Palatine, IL Home Business: Zoning & Home Occupation Permits (2026)

Zoning Ordinance § 6.04 is Palatine's home-occupation rulebook. Subsection (a) permits eight specific uses without any special review: babysitting for up to three children, computer programming, day care homes, dressmaking and tailoring, music and dance instruction for up to three pupils, painting, sculpting or writing, certain professional offices, clergy, lawyers, physicians, dentists, architects, engineers, accountants, and tutoring for up to three students. Subsection (b) flatly bans ten other uses as home occupations no matter how small, including animal grooming establishments, barber shops, beauty parlors, clinics or hospitals, commercial stables, kennels, real estate offices, restaurants, tourist homes, and vehicle repair or painting other than a resident's own car; a landscaping business is prohibited unless it can meet every standard in (d).

Anything not on either list is judged under subsection (c) against the standards in (d): the home occupation cannot change the dwelling's outside appearance, cannot be visible from the street or create unreasonable traffic, must be run by an immediate family member living on site with no other person employed or involved, must keep all activity and storage inside a structure, must handle wholesale, jobbing or retail sales entirely by mail, phone or electronic means, cannot use more than 600 square feet of the dwelling, cannot run on anything but electric motors, can keep no more than one pickup truck of one-ton capacity or less and no semi-trailers on site, cannot create unreasonable odor or noise, and, where applicable, needs a Village of Palatine business license. Meeting every applicable standard is what separates a lawful home occupation from an illegal home business the Village can shut down.