Richland, WA Business Licensing & Operations: Auto Repair on Residential Property (2026)

RMC Section 23.42.090 governs home occupations in Richland's residential districts, and subsection (B)(2) draws a hard line around auto repair. The section names vehicle repair and/or maintenance, rebuilding of motors, and painting of vehicles, trailers or boats as uses that shall not be allowed as a home occupation, explicitly because of their increased potential for hazardous or nuisance conditions and their tendency to expand beyond home-occupation limits. The same subsection extends the ban to any Group H occupancy as defined in the most current edition of the International Building Code and International Fire Code the city has adopted, which covers uses handling hazardous materials such as flammable solvents, paints and fuels commonly found in a repair shop.

This sits apart from the home occupations the city does allow as accessory uses, such as professional consultation, tutoring, mail order services and handcrafted-item making under subsection (B)(1), and it is a categorical exclusion rather than a case-by-case judgment: subsection (B)(3) lets other, unlisted home occupations qualify if they meet the general criteria in subsection (C), but auto repair is carved out of that path entirely by name. A resident who wants to run this kind of business from a residential property in Richland cannot obtain home occupation approval for it at all; subsection (D) ties every home occupation application to development services review and to the business license process under RMC Title 5, and vehicle repair is barred at that first review step rather than merely restricted in scope or hours.