Gardena, CA Local Taxes & Fees: Business Tax Classification (2026)

Section 5.08.340 of the Gardena Municipal Code, titled "Professions and services," is the residual license classification: it applies to any trade, calling, occupation, vocation, profession or other means of livelihood that Chapter 5.08 does not license under one of its named categories, such as barber shops, contractors or hotels, which instead use the flat schedules in Section 5.08.510 or their own subsections. Under this classification, the license collector calculates the annual fee against whichever is larger: the business's total annual gross receipts, or its "cost of operation," defined as the sum of the annual fair rental value of all city real property the business uses, the annual payroll of employees based in the city, and the cost of the business's utilities.

The fee schedule prints as a table: businesses with receipts or costs of operation of not more than $50,000 pay a flat $150 per year, and every additional $1,000 of receipts or costs above that threshold, or fraction of $1,000, adds another $1.00 to the fee. Because the fee is uncapped and scales linearly past the $50,000 floor, a professional practice or service business with $500,000 in annual gross receipts would owe roughly $600 a year under the formula. The classification traces to the prior code's Section 6-1.236 and was last amended by Measure A, Section 17, in 2001.