Baltimore County, MD Special Events & Permits: Sidewalk Dining & Cafés (2026)

Baltimore County Zoning Regulations § 447.1 (Section 447, Restaurants and Taverns in B.L.R. Zone) is the operative outdoor-dining rule for the county's Business Local zone: "any restaurant or tavern in a B.L.R. Zone that is located inside the Urban-Rural Demarcation Line and on the final landmarks list is permitted to have restaurant uses, tavern uses, and accessory activities outside of the enclosed restaurant or tavern building." The section draws a hard line between outdoor dining/bar service, which can run past midnight, and other accessory activities (live entertainment, outdoor games, etc.), which must end at 12:00 midnight. If the tract also carries D.R. (Density Residential) zoning adjacent to the B.L.R. Zone, outdoor activity may spill onto a dedicated portion of that D.R. land, but only up to 15 percent of the total tract area.

The rule is narrow by design: it applies only inside the county's Urban-Rural Demarcation Line (the growth boundary separating serviced/urbanized county land from rural land) and only to properties on the final landmarks list, meaning most B.L.R. establishments outside those historic corridors fall back to the underlying B.L.R. use table rather than this outdoor-activity allowance. Elsewhere in the code, outdoor seating is folded into the base use definition for restaurants (for example, marina and yacht-club restaurant uses capped at 5,000 square feet of floor area "including outdoor seating area"), rather than governed by a freestanding sidewalk-cafe permit scheme.

Because § 447.1 sits in the Zoning Regulations, enforcement runs through the county's zoning violation and code-enforcement process rather than a criminal citation for the outdoor use itself; a restaurant or tavern operating outdoor activities past the midnight cutoff, or expanding onto D.R. land beyond the 15 percent cap, is out of compliance with its zoning use and subject to Permits, Approvals and Inspections enforcement.