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

In the City of Shoreline, home occupations are governed by Shoreline Municipal Code § 20.40.400, which lets residents run one or more accessory businesses from a dwelling unit but caps the space devoted to that business at 25 percent of the unit's floor area, not counting garages and storage buildings used only for holding home-occupation goods. Subsection D flatly bars four categories of activity in residential zones: automobile, truck and heavy equipment repair; auto body work or painting; parking and storage of heavy equipment; and on-site metals and scrap recycling.

These four bans apply no matter how small the operation is or how much floor area it would otherwise fit within, and they sit alongside the section's other limits: no more than two nonresident full-time-equivalent employees on site (subsection C), indoor-only operations except plant growing and storage (subsection B), and restrictions on signage and vehicle use. Every home occupation, banned activities aside, still needs a City business license consistent with Chapter 5.05 SMC (subsection J). Planning and Community Development enforces the Development Code, and a use found to violate SMC Title 20, including an unpermitted home auto-repair operation, is processed as a Code Violation under the notice-and-order procedure of SMC § 20.30.760, which can carry a $500 civil penalty for violating a notice and order, escalating to 150 percent for a second 14-day period and doubling for each period after that.