Short-term rental regulations by jurisdiction

How we describe regulatory burden

Each researched jurisdiction is scored against the same 12-criterion rubric, using only claims we can trace to a current official source. The question the score answers is narrow: how far do the documented rules constrain an ordinary non-owner-occupied, whole-home short-term rental? It is not a measure of whether a place is good, bad, profitable, legal, or worth investing in. Red is not “bad” and green is not “good”.

• Very high / effectively restricted

  80–100 of 100

  Documented rules make an ordinary non-owner-occupied whole-home short-term rental unavailable or close to impossible for most properties — for example an outright prohibition, a primary-residence mandate, or a closed permit programme.

  How a place lands here: Requires at least one documented severe market-access trigger. Routine operating requirements can never reach this band.

• High access constraints

  60–79 of 100

  Major eligibility or supply barriers are documented — narrow zoning, hard caps or waitlists, discretionary conditional-use approval, severe spacing, or entity limits — so entry depends on more than completing paperwork.

  How a place lands here: Requires a documented major access constraint, or at least two documented moderate-or-greater access constraints.

• Moderate / structured

  40–59 of 100

  Short-term rentals are generally viable but sit inside a real compliance framework: permitting, inspections, operating standards, or localised zoning verification. This can mean a clearer path to compliance; it is not a recommendation, a rating, or an investment view.

  How a place lands here: The ceiling for jurisdictions whose documented rules are operating requirements only.

• Lower regulatory burden

  20–39 of 100

  Broadly viable in the sources reviewed, with lighter registration and operating requirements and no documented market-access constraint.

  How a place lands here: No documented access constraint and a light operating rule set.

• Minimal STR-specific burden located

  0–19 of 100

  Few or no short-term-rental-specific requirements were located in the official sources reviewed. This does NOT mean short-term rental is unrestricted, legal, low-risk, or advisable here. Zoning, HOA and deed restrictions, building and fire code, lodging tax, nuisance rules, and state law may still apply, and a rule may exist in a source we did not review.

  How a place lands here: Very little confirmed STR-specific rule-making. Always read with the evidence-coverage figure beside it.

Feasibility first: two separate dimensions

Rules that decide whether you can operate at all are weighted far above rules that decide what you must do while operating. The two are scored separately and then combined as 0.75 × market access + 0.45 × operating compliance, capped at 100. That is why a jurisdiction with permits, inspections, a local-contact rule, occupancy limits and lodging tax — but no eligibility barrier — reads as moderate and structured, not as restricted.

What it takes to enter each band

• • Very high / effectively restricted (80–100) requires at least one documented severe market-access trigger — outright prohibition, an owner-occupancy or primary-residence mandate, a closed application window, a hard cap with a waitlist, or exclusion from most residential inventory.
• • High access constraints (60–79) requires a documented major access constraint, or at least two documented moderate-or-greater access constraints.
• • With no documented access constraint above 'moderate' and fewer than two moderate constraints, the estimate is capped at 59 — the top of Moderate / structured.
• • Taxes carry 5 of the 100 operating points. Safety, nuisance and inspection rules indicate a structured framework and are weighted accordingly; they cannot by themselves signal restricted access.

Uncertainty, not omission

Every jurisdiction in the library receives a result, including ones where research is incomplete. Market-access findings are graded severe, major, moderate or none from the cited official claim itself; the most severe finding scores in full and each additional finding adds a quarter of its points, so correlated restrictions are never double-counted. The operating sub-score is a weighted count out of 100 and is multiplied by 0.45, which is why routine permitting, inspection, contact, tax and enforcement rules alone cannot exceed the Moderate / structured band. An unresolved criterion is never recorded as 'not required' and never scored as zero: it enters the central estimate at a quarter of its worst case and reaches its full worst case at the top of the published interval, but it can never release the gates that open the high-access or effectively-restricted bands — those read confirmed findings only. Every result therefore ships as estimate, interval, evidence coverage and confidence together. Each page publishes the estimate, that interval, the evidence coverage percentage, and a High / Medium / Low confidence label. Anything below High is labelled provisional, drawn with a dashed grey border, and states plainly when its range crosses more than one category. At least 4 criteria must be affirmatively resolved as “does not apply” before we will say no local rule was located.