San Bernardino Short Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in San Bernardino and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Unfortunately, the honest answer this year is no, and it's a recent no. The city council banned short-term rentals citywide on April 15, 2026, in a contentious 4-3 vote, and the ban took effect May 15, 2026. Whatever plan you had for a property inside San Bernardino, California, city limits (this is the city itself, the county seat of San Bernardino County, not the county's Mountain and Desert regions, which run under a completely different set of rules) needs a rethink before you spend another dollar on it.

That's a fast turn. About 108 properties were listed as short-term rentals across the city when the council voted, and city staff had recommended regulating them instead of banning them outright. The majority went with the ban anyway, and fines for anyone who keeps operating start at $1,000 a day. Even before this, San Bernardino never had a dedicated short-term-rental permit, so hosts here were already working with less structure than most California cities offer.

So this guide covers what happened, what applied to hosts before the ban (the taxes and registration rules still worth understanding if you're winding down), how enforcement works now, and who to call if you're one of those 108 hosts. Every figure below comes from the city's own pages or from local reporting on the council vote itself, checked in July 2026, and I've flagged the one or two things I couldn't confirm directly. If you're deciding whether to hold the property, convert it to a long-term lease, or look elsewhere in California entirely, run the numbers through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in San Bernardino

There isn't one to start, at least not inside city limits, and that's the thing to sit with before reading any further. Renting a home in San Bernardino for stays under 30 days is now prohibited outright, regardless of whether you own the property, live in it part-time, or planned to hire a management company to run it for you. No permit unlocks it. No LLC structure gets around it. The council's own vote closed that door for the whole city, not confined to a subset of zones or property types.

What makes this sting a bit more is that San Bernardino never made hosts jump through much of a hoop to begin with. Going through the city's own Development Code, specifically the Residential Zones chapter that governs permitted, conditionally permitted, and prohibited land uses, there was never a "short-term rental" use category defined at all. Hosts operated in a genuine gap rather than under an explicit permit, and that gap is exactly what drew the complaints that led to the ban in the first place.

If you already own a property here and the short-term math was the whole plan, the realistic options now are a long-term lease, a sale, or a completely different market. San Bernardino County's own unincorporated Mountain and Desert regions still permit short-term rentals under the county's own ordinance, but that's a different jurisdiction with its own permit, and it only covers the mountain and desert areas, not the Valley region where the city of San Bernardino sits. Our California statewide guide walks through how much of this decision-making happens at the city and county level rather than under any one state rule.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in San Bernardino

Since there's no business to license anymore, this section is about what used to apply, and it's worth understanding if you're closing one out. San Bernardino never issued a short-term-rental-specific permit. The closest thing was the general Business Registration Certificate that the city requires of "any person" conducting business within city limits, under Title 5, Chapter 5.04 of the Municipal Code. That certificate wasn't built for hosting specifically. It applies to essentially every business type in the city, and a short-term rental happened to fall under it because renting a property for money counts as a business.

Fees for that certificate are set by resolution of the mayor and city council rather than fixed in the code itself, with the amount depending on gross receipts for a business physically located in the city, or a flat rate for one operating from outside it. I couldn't pin down a current dollar figure from the city's published pages, since the fee schedule lives in a separate resolution rather than the ordinance text, so make sure you don't guess at a number. Call the Business Registration Division directly if you're settling up an old certificate.

None of this required an inspection, an occupancy cap, or a neighbor-notification step the way permits in other California cities do. That's part of why the ban landed the way it did. Council members who supported it argued the city had no real enforcement mechanism for a use it had never formally defined, so a prohibition was simpler to write and simpler to enforce than a new permit system would have been.

Required Documents for San Bernardino Short Term Rentals

Because there was never a dedicated permit, there was never a dedicated document checklist either, and that's worth keeping in mind if you're used to guides that list a stack of required paperwork. Operating under the general Business Registration Certificate meant supplying the standard information any business owner provides: identification, the business name and structure, the property address, and whatever the current fee schedule required.

Beyond that, a San Bernardino host's real paper trail lived in tax records rather than permit files, since the transient lodging tax below required registering as an operator and filing returns. If you're closing out an existing registration now that the ban is in effect, don't forget to keep your final tax filings and any correspondence with the Business Registration Division on hand. That's the documentation a wind-down needs, not a fresh application packet.

San Bernardino Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you were operating before the ban and are still able to collect on bookings made ahead of May 15, there's still tax owed on that income, so keep in mind how the city's tax worked. San Bernardino's Transient Lodging Tax, codified at Chapter 3.55 of the Municipal Code, charges 10% of the room rental amount for the privilege of occupancy in a hotel, which the code defines broadly enough to reach short-term rentals. City voters approved this version of the tax on November 5, 2002, after two earlier attempts were struck down in court as unconstitutionally vague; the current version survived its own court challenge in 2005. I wasn't able to load that code chapter directly (amlegal.com's server returned an access error on every attempt), so I'm relying on a municipal attorney's published breakdown that quotes the operative sections, rather than my own read of the primary text. Treat the rate and the enactment date as solid, but confirm the current text with the city if it matters to your specific situation.

