Lafayette, LA Home Business: Home Daycare (2026)

Table 89-83-1 in Lafayette's home-occupation section, Sec. 89-83, marks "Child care facility, residential" with a "P", permitted, across every listed residential category: the "A" Agricultural district, "RS" Single-Family Residential, "RM" Mixed Residential, and the unincorporated parish, plus the "MN" Mixed Use Neighborhood category. That table governs which home occupations are even allowed in the first place; a residential daycare clears that first hurdle everywhere a home occupation itself would be allowed. It then gets a specific carve-out from the section's general size limit: subsection (d) caps most home occupations at ten percent of the dwelling unit's gross floor area, but reads "Home occupations, with the exception of residential child-care facilities, may occupy up to ten percent of the gross floor area of the dwelling unit", meaning a residential child-care operation is not bound by that ten-percent ceiling the way a home office or tutoring business would be.

The rest of Sec. 89-83's standard package still applies unless another provision overrides it: the operation must stay within the dwelling, cannot store equipment outdoors, is limited to one non-illuminated sign of one square foot, and any owner opening a residential child-care business still completes the "Home Occupation Affidavit" as part of the certificate-of-occupancy process under subsection (j) before the city will sign off on occupancy.