Montgomery County, VA Garage & Yard Sales: Frequency, Duration & Permits (2026)

Outside Blacksburg and Christiansburg, Chapter 5, Article VI regulates flea markets, and its definitions section, Section 5-156, is where the county's garage sale rule actually lives: a flea market is any place where a person or group of vendors offers goods for sale, trade or barter, whether new, used, antique or homemade, in the open air, a building or a temporary structure. The definition then expressly excludes homeowners selling goods at their own residence in what are commonly called garage sales or yard sales, but only on the condition that such sales do not occur more frequently than once every sixty days.

A sale held more often than that frequency loses the exemption and falls under the full flea market licensing scheme in Section 5-158, which requires an annual permit application to the county administrator with a site plan, parking layout, health department approvals for camping and food sales, and state highway department approval of entrances, plus payment of the two-hundred-dollar annual flea market license tax imposed by Section 5-159. Civic and charitable organizations are exempt from the flea market article's requirements under Section 5-158. The ordinance also exempts any business or occupation that already holds a valid business license or special use permit covering the sale, trade or barter of goods, so a garage sale exceeding the sixty-day frequency is not automatically unlawful, it is simply reclassified and made subject to the flea market permit and tax.