Coconino County, AZ Home Business: Home Daycare (2026)

Coconino County's zoning table lists "Care Center, Child and/or Adult Care" as a Permitted use across residential zones, but the headcount that decides whether a home operation needs a state child care license, rather than just informal supervision, comes from Arizona Revised Statutes Title 36, Article 7. " Below that headcount, the operation falls outside Article 7 licensing entirely. The same section, § 36-881(1), defines "Child" as anyone through age fourteen, or through age seventeen with a qualifying developmental disability, and § 36-881(2) defines "Child care" itself as care, supervision, and guidance of a child unaccompanied by a parent, guardian, or custodian, for less than twenty-four hours a day, in a place other than the child's own home.

Paragraph 4 defines a "Controlling person," the individual whose ownership stake or officer role in a licensed facility the Department of Health Services screens when issuing a license under § 36-882. " That exemption is why watching a niece, nephew, or grandchild in your own Coconino County home never triggers state licensure, no matter how often it happens. A provider caring for five or more unrelated children, on the other hand, becomes a licensed "child care facility" subject to Department of Health Services standards of care under § 36-883, and, at the county level, must still secure whatever zoning approval Table 2-7 or Table 2-9 requires for a Care Center use in the applicable zone.