Grand Forks, ND Business Licensing & Operations: Auto Repair on Residential Property (2026)

The Land Development Code treats automotive repair as a home occupation that is intentionally boxed in more tightly than others. Section 18-0204(C) states that 'home occupations (other than automotive repair and commercial kennels) may be conducted in any accessory buildings,' which means every other permitted home business can spread into a garage, shed or other outbuilding on the lot, but a residential auto repair operation cannot; it is confined to whatever space the code allows inside the dwelling itself, subject to the same 30 percent floor-area cap in Section 18-0204(A) that applies to every home occupation.

That confinement matters in practice because vehicle repair work, lifts, and parts storage are exactly the kind of activity a garage would normally house, so excluding automotive repair from the accessory-building allowance functions as a de facto ban on running a real repair shop out of a residential garage. The same section's ban on retail sales in Section 18-0204(D) and its traffic-volume limit in Section 18-0204(E) apply on top of the accessory-building exclusion, and any exterior evidence of the business beyond a single home occupation sign is barred by Section 18-0204(B).

Because 'home occupation' is the citywide zoning category referenced in every district's use table, the automotive-repair carve-out applies the same way in an R-1 subdivision as it does elsewhere, unless a separate commercial garage use is sought under one of the business or industrial district tables instead.