- Can I rent my whole apartment in New York City for a few nights?
- In most of the city's housing stock, no. State law has long prohibited renting a whole unit in a Class A multiple dwelling for fewer than thirty days when the permanent occupant is not present. Local Law 18 then made the prohibition enforceable at the booking layer by requiring registration and stopping platforms from processing bookings without it.
- What does Local Law 18 actually require?
- Registration with the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement before hosting, and a registration number the platform verifies. A registered host must be present during the stay, may host no more than two guests at a time, and must give those guests access to the whole unit — internal doors cannot be locked off.
The rule that predates the registration law
The substantive prohibition is older than Local Law 18 and comes from state law: in a Class A multiple dwelling — the category most New York City apartment buildings fall into — a unit is for permanent residence, and letting the whole of it for fewer than thirty days while the permanent occupant is absent is not permitted.
What that leaves is hosted stays: the permanent occupant present, letting part of their home. That was legal before Local Law 18 and remains so, subject to registration.
What Local Law 18 added
Local Law 18 requires a host to register with the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement before taking a short-term booking, and prohibits a booking platform from processing a transaction for an unregistered short-term rental. The registration conditions restate the substantive rules: the host must be present, no more than two guests at a time, and guests must have access to the whole dwelling unit.
The enforcement mechanism is what mattered. Rather than pursuing hosts one at a time, the city made the platform unable to take the money — so compliance stopped being a question of whether anyone would notice.
What is outside it
The registration requirement is aimed at short stays. Outside its scope are:
- Stays of thirty consecutive days or more, which are tenancies rather than short-term rentals
- Class B multiple dwellings legally occupied for transient use
- Hotels and other lawfully operating transient accommodation
What operators did instead
The market response in New York has largely been to move above thirty days — mid-term furnished lettings to relocating professionals, medical staff on rotation and insurance placements. That is a different product with different economics, and, importantly, a different legal character: a thirty-day-plus occupant has tenancy rights that a guest does not.
An operator making that move should be clear that they are becoming a landlord, not running longer stays. The paperwork, the deposit handling and the eviction position all change with it.
Thirty days is the line, and above it a stay is a tenancy with everything that implies. Direct PMS runs both on one calendar, so a unit moving from nightly to monthly does not move to another system.
Long-term rental managers →- Rules and rates in this area change often, and this page is a summary rather than advice. Check the official source before you rely on any figure in it.
Florida is one of the few states that licenses vacation rentals itself — and one of the few that stops its cities doing the same, unless they were already doing it in 2011.
There is no California short-term rental law to comply with. There are roughly five hundred municipal ones, and the only safe assumption is that the city you are buying in does something different from the city you already operate in.
San Francisco's regime is the strictest of the residency-based models: you must actually live there, you must register, and the city audits the count of nights you were not home.