We Checked Short-Term Rental Rules in 1,044 US Markets. Here Is What the Data Says.

There is no national short-term rental law. There are several thousand local ones, written by city councils and county commissions that do not coordinate, do not publish in a common format, and do not tell you when they change. Most coverage of this problem is anecdotal: a host gets fined, it makes the local paper, everyone panics for a week.

We are in an unusual position to say something less anecdotal. HostReady tracks short-term rental rules across 1,044 US markets, and every fact we store has to survive a verification gate before it lands. So we ran the numbers on our own database. Here is what the American short-term rental rulebook actually looks like in aggregate.

A licence is not the exception. It is the rule.

Of the 750 markets where we have a verified answer to "does this jurisdiction require a licence or permit to operate a short-term rental," 723 say yes. That is 96.4%.

This is the single most useful number in this post, because it inverts the assumption most new hosts start with. The question worth asking is not "does my city require a permit." It is "which permit, what does it cost, and when does it renew." Assume you need one and work backwards.

The licence itself is cheap. The spread is not.

Across the 294 markets where we have a verified licence fee, the median is $150.50 per year. A quarter of markets charge $100 or less. A quarter charge more than $300. The top decile starts at $500.

But the median hides the story. The cheapest verified fee in our data is $0, and that is not a data error. Juneau, Eugene, Iowa City and Glendale all require you to register and then charge nothing to do it, which is its own kind of trap: a free requirement is still a requirement, and it is the easiest one to skip. At the other end, the most expensive verified US fee is $1,781, in McMinnville, Oregon.

None of that spread correlates with anything a host could guess from the outside. Boston charges $25. Palm Springs charges $1,072. Same piece of paper, 43x apart.

We went deeper on this in what a short-term rental licence actually costs, including the recurring obligations that dwarf the fee.

Nearly half the market wants you living there

Of the 437 markets where the question is answered, 197 require the operator to live in the property as a primary residence. That is 45%, and it is the rule most likely to make a property flatly ineligible rather than merely expensive.

It is also the rule that catches investors hardest, because it cannot be fixed with paperwork. A primary-residence requirement does not slow down a non-owner-occupied purchase. It ends it.

The other constraints, ranked by how often they appear

The bottom two rows are the ones to watch. A night cap turns a full-time rental into a part-time one, and 96 markets impose one with a median ceiling of 90 nights a year. A permit cap is worse still: 46 markets issue a fixed number of permits and then stop, which means compliance is not something you can achieve by following the steps. You have to wait for someone else to give theirs up.

Lodging tax: a median of 10%, a ceiling of 21%

Across 422 markets with a verified combined lodging tax rate, the median is 10%. The 75th percentile is 12.5%. The highest verified rate in our data is 21%.

The trap here is not the rate, it is the assumption that the platform handles it. Airbnb and Vrbo collect and remit in many jurisdictions and not in others, and in a meaningful number of markets they collect the state portion while the city portion remains the host's problem. A host who assumes full platform coverage in a market with a split obligation is accruing a liability every night, silently, with no notification of any kind.

Enforcement is real in about a third of the markets that have been rated

Of 467 markets with a verified enforcement posture, 145 are high, 92 are medium, and 230 are low. Fines follow the same shape: across the 424 markets where we have a verified maximum penalty, the median is $1,000, but 79 markets can assess $5,000 or more and 32 can reach five figures.

The detail that makes those numbers larger than they look is per-day accrual, which we broke down in what cities actually fine you for an unpermitted rental.

Nine markets, side by side

Aggregates are useful for orientation and useless for planning, because you do not operate in the median market. Here are nine well-known markets as they sit in our database today. Every figure links to the market page, where the government source behind it is cited.

Boston and Palm Springs are 2,700 miles and 43x apart on fee alone. Galveston and Orlando are both in the Sun Belt, both beach-adjacent, both heavily short-term-rented, and one of them will not let you operate unless you live there.

The rules move constantly

Between 10 April and 13 August 2026 we recorded 1,068 regulatory signals across 232 distinct US markets in 45 states: council votes, ordinance amendments, moratoriums, enforcement pushes, tax changes. That is roughly eight a day, spread across a fifth of every market we track, in four months.

No host reads eight local government agendas a day. That is the entire reason this problem is hard, and it is why the useful unit of work is not "look up the rules once" but "get told when they change." Every one is dated and attributed to its source.

What we would tell a host reading this

• Assume you need a licence. 96.4% of the markets that answer the question require one.
• Check the primary-residence rule before you buy, not after. It is the one requirement that no amount of paperwork can satisfy after the fact, and it applies in 45% of markets where the answer is known.
• Budget the recurring cost, not the fee. The median licence is $150.50, but inspections, insurance minimums, a local contact and a 10% median lodging tax are the actual annual load.
• Treat "the platform handles tax" as a claim to verify, not a fact. Split state and local obligations are common and silent.
• Set up a way to hear about changes. 232 markets moved in four months. Whatever you looked up last year is a snapshot, not a status.

How we counted

These figures come from HostReady's own regulation database, measured on 2026-08-13 across the 1,044 active US markets we track. We only count a field when it survived our verification gate, which requires the source page to be reachable, the quoted text to appear literally on that page, and the value to appear literally in the quote. A market where nobody has yet answered a question is excluded from that question's denominator rather than counted as a zero, so every percentage above states the number of markets it is drawn from.

That cuts both ways and it is worth saying plainly: 417 of 1,044 US markets currently have a linkable ordinance in our database. The rest are in progress. We would rather publish a number with an honest denominator than a round one with a hidden gap. A continuously updated version of these aggregates lives at The State of Short-Term Rental Regulation.