What a short-term rental permit actually costs in 40 cities

The permit and registration fees 40 cities publish for short-term rentals, quoted as written in each ordinance or fee schedule, with the source beside every figure.

A permit fee is the one regulatory cost a buyer can price before the offer, and almost nobody does, because the number lives in a fee schedule three clicks deep on a city website. Below are 40 of them, quoted as the city publishes them. We have not converted them to a single annual figure, because the cities do not: some charge per unit, some per bedroom, some once, some every two years, and a few bundle an inspection. The quote is the fact. The arithmetic is yours.

How to read the table

Each row is one city's rule as our ordinance index holds it after a human review, with the renewal cadence the city states and a link to the page or code section the figure came from. Where a city lists several tiers we show the line the source gives. Where the fee is set by council resolution and the ordinance names no number, the city is not in this table, which is why several large cities are missing: their codes say "a fee established by resolution", and the resolution is a separate document we have not yet indexed.

Fees change. The date at the top is the date of our last review pass, not the date each city last changed its schedule. Before you rely on a figure, open the source.

What the spread tells you

The range runs from $20 a year in small Alabama cities to $1,325 a year in Islamorada and $914 in unincorporated Los Angeles County, and the shape matters more than the median. Coastal Florida clusters between $300 and $900 with an inspection attached, which is a fixed cost that a one-bedroom absorbs badly and a five-bedroom barely notices. Cities that price per bedroom, Little Rock among them, do the opposite. San Diego's tiers are the clearest example of a fee designed to sort hosts: the two lower tiers, for part-time and home-share use, cost a fraction of the whole-home tiers.

None of this is the cost that decides a deal. Transient occupancy tax, which most of these cities also levy, dwarfs the permit fee on any listing that actually books. But the permit is the gate. A city that charges four figures and inspects the property is telling you it intends to enforce, and the match rate between its registry and the listings we see is usually high. A city that charges $25 and never inspects is telling you something too.

What we will add

Two groups are missing and both are queued. First, cities whose rows have not yet passed our human review, which is why Los Angeles, Sacramento, Anaheim and Sedona are absent even though their schedules are public. Second, cities whose ordinance defers to a fee resolution, for which we are indexing the resolutions themselves. Until then, the quote and the link are what we can stand behind.