Wicomico County, MD Home Business: Customer Traffic Restrictions (2026)

Wicomico County's home-based business standards at § 225-97 tie customer and visitor traffic directly to which of the three business types a use falls into, a determination the Zoning Administrator makes. A Type I home-based business, defined in Subsection A(1), allows no employees and no customers to come to the site at all, so any client visits automatically push the use into the Type II or Type III category. Subsection B(1) then applies to every type: no home-based business may generate significantly greater traffic volumes or increased traffic hazards than would normally be expected in a residential district, a general standard the Zoning Administrator and Board of Appeals apply when reviewing an application or investigating a complaint.

For Type II and Type III home-based businesses, which by definition do bring customers or employees to the property, § 225-97(E)(2)(a) requires the Board of Appeals or Planning Commission to fix specific numeric limits as conditions of approval: hours of operation, the maximum number of customer or client visits allowed in any one day, and the maximum number of customers or clients who may be present on the property at any one time. Those numbers are not fixed county-wide by the ordinance itself; they are set case by case in the approval for each business, which means the permit record, not the zoning text, is where an operator or a neighbor finds the actual daily visit cap.

A home-based business that exceeds its approved visit or hours conditions, or a Type I operator running client visits despite the no-customer rule, is out of compliance with § 225-97 regardless of how it is otherwise zoned.