Is your short-term rental actually legal?
Read the fine print before the city reads your listing.
Fifty regulated markets, checked cell by cell against the municipal code — permit, cap, residency rule, and the fine schedule in dollars. Your verdict in about a minute.
The Host Compliance Kit — $59, one time
The verdict tells you where you stand. The kit walks you through standing there lawfully: registration walkthroughs for all 50 covered markets, the compliance calendar, the permission letters, the fine-avoidance file, and tax routing state by state.
$59 See the Host Compliance Kit
One-time payment. No subscription, ever.
How the verdict works
Never a bare "legal"
Every verdict is conditional: LEGAL IF YOU REGISTER, LEGAL IF — CAPPED, LEGAL IF — PRIMARY RESIDENCE ONLY, CITY CAN'T BAN — STATE PREEMPTION, PHASE-OUT CLOCK, or NOT LEGAL AS DESCRIBED. The conditions print with it.
Fines in dollars, not adjectives
San Francisco's $484 a day turns a 30-night season into $14,520 of exposure. Honolulu charges $10,000 a day. Your verdict does the math for your market and your nights.
Renters get their own path
The lease gate leads the renter flow — and in Los Angeles, Denver and New York, landlord permission is written into the law itself, so the checker computes it instead of footnoting it.
The enforcement machine is a data pipeline now
Platforms verify registration before processing bookings in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and Seattle. Rolls are public; listings are scraped; per-day fines do the rest. Rules checked October 2026
Start with the markets that regulate hardest
New York City, NY
A short-term rental is any rental under 30 days. Under the state Multiple Dwelling Law and Local Law 18, renting a whole apartment for under 30 days i…
Los Angeles, CA
Home-sharing means renting all or part of your primary residence for 30 or fewer consecutive days. Only your primary residence qualifies; rent-stabili…
San Francisco, CA
A short-term rental is a rental under 30 nights. Only a permanent resident may register, and only their one permanent residence.…
Denver, CO
A short-term rental is a rental under 30 days. In Denver it is legal in exactly one place: your primary residence.…
Austin, TX
A short-term rental is a rental under 30 days. Austin repealed its old Type 1/2/3 system and census-tract caps effective October 1, 2025: STR is now a…
Clark County (Las Vegas area), NV
Unincorporated Clark County licenses short-term rentals under state law AB 363: the county may not ban them, but licenses are capped at 1% of housing …
Chicago, IL
Shared housing means renting a dwelling unit, or part of one, for under 32 consecutive days. Chicago registers the unit (not just the host) and bans s…
Honolulu (Oahu), HI
Oahu's Ordinance 22-7 confines legal STRs (under 30 days) to resort zones and specific apartment precincts. Outside them, the lawful categories are na…
Guides that answer the question behind the question
The Primary-Residence Rule: The One Line That Decides Most Cities
Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, DC — the biggest STR regimes in America all ask the same question first: do you live there?
Renting Out a Place You Rent: The Lease Gate
City permission and lease permission are two different doors, and the lease is the one that can evict you.
Night Caps, Guest Caps, Minimum Stays: Reading the Numbers in a Rule
120 in Los Angeles, 90 in San Francisco and DC, 60 in Jersey City — caps are where legal hosts quietly become illegal ones.