Aiken County, SC Business Licensing & Operations: Auto Repair on Residential Property (2026)

8 splits residential vehicle repair into two tiers. The first tier, allowed outdoors without restriction on location, covers only the changing and replenishment of fluid levels, such as hydraulic fluid, windshield washer fluid and lubricating oil, the replacement of spark plugs and ignition points, and the rotation of tires and replacement of drive belts and hydraulic lines. Anything beyond that list, such as engine work, bodywork, transmission repair, or brake jobs, falls into the second tier and must be confined to totally enclosed spaces, meaning inside a garage or shop building rather than a driveway or yard.

That second tier also narrows who the work can be done on: only privately registered vehicles having current license plates, or vehicles the state has designated as antique carriages, qualify, which rules out running a repair operation on customers' cars or on unregistered, junked vehicles even inside an enclosed building. The restriction applies specifically to the RC, RD, RM, and OR zoning districts, the county's residential and office/residential categories, and does not reach commercial or industrial-zoned parcels where auto repair is a permitted business use under the district tables elsewhere in Chapter 24.

There is no separate home-occupation permit created by this section; it operates instead as a use restriction layered directly onto what a residential property owner or occupant can physically do to vehicles on site.