Lexington County, SC: Auto Repair on Residential Property (2026)

Sec. 22, rewritten by Ord. No. 23-17 effective June 25, 2024, opens by defining what counts as a home occupation, then lists categories that are excluded from that definition entirely rather than merely restricted. Repair of transportation-related equipment sits alongside the temporary storage of wrecked, dismantled or unregistered vehicles for sale, sexually oriented businesses, bed-and-breakfast transient habitation, and kennel/animal impoundment activities as uses that cannot be authorized under the home occupation permit process at all. Because these are excluded from the definition itself rather than subject to the variance procedure that applies to items like exterior displays or excess traffic, there is no home occupation route to approval for a residential auto repair operation; the activity instead has to locate in a district and land use classification such as General Repair and Maintenance Services or Vehicle Servicing, which the ordinance's Chart of Permitted Activities by District confines to nonresidential and mixed commercial districts.

A resident who wants to work on vehicles as a business, rather than as a purely personal, non-commercial activity in a garage, cannot obtain a home occupation zoning permit for it and instead must locate the business on a commercially zoned parcel that allows vehicle repair or servicing outright.