Fairfax County proposes longer food truck hours and a rewrite of the rules for restaurants in office buildings

Fairfax County —

Food trucks could stay at many Fairfax County locations for two more hours a day, and some restaurants in office and industrial buildings could get a clearer path to approval, under proposed changes to the county’s zoning ordinance.

The recommendations are the first phase of the county’s Commercial and Industrial Modernization initiative, known as CI-MOD. Staff presented it to the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Policy Committee on Sept. 1.

Nothing has been adopted. Public hearings have not been scheduled, and the county’s own draft text still carries the key numbers in brackets, with ranges for the Board to choose from.

Six hours instead of four

Food trucks are limited to four hours a day at any one location under the current ordinance, at subsection 4102.8.E(4)(c), and that window “includ[es] set-up and break-down.” The time available for actual selling is shorter than the number suggests.

Staff proposes six hours in:

• Commercial and industrial districts
• Nonresidential areas of planned districts
• Agricultural properties
• Agritourism and craft-beverage properties smaller than 20 acres

The four-hour limit would stay in residential districts and the residential areas of planned districts, where the white paper cites potential conflicts over noise, trash and parking.

Operations on 20 acres or more that host food trucks in connection with an agritourism activity, farm winery, limited brewery or limited distillery would keep the eight-hour daily window they already have. That is existing law being left alone rather than something new on offer.

Six hours is the staff recommendation, not a decision. Every tier in the draft text is annotated “Range: four to eight hours,” so the Board could land anywhere in that band.

The proposal exists because the Board asked for it. When Fairfax adopted its Special Events and Food Trucks amendment in February 2025, increasing how many days a truck may visit certain properties, supervisors approved a follow-on motion directing staff to examine longer operating periods. The daily window was not touched then. The four-hour limit itself dates to 2014, adopted through ZO-14-455 and informed in part by a 2013 National League of Cities study.

Staff writes that operators told the county during 2025 outreach that four hours can make a stop economically unworkable once travel, setup, breakdown, labor, fuel and prep are counted against a narrow selling window. Six hours could let a truck cover more than one meal period, or stay at a brewery or tasting room through a larger part of its day.

County research put Fairfax behind some neighbors. According to the staff white paper, Alexandria recently moved to as much as six continuous hours between 7 a.m. and midnight; the City of Fairfax sets operating hours rather than a daily duration, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; and Herndon tracks operations weekly, allowing up to 21 hours at a single site over seven days. Those descriptions are the county’s characterization of its neighbors’ rules, not our reading of their codes.

The health department’s warning is about eight hours, not six

Staff consulted the Fairfax County Health Department, and the white paper records what came back. The department’s view is that the county food code does not itself bar a mobile unit from vending at one location beyond the traditional four-to-six-hour window, but that stretching to eight hours raises four practical problems.

Cold holding is the first. Time/temperature control for safety food has to stay at 41°F or below under 12VAC5-421-820, and the department’s point is that refrigeration has to hold that through the whole service period, not just the first few hours.

Water and wastewater is the second, and it compounds. Potable water has to be refilled at a commissary or approved source and wastewater disposed of the same way. A mobile sewage holding tank must be sized 15% larger than the water supply tank under 12VAC5-421-2500, which means a truck cannot simply carry more water without also carrying more waste capacity.

Cleaning is the third, and it is where the two pressures meet. Food-contact surfaces, utensils and equipment used with time/temperature control for safety food generally have to be washed, rinsed and sanitized at least every four hours under 12VAC5-421-1780. A longer day means more cleaning cycles, which means more water drawn and more wastewater held. The regulation carries a list of exceptions permitting longer intervals in specific circumstances, so the four-hour figure is a general rule rather than an absolute one.

Restroom access for employees is the fourth. The requirement is satisfied at the commissary or base of operation rather than on the unit itself, but it has to be planned for across a longer shift.

