Tamarac, FL Home Business: Home Daycare (2026)

Tamarac's Land Development Code treats a family child care home as a licensed residential land use rather than a commercial child care center, and it sits inside the broader Child Care Facility standards at LDC §10-3.3(C)(4). Subsection (a) requires every child care use, including a family child care home, to comply with the Broward County Child Care Ordinance, Chapter 7 of the Broward County Code of Ordinances, as amended, layering county licensing on top of the city's zoning rule. Subsection (e) then sets the numeric ceiling for a home operator: the property may serve up to four children if all are under 12 months old, up to six children if no more than three are under 12 months old, up to six children if all are preschool age between 13 months and five years old, or up to ten children if no more than two are under 12 months old and no more than five are preschool age.

Those caps apply throughout the calendar year, and the count includes any child under 13 who is related to the caregiver, so a large household cannot exclude its own kin from the total. Because the use is defined as a licensed residence, an operator needs a Florida Department of Children and Families family day care license before the city recognizes the use as lawful; exceeding these headcounts is a zoning violation on top of any state licensing problem. Community Development's code compliance division, which routes contested cases to Tamarac's special magistrate, handles enforcement.