Mount Vernon, NY Home Business: Customer Traffic Restrictions (2026)

A(6), inside the zoning code's Additional Regulations for Residence Districts, states plainly that there may be only one patient, client, customer or any other kind of visitor being served at any one time. The limit applies to both categories the section covers, the office of a professional person and the customary home occupation, and it operates alongside the section's other conditions: the business must be conducted entirely inside the practitioner's own dwelling unit, the practitioner must be domiciled there, at most one nonresident partner, associate or employee may work on the premises (and only with site plan approval or Building Department registration for an existing structure), and the space devoted to the use cannot exceed 25% of one floor's area or 500 square feet, whichever is less.

Together these conditions confine a Mount Vernon home business to a genuinely small-scale, low-traffic operation: a single employee, a capped share of the house, and never more than one visitor in the building at a time, whether that visitor is a therapy client, a tax-prep customer, or a tutoring student. A home business that regularly has two or more clients on site at once, even briefly for an overlap between appointments, falls outside this exception and is not a permitted home occupation under the section.