- Who can run a short-term rental in San Francisco?
- A permanent resident of the unit. The city requires the host to live in the unit for the majority of the year — the standard is at least 275 nights — which excludes an investment property the host does not occupy.
- What is the 90-night cap?
- Un-hosted stays, where the host is not present, are limited to 90 nights per calendar year. Hosted stays, where the host remains in the unit, are not capped. The city tracks the un-hosted count and hosts are required to report their stays.
The residency test
San Francisco permits short-term residential rental only by a permanent resident of the unit. The city's standard is occupancy of the unit for at least 275 nights of the year, which is not a formality — the Office of Short-Term Rentals asks for evidence, and an applicant who cannot show it does not get registered.
This is the provision that removes the investment case. A unit bought to be let nightly cannot satisfy a test that requires the owner to live in it.
Registration and the business registration certificate
A host needs to register with the Office of Short-Term Rentals and obtain a business registration certificate from the Treasurer and Tax Collector. Registration produces a number, and the platforms will not list a San Francisco property without one — the city's settlement with the major platforms put that check in place years before other cities adopted the same idea.
Registration is renewable, and lapses. A lapsed registration is a delisted property rather than a warning.
Hosted, un-hosted, and the count
The distinction that governs the calendar is whether the host is present. Hosted nights — the host in the unit while guests stay — are unlimited. Un-hosted nights are capped at 90 in a calendar year, and hosts are required to keep and report records of their stays.
Transient occupancy tax applies to the stay and is generally collected by the platform on a platform booking. On a direct booking it is the host's to collect and remit, which is the same trap that catches direct-booking operators everywhere: the obligation follows the channel, and nobody sends a reminder.
Ninety nights un-hosted is a number somebody has to be counting. Direct PMS holds every booking against the unit on one calendar, so the count is a report rather than a reconstruction.
Short-term rental operators →- 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.
New York did not ban short-term rentals. It required registration, then required the platforms to check it — which removed most of the market in a single step, because most of the market could never have registered.