Here's the part that catches people out: Airbnb's own California tax-collection list explicitly excludes the City of San Bernardino from the county's automatic collection, naming it directly in a list of incorporated cities the county entry doesn't cover. In practice, that meant a San Bernardino city host was on their own for registering with the city and remitting this tax, even while Airbnb was quietly collecting the equivalent tax in plenty of nearby jurisdictions on a host's behalf. Don't assume a platform handled this for you just because it does in other California markets.

Above the city, California itself levies no statewide occupancy tax at all. Revenue and Taxation Code § 7280 authorizes cities and counties to tax stays of 30 days or less, with no state cap on the rate, which is exactly the authority San Bernardino used to write its own 10% tax. Rental income itself is still ordinary taxable income at both the state and federal level regardless of what the city allows, so a wind-down doesn't erase whatever you already earned this year.

San Bernardino wide Short Term Rental Rules

That tax picture only mattered while there was still a legal activity to tax, which brings us to the rule that now overrides everything above it. The city council's April 15, 2026 vote banned short-term rentals across the entire city, not in specific zones or for specific property types. Councilman Fred Shorett made the motion, Councilmember Treasure Ortiz seconded it, and Councilmembers Mario Flores and Juan Figueroa joined them for the 4-3 majority. Mayor Pro Tem Kim Knaus and Councilmembers Theodore Sanchez and Sandra Ibarra voted against it, favoring a regulate-rather-than-ban approach that city staff had recommended in the agenda materials.

The vote followed an earlier direction from the council in August 2024, when members voted 6-1 to have staff draft ban language in the first place. Staff came back with both a regulation option and a ban option, and after months of public hearings the ban is what passed. Public comment at the hearing ran hot on both sides. One resident, Jose Gomez, described a Halloween 2025 party at a short-term rental that drew more than 1,000 people. Another, Mike Hartley, put it bluntly: "All you're doing with these Airbnbs is adding chaos to chaos." On the other side, resident Eric Meza argued the opposite case: "A full ban does not solve the problem. It punishes the wrong people," and pushed for regulation instead of prohibition.

Worth knowing here too: California caps how much a city can fine someone for an STR-ordinance infraction, generally $1,500 for a first violation, $3,000 for a second within a year, and $5,000 for additional violations within that year, under Government Code § 36900(d). San Bernardino's own reporting describes fines "starting at $1,000 per day," which sits under that first-violation cap, though how a per-day structure interacts with the state's escalating tiers over a longer violation isn't something I could confirm from either news account. If you're facing an actual fine, that's worth raising directly with the city rather than assuming either number controls.

Does San Bernardino strictly enforce STR rules? Is San Bernardino Airbnb friendly?

No, and as of mid-2026 that's about as unambiguous as this question gets anywhere in California. A city that bans an entire category of listing isn't a "strict enforcement" story in the usual sense, where fines pile up on operators who skip a permit step. It's simpler than that: the activity itself is prohibited, full stop, and the city has said it plans to identify remaining listings through third-party monitoring rather than waiting on neighbor complaints alone.

That's a meaningfully more proactive posture than most cities take. Plenty of California jurisdictions rely almost entirely on someone filing a complaint before code enforcement ever looks at a listing. San Bernardino's stated approach, watching the platforms directly and notifying operators to stop, means a listing doesn't need to generate a noise complaint to draw attention. It just needs to still be live after May 15, 2026.

None of the news coverage I found specifies which city department is running that monitoring, so don't assume it's Code Enforcement by default. Be aware you may need to call and confirm before assuming any one office owns this particular process.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in San Bernardino

You can't, not inside the city, so the useful version of this section is "how to handle what you've got" instead. Here's the order that makes sense if you're one of the roughly 108 hosts this ban affects:

1. Confirm your property sits inside city limits. San Bernardino's city boundary doesn't match the ZIP code boundary, and plenty of addresses that feel like "San Bernardino" sit in unincorporated county territory or in a neighboring city with its own rules. Make sure you check your parcel against the city's own maps before assuming the ban applies to you.
2. Stop taking new bookings past the effective date. Existing reservations made before May 15, 2026 are a gray area the city hasn't publicly clarified, so don't assume a booking calendar protects you once the ban is live.
3. Settle any outstanding Transient Lodging Tax. Whatever you collected before the ban is still taxable, and the city can still come after unpaid tax from the period when the activity was legal.
4. Decide between a long-term lease, a sale, or a different market entirely. A 30-day-plus furnished rental sits outside this ban and under ordinary landlord-tenant law instead, which is where a lot of displaced short-term inventory tends to land in cities that restrict nightly rentals.
5. Look at other California markets if you want to stay in the STR business. San Bernardino County's own inland-empire neighbors run different rules entirely, and Central Valley counties like Stanislaus and San Joaquin are worth a look if you're comparing similarly affordable, inland markets with a different regulatory posture.

