Folsom, CA Home Business: Home Daycare (2026)

Section 5.100.050(H) confines large family day care homes, which serve nine to fourteen children under a state license, to single-family residential properties, and only as an accessory use: the day care has to stay secondary to the property's primary function as someone's home. Section 5.100.050(G) reinforces that by requiring the day care provider to live at the property as a principal residence.

The distinctive zoning tool here is the spacing requirement in Section 5.100.050(I): a new large family day care home cannot be located closer than three hundred feet from an existing state-licensed large family day care home, with distance measured from the closest point of one lot line to the closest point of the other. The director can allow an exception where a legitimate physical or topographical barrier, an open space corridor, a highway, or an arterial street, already provides comparable separation between the two properties, even if the straight-line distance is shorter than three hundred feet.

Small family day care homes serving up to eight children are not subject to Chapter 5.100 at all (Section 5.100.030(C)); state law treats those as a matter of right in residential zones. Once a large family day care home qualifies, it also needs two on-street parking spaces reserved for drop-off and pick-up in addition to its driveway, plus one off-street space per non-resident employee, and it cannot post any sign advertising the business (Sections 5.100.050(D), (J), (K)).