Olympia, WA Home Business: Home Daycare (2026)

The Olympia Municipal Code treats a family child care home as a specific type of home occupation. The rule sits in the residential districts' use standards at OMC § 18.04.060, subsection L, which carries a Revised 5/26 tag in the exported code. Paragraph (L)(3)(a) opens the use to all districts permitting residences, so a City of Olympia provider does not hunt through a district-by-district table and does not face a public hearing. The one gate is paperwork. Before initiation of child care services, each child care provider must file a Child Care Registration Form with the Department. The provider must then demonstrate compliance with the applicable requirements of the code as listed on that Registration Form, and the code states that no fee is required for registration.

The general home occupation standards in subsection (L)(2) add two carve-outs that matter to child care. The cap that limits an ordinary home occupation to 25 percent of the total floor area of the dwelling or 500 square feet per dwelling unit, whichever is less, does not apply to family child care homes (§ 18.04.060(L)(2)(d)). Customer and client visits for ordinary home occupations are limited to no earlier than 7:00 a.m. and no later than 9:00 p.m., but child daycare is excluded from that window (§ 18.04.060(L)(2)(g)), so Olympia's home occupation section sets no visitation clock for it.

Compare the neighboring paragraph on adult day care homes, which does print limits: no more than six adults, no more than 12 hours of operation per day, and a primary care giver who resides in the home. The family child care paragraph prints no headcount and no hours cap of its own. Paragraph (L)(2)(k) still applies to every home occupation: it must comply with all applicable local, state, and federal regulations, and nothing in the section is an exemption from them.