Before you commit to any of those, it's worth pulling the actual numbers rather than guessing. The San Bernardino market page on BNBCalc Markets shows what nightly rates and occupancy looked like in this market before the ban took hold, which is useful context whether you're pricing a long-term conversion or making the case for a different city altogether.

Who to contact in San Bernardino about Short Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Three city offices split the questions you're likely to have, and knowing which one owns your specific issue saves a round of transfers.

Code Enforcement Division handles property-use complaints and is the most likely office to field questions about the ban itself, given its standing role investigating unpermitted or prohibited property uses citywide.

• Address: 290 North D Street (Vanir Tower), San Bernardino, CA 92401
• Phone: 909-998-2000
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday through Thursday, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Community Development and Housing Department oversees zoning and the Development Code, and was the department whose director supplied the 108-property count cited in local reporting on the ban.

• Address: 201 North E Street, 3rd Floor, San Bernardino, CA 92401
• Phone: 909-998-2200
• Hours: same as Code Enforcement above

Business Registration Division, inside the Finance and Management Services Department, handles Business Registration Certificates and administers the Transient Lodging Tax.

• Address: 201 North E Street, Space 201A, San Bernardino, CA 92401
• Phone: 909-998-2101
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday through Thursday, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

What do Airbnb hosts in San Bernardino on Reddit and Bigger Pockets think about local regulations?

I wasn't able to reach Reddit for this pass, since it blocks the kind of automated access this research pipeline needs, so what follows leans on BiggerPockets and on the public comments made at the council hearing itself rather than a Reddit survey. Take it as a read on the mood, not a poll.

The most telling thing I found was a BiggerPockets thread pitching DSCR financing for a hypothetical San Bernardino short-term rental, posted February 14, 2026, just two months before the council vote. It runs through occupancy projections and loan structures for the market without a single mention of the ban that was already working its way through the council by then. That's not a criticism of the poster so much as a snapshot of how fast this changed. Investors were still actively pitching San Bernardino as an STR market right up until the council pulled the plug on it.

The hearing itself is where the real debate lives, and it split the way these debates usually do. Residents who'd dealt with a bad neighbor cited real incidents, like the Halloween 2025 gathering that reportedly drew over a thousand people to one property, as proof the city couldn't manage this use responsibly. Hosts and property owners pushed back that a blanket ban punishes compliant operators for the failures of a few, and argued regulation (permits, occupancy caps, a local contact requirement) would have solved the same problems without ending the business entirely. The council sided with the first group by a single vote.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I still run a short-term rental in San Bernardino, California in 2026?

No. The San Bernardino City Council voted 4-3 on April 15, 2026 to ban all short-term rentals citywide, and the ban took effect May 15, 2026. This applies to entire homes, rooms, and any stay under 30 days, regardless of who owns the property or how it was previously operated. Violators face fines starting at $1,000 per day. Stays of 30 consecutive days or longer fall outside this ban and are governed by ordinary landlord-tenant law instead.

Did San Bernardino require a permit for short-term rentals before the ban?

Not a dedicated one. The city's Development Code never defined a short-term-rental land-use category, so hosts operated under the general Business Registration Certificate that applies to any business in the city, plus registration for the city's Transient Lodging Tax. There was no separate short-term-rental application, inspection, or occupancy cap the way many California cities require.

Do I still owe transient lodging tax on bookings from before San Bernardino's ban?

Yes. San Bernardino's Transient Lodging Tax charges 10% of the room rental amount, and that obligation applies to any stay that occurred while short-term rentals were still legal in the city, regardless of when you file or pay. Airbnb did not automatically collect this tax on the city's behalf, since San Bernardino is explicitly excluded from the county's platform-collection list, so hosts were responsible for remitting it themselves.

Are short-term rentals legal anywhere in San Bernardino County?

Yes, but only in specific unincorporated areas. San Bernardino County's own ordinance permits short-term rentals in the county's Mountain and Desert regions under a county-issued permit, separate from the city's rules entirely. The City of San Bernardino sits in the Valley region and was never covered by that county permitting scheme, so its new citywide ban and the county's mountain and desert rules are two different systems governing two different places.

What happens if I keep operating a short-term rental in San Bernardino after May 15, 2026?

The city has said it will identify active listings through third-party monitoring rather than relying only on neighbor complaints, then notify operators to stop before enforcement follows. Fines start at $1,000 per day and property owners who continue after being notified are ordered to stop the practice. Neither of the two local news accounts I could verify specifies a formal grace period beyond the standard 30 days between the council's vote and the ban's effective date.

Last verified: July 2026. Every ordinance, tax rate, state law, and contact detail in this guide links to or comes from its official source.