Chapel Hill, NC Business Licensing & Operations: Pawnbrokers (2026)

Chapel Hill Code of Ordinances Sec. 10-189 defines a pawnbroker as any person engaged in lending or advancing money or other things of value for profit while taking specific articles of personal property as a pledge, forfeited to the pawnbroker if the loan is not repaid within a definite time. Anyone operating as a pawnbroker within the corporate limits must pay an annual privilege license tax of $100.00 to the town, on top of any state pawnbroker license the operator holds. The section sits in Chapter 10, Article VII, Licenses for Specific Businesses, the same article that taxes secondhand precious metal dealers, peddlers, itinerant merchants and dozens of other trades.

A footnote preceding the article notes that state law, G.S. Sec. 91A-12, limits how far a North Carolina city may go in regulating pawnbrokers, which is why Chapel Hill's own ordinance is confined to this flat license tax rather than separate recordkeeping or hold-period rules like those Chapter 10 imposes on secondhand precious metal dealers under Article VI. The tax traces to Ordinance No. 2001-4-09/O-5, Section II, which consolidated the town's specific-business license taxes into Article VII. Because the ordinance sets a tax rather than a use restriction, a pawnbroker who opens without paying it is operating unlicensed rather than committing a separate use violation, and the town's finance office collects the tax as part of the annual privilege license process required of every taxed business in Chapel Hill.