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.
Most hosts who break STR law don't break it on night one. They break it on night 121 — the morning a cap they never counted crosses under them. Caps are the arithmetic layer of this field, and each kind counts differently.
Night caps: what counts is the unhosted night
Los Angeles caps unhosted rentals at 120 nights a year (its Extended Home-Sharing path lifts the cap for a much larger fee and neighbor notice). San Francisco caps unhosted nights at 90. Washington, DC caps the host-away "vacation rental" at 90 while hosted stays run uncapped. Jersey City's voter-approved cap is 60 for whole-home use. Boston's Limited Share category caps at 90.
The common error is counting booked nights instead of unhosted nights, or counting per calendar year when your city counts a rolling or license year. The cap is a budget; budgets need a ledger, and the cities that cap also tend to demand the records — San Francisco takes quarterly reports.
Guest caps
New York's Local Law 18 pairs its registration with the housing code's hard line: no more than 2 paying guests, whatever the apartment's size. Elsewhere guest caps arrive through occupancy formulas (Hilton Head's two-per-bedroom pattern, Sevier County's septic-driven numbers) — which is why a "sleeps 14" listing can be the violation itself.
Minimum stays and their cousins
Minimum-stay rules flip the logic: instead of capping how much you rent, they floor how long each rental must be. Chicago requires a 2-night minimum. Las Vegas (city and county) requires 2-night minimums. Salt Lake City and Anaheim effectively impose a 30-day floor by banning anything shorter in residential zones. Palm Springs rations by contracts (32 a year), not nights — a distinction our Palm Springs page spells out, because hosts miscount it in both directions.
Density caps: the cap that isn't about you
Clark County caps licensed STRs at 1% of housing units — with under 200 licenses issued by 2025. San Diego auctions its whole-home tier by lottery at about 1% of housing. Breckenridge and Big Bear cap by zone and town. A density cap means your arithmetic can be perfect and the answer still "no slot exists." Our verdicts print scarcity as a condition for exactly this reason.
Run the checker with your real planned nights — the verdict shows the cap math for your market, including what the over-cap nights would cost at that city's per-day fines.