Woodstock Caps Rentals at 120 Nights: What Hosts Must Know Now

If you own a cabin in Woodstock and you're counting on Airbnb income to carry the deal, there is one number that controls everything: 120. That is the maximum number of nights per calendar year you are legally allowed to rent under Woodstock's Local Law No. 2 of 2022, and it does not matter how strong your bookings are. Once you hit that ceiling, you stop. Hosts who haven't built that limit into their underwriting are in for a rude surprise.

What the Law Actually Requires

Woodstock requires every short-term rental operator to hold an annual registration. The fee runs approximately $150 per year under Local Law No. 2 of 2022. That registration is not optional and it is not a one-time filing. You renew it, you pay it, and you stay on the right side of the town before you take a single booking.

The good news, if there is any, is that Woodstock does not impose an owner-occupancy requirement. You do not have to live in the property to rent it short-term. That puts Woodstock in a meaningfully different category from neighboring towns like Hurley, which bans non-owner-occupied short-term rentals outright. In Woodstock, a pure investment cabin is still a legal play. It is just a capped one.

The 120-Night Cap Is the Real Story

The registration fee is manageable. The night cap is the thing that reshapes your entire revenue model. At 120 nights per calendar year, you are working with roughly a third of the year. If your pro forma assumed a significantly higher number of bookings, you are not just leaving money on the table. You are operating illegally for every night beyond that ceiling.

That cap applies per calendar year, not per rolling 12 months, which means the clock resets every January. A host who books heavily in the fall and burns through nights fast could find themselves locked out of income during peak foliage or holiday season. Planning your booking calendar around that ceiling is not optional. It is the job.

How Woodstock Compares to Its Neighbors

Woodstock is not the strictest town in the region, but it is far from the loosest. A quick look at the surrounding landscape shows just how much the rules shift when you cross a town line.

• Hurley: Non-owner-occupied short-term rentals are banned entirely.
• Shandaken: Non-owner-occupied permits are capped at a fixed total across the whole town. New investors may land on a waitlist.
• Town of Olive: Caps rentals at 180 nights and has permit caps in effect, meaning new applications may not even be accepted.
• Plattekill: No local short-term rental law on the books as of early 2026. Register for county occupancy tax and operate.
• Town of Lloyd: Requires a Special Use Permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals, a discretionary decision that can go either way.

Woodstock sits in the middle of that range. It allows non-owner-occupied rentals, which is more permissive than Hurley or Shandaken. But the 120-night cap is a genuine constraint that separates it from the lightest-touch towns in the valley.

What Hosts Should Do Right Now

If you are already operating in Woodstock, confirm your registration is current and start tracking your rented nights against the 120-night ceiling. Do not wait until October to realize you are close to the limit. Build the cap into your booking software or calendar from day one of each year.

If you are evaluating a Woodstock property as an investment, rerun your numbers with a hard ceiling of 120 nights per year. That is your legal maximum. Any revenue projection above that figure is not just optimistic. It is non-compliant.

And if you are shopping across multiple Hudson Valley towns, do not assume the rules that apply in Woodstock carry over to the next parcel. The rules change at the town line, sometimes drastically, and the difference between a viable rental cabin and an illegal one can be a single zoning boundary.

For the complete Woodstock compliance guide including tax calculator, checklist, and daily monitoring, see Woodstock, NY STR Regulations.