MattMMarketing/short-term-rental-permit-ordinances

US Short-Term-Rental Ordinance Dataset

Dataset Summary

A structured, primary-sourced dataset of US short-term-rental (STR) registration ordinances for 30 US cities. Each row covers one city's program: the official registration or permit program name, the permit fee, the renewal cadence, the occupancy or zoning rule (when the city's rule turns on owner-occupancy or host presence), and the official .gov primary source URL with the date the facts were verified.

Row count: 30 verified cities (as of July 2026).
Geographic scope: United States.
Time period: Verified 2026-07-04 through 2026-07-05.
License: CC BY 4.0 — free to use, adapt, and republish with attribution.
Canonical on-site page: strpermitkit.com/data/str-ordinances

Use cases

• Research on short-term-rental regulation patterns across US cities.
• Building STR compliance tools, lookups, or comparison tables.
• Journalism or policy analysis of STR regulation trends.
• Training or evaluating LLMs on factual municipal ordinance data.
• Generating or augmenting STR permit guidance products.

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Supported Tasks

• Reference lookup: Look up a city's STR registration program, fee, and renewal cadence.
• Comparative analysis: Compare fee structures, renewal periods, and occupancy rules across cities.
• Regulatory research: Identify patterns in how US cities regulate short-term rentals.
• NLP/LLM: Fact-grounded training or evaluation data for STR or municipal regulation tasks.

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Languages

en — English only. All text fields are in English.

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Dataset Structure

Files

• str-ordinances.csv — UTF-8, RFC 4180 CSV, 30 data rows + header row.
• str-ordinances.json — JSON array of the same rows, same column names.

Columns

Column	Type	Description
id	string	Stable row ID, format: us-str-{state}-{city-slug}. Example: us-str-tx-houston-tx.
city	string	City display name.
state	string	Two-letter US state code.
program_name	string	The official name of the city's STR registration or permit program.
requirement	string	Answer-first one-sentence summary of what the city requires.
fee	string	The permit or registration fee, quoted from the primary source. May include multiple tiers or components.
renewal_cadence	string	How often the permit must be renewed (annual, biennial, every 3 years, etc.).
occupancy_rule_kind	string	Occupancy rule type, when applicable. Values: primary-only, host-present, tiered, no-restriction, or empty.
occupancy_rule_summary	string	One-sentence summary of the occupancy rule. Empty when occupancy_rule_kind is empty.
notes	string	Additional facts from the primary source. Multiple notes separated by |.
source_label	string	Human-readable label for the primary source.
source_url	string	The exact URL of the primary .gov source the row was verified against.
verified_on	string	ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD) on which the source was live-checked and the facts confirmed.

Example row

{
  "id": "us-str-tx-houston-tx",
  "city": "Houston",
  "state": "TX",
  "program_name": "Short-Term Rental Certificate of Registration",
  "requirement": "Houston requires every short-term-rental operator inside the city limits to hold an annual Certificate of Registration and to give the City-issued registration number to the listing platform.",
  "fee": "$275.00 per year for the certificate of registration (set in Sec. 28-731(a) of the Code of Ordinances), plus the City's separate administrative fee added to the City Fee Schedule.",
  "renewal_cadence": "Annual. Certificates issued on or before December 31, 2026 expire December 31, 2027, so the certificate is renewed each year.",
  "occupancy_rule_kind": "",
  "occupancy_rule_summary": "",
  "notes": "Hosts had until January 1, 2026 to register under the ordinance adopted April 16, 2025. | Starting January 1, 2027, the City will notify platforms to remove listings that lack a certificate of registration. | Operating without a certificate can carry a fine of $100–$500 for each day of the violation.",
  "source_label": "City of Houston — Administration & Regulatory Affairs, adopted STR ordinance (Sec. 28-731)",
  "source_url": "https://www.houstontx.gov/ara/str.html",
  "verified_on": "2026-07-04"
}

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Data Collection and Processing

Methodology

Each row was compiled from the city's official primary source: a .gov program page, an adopted ordinance, or the city's own permit application documentation. The fee, renewal cadence, and occupancy rules shown are quoted or paraphrased from the cited source — not estimated, averaged, or inferred from third-party summaries.

Fail-closed approach: A city is only included when its exact permit fee can be confirmed on a fetchable primary source. Cities whose fees could not be confirmed during the research pass are excluded from this dataset and held for a future verification cycle. This dataset represents only cities where the fee has been directly read from the source.

Verification process:

1. Identify the city's official STR/permit program page (.gov or official city domain).
2. Read the fee, renewal cadence, and occupancy rule directly from that page.
3. Record the exact source URL and the date of verification (verified_on).
4. Only publish rows where the source URL was live-accessible and the facts could be read directly.

What is NOT in scope

• State-level STR regulations (only city-level ordinances).
• County-level regulations (only city/municipality programs, except Miami-Dade which is county-wide).
• Short-term rental taxes (lodging/occupancy taxes) beyond what is part of the permit fee itself.
• Unverified cities — cities where the exact fee could not be confirmed against a primary source.

Primary sources

Sources used include official city government websites, adopted ordinance texts, permit program pages, and official city fee schedules. Each source URL is included in the source_url field. A representative selection:

• houstontx.gov, planning.lacity.gov, austintexas.gov, nyc.gov
• nashville.gov, seattle.gov, denvergov.org, boston.gov
• sandiego.gov, phoenix.gov, miamidade.gov, kcmo.gov
• phila.gov, longbeach.gov, cityofslt.gov, dlcp.dc.gov

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Source Data

All data was sourced from official city or county government websites. No third-party aggregator, scraper, or non-primary source was used. The full list of source URLs is in the source_url column of each row.

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Licensing

This dataset is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including commercially.

Under the following terms: Attribution — you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

Attribution line:

STRPermitKit (https://strpermitkit.com/data/str-ordinances), CC BY 4.0.

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Citation

@dataset{strpermitkit_str_ordinance_dataset_2026,
  title        = {US Short-Term-Rental Ordinance Dataset},
  author       = {STRPermitKit},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {July},
  url          = {https://strpermitkit.com/data/str-ordinances},
  license      = {CC BY 4.0},
  note         = {30 verified US cities: STR registration program, permit fee, renewal
                  cadence, occupancy rule, and official .gov source URL. Verified
                  against each city's primary source July 2026.}
}

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Link to on-site page

Full dataset with searchable table, methodology, and data dictionary:
https://strpermitkit.com/data/str-ordinances

Direct downloads:

• CSV: https://strpermitkit.com/data/str-ordinances.csv
• JSON: https://strpermitkit.com/data/str-ordinances.json

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Disclaimer

This dataset is provided for informational and research purposes only. It is not legal advice and is not affiliated with any city government, Airbnb, or Vrbo. Regulations change; always verify the current requirements with your city before acting on this data. The verified_on date indicates when each row was last confirmed against its source.