Circuit Court for Howard County, Clerk's Office, License Department

Trader's License

Any person doing business as a trader — selling goods from a fixed place of business in Howard County, rather than growing, making or manufacturing them — needs this license from the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Howard County, a state judicial officer rather than a county department, at 9250 Judicial Way, Suite 1900, Ellicott City. The fee is set by Md. Code, Bus. Reg. §17-1807(c)(2), not §17-1804 (a section covering application procedure for visually-handicapped applicants and Blind Industries, unrelated to the fee amount): a 21-tier schedule by stock-in-trade value running from $15 at $1,000 or less up to $800 for stock-in-trade over $750,000, the schedule that applies in every Maryland county except Baltimore City and Baltimore County, which have their own separate tables. Every license also carries a flat $2.00 issuing fee. Howard County has not elected the alternate flat uniform fee a county may choose under §17-1806, because the Clerk's own published chart uses the full tiered schedule rather than a single flat amount. The license year runs May 1 through the following April 30. This record covers the core, confirmed use case of a retail business selling goods from inventory; whether the trader's-license requirement also reaches restaurants, coffee shops, food trucks, auto-repair shops or salons to the extent any of them sells goods from inventory was not independently tested against the statute's own definition of 'trader' and is not asserted here.