Get your short-term rental legal with the city

  1. Find your city's short-term rental ordinance
    30 min

    This step produces your go/no-go verdict: a written determination, with the municipal code chapter cited, of whether your city allows short-term rentals at all. It is the cheapest failure point in the whole playbook — most enforcement letters go to hosts who never read the code. The verdict is one sentence: allowed, conditional, banned, or under moratorium.

    Search two ways and compare:

    • Search for “short-term rental ordinance [city] [state]” and also “vacation rental” and “transient rental” — cities name these chapters differently.
    • If the city publishes its code on Municode, eCode360, or American Legal, open the portal and browse the table of contents for a chapter called “Short-Term Rentals”, “Transient Rentals”, or “Licenses”.
    • Open the definitions section and find the city's definition of a short-term rental — usually “a dwelling rented for 30 consecutive days or fewer” — and the section that says whether it is permitted, prohibited, or conditional.
    • Check for a moratorium or a minimum-stay rule: a 30-day minimum means no short-term rentals at all. Note the ordinance's effective date — these laws change every legislative session.
    • Download or print the chapter as a PDF and note the chapter and section numbers.