One coincidence worth keeping straight: the four-hour zoning limit and the four-hour sanitizing interval are unrelated and happen to be the same number. This proposal changes the zoning limit. It does nothing to the sanitizing interval, and none of the health requirements above were altered by the food code update that took effect Sept. 10.

For an operator, the question is whether the truck is self-contained enough to run six or eight hours without a mid-service trip back to the commissary.

A rewrite for restaurants in office and industrial buildings

A separate part of CI-MOD would change how restaurants and carryout businesses get approved inside office, commercial and industrial buildings.

Today they sit in a category called associated service uses, at subsection 4102.1.G, alongside child care centers, convenience stores, personal service and business service uses. The ordinance defines such a use as one “primarily designed to provide goods and services to the building’s occupants, business enterprises, or industrial operations in that principal building.”

Staff says that test no longer works. The white paper is blunt about it: the standards “have proven difficult to interpret and apply consistently,” the phrase “primarily designed to provide goods and services to the building” gives “no clear quantitative guidance,” and the requirement that hours conform to the principal use’s business hours is “no longer viable or practical to enforce.” Restaurants advertise online, take delivery orders and draw customers from outside the building. Establishing whether one primarily serves the occupants can delay an approval without describing anything real.

The proposal eliminates the associated service use category and regulates these businesses as principal uses with their own standards. For restaurants and carryout, at proposed subsections 4102.5.G and 4102.5.H, the working numbers are:

• A maximum of 2,500 square feet [range: 1,500 to 2,500]
• A cumulative cap of 10% of the building’s gross floor area across all covered service uses [range: 10% to 30%]
• Hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

Meeting all three would allow the restaurant to proceed by right, through administrative zoning review, rather than seeking a discretionary special exception from the Board. A business that exceeds any of them could still apply for a special exception.

This is narrower than it sounds, and the scope is the thing most likely to be misread. These caps attach in the office-and-industrial districts, C-1 through C-4 and I-2 through I-6. Restaurants are already permitted by right in C-5 through C-8, the retail commercial districts, with no size cap, no building-percentage cap and no hours restriction, and CI-MOD does not change that. Fairfax is not proposing to cap restaurants at 2,500 square feet countywide.

The change is not purely a loosening. Restaurants and carryout would no longer be permitted through the associated service provisions in the county’s R-20 and R-30 high-density residential districts. So the proposal both streamlines approvals in one set of districts and withdraws a permission in another. Other service uses are treated differently: child care centers in R-20 and R-30 would move to permitted-or-special-exception with an enrollment cap, and personal services would become by-right up to 2,500 square feet.

The clearest beneficiaries would be smaller restaurants looking at space in eligible office and industrial buildings, where the building-occupant test currently creates uncertainty.

What it could mean for operators

For a food truck, two more hours is revenue without another trip, another setup or another permit. The effect is largest for breweries, wineries and agritourism businesses that rely on outside vendors because they have no kitchen of their own, and whose customers arrive across a longer afternoon than four hours covers.

For a building owner, clearer restaurant standards make small ground-floor and lobby spaces easier to market, and a tenant amenity easier to deliver in buildings still carrying vacancy from hybrid work.

Two questions stay open. Food truck operators will want to know whether setup and breakdown keep counting against the daily limit, since the draft preserves that language, and where in the four-to-eight band the Board lands. Restaurant operators will want to see the final square footage and building-percentage numbers before judging whether the envelope fits a viable kitchen, storage, seating and pickup operation. Anything needing later evening hours will still require a special exception.

The calendar

The Planning Commission’s Land Use Process Review Committee is scheduled to take up CI-MOD on Oct. 8 at 7:30 p.m., in Conference Room 11. Community and industry outreach runs through the fall and winter.

After that the county’s timeline is tentative, and labeled as such on every line: Board authorization of public hearings in January 2027, a Planning Commission hearing in February, a Board hearing in March.

Until the Board adopts an amendment, the existing four-hour food truck limit and the current associated service use provisions remain in force.

Comments can go to the county’s Zoning Administration Division. The draft text, the white paper and the meeting materials are on the CI-MOD project page.