Columbus, Ohio Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Columbus, Ohio and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and you don't even have to live in the house to do it. Columbus runs its short-term rentals through Chapter 598 of the city code, which wants an annual permit before you list and charges $75 a year where the property is your primary residence, or $150 a year where it isn't. That makes Columbus one of the more permissive places in Franklin County, since several of the suburbs wrapped around it have banned short-term rentals outright.

The permit is cheap. Getting one is the part that catches people out. You'll need a fingerprint background check through Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation every year, and so will your co-host, your property manager and your 24-hour local contact. On top of that sits a notarized application, a Letter of Good Standing from the city's income tax division, and a bedroom count matching what the Franklin County Auditor already has on file. You'll also need at least $300,000 of liability insurance, and letting it lapse revokes the permit automatically. Three police calls to your address inside twelve months can put the whole thing back in front of the License Section.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly: what Chapter 598 requires in 2026, what the paperwork costs, the one lodging tax you collect and the two that don't touch you, how hard the city pushes when a listing goes wrong, and who to call when something stalls. Every figure below comes from the City of Columbus, Franklin County or the state's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving I've said so. Before any of it matters, though, run the property through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations Columbus, Ohio?

Before the spreadsheet, you need to know which rules you're modeling, and two chapters of the Columbus city code do nearly all of the work. Chapter 598 handles the permit and how you're allowed to operate. Chapter 371 handles the tax. Get those two straight and most of the confusion around this city disappears.

Chapter 598 defines a short-term rental as any dwelling with five guestrooms or less rented wholly or partly for a fee for less than thirty consecutive days, by someone other than the owner or permanent occupant. The city puts it more plainly on its own permit page: a rental of all or a portion of your home for periods of less than 30 nights.

Both halves of that definition matter. Go above five sleeping guestrooms and you're a hotel/motel under the same chapter, which means a different permit and a different set of state obligations. Rent to the same guest for thirty consecutive days or more and you've left the regime entirely, since Chapter 598 exempts those stays from the short-term rental rules and the excise tax alike.

The trigger for needing a permit is earlier than most hosts assume. Section 598.02(A)(2) bars the "offering, listing, advertisement or marketing" of a qualifying dwelling without a valid permit, so the permit has to exist before the listing goes live, not before the first guest arrives. A few other duties attach to the permit itself and are worth knowing before you plan anything:

• You have to be the owner or the permanent occupant. A permanent occupant is someone who lives in the dwelling more than 51% of the calendar year. An entity can hold the permit, but a person has to be the host behind it.
• Your permit number goes on every listing, and no booking platform may facilitate a paid reservation for a Columbus dwelling unless the host has given it a valid permit number.
• You need a named 24-hour local contact, and the application asks for that person's residential address, so a call center won't satisfy it.
• Guests are capped at three times the number of rooms, and the bedroom count on your application has to match the Franklin County Auditor's record for the parcel.
• The permit lives with the property and the person. Any transfer of ownership voids it, and it can't be transferred or assigned to anyone else.

Zoning works differently in Columbus than in a lot of cities, and the difference is easy to misread. Chapter 598 doesn't tie your permit to a zoning district, so there's no list of approved streets and no separate zoning clearance to chase. What the city does do is tell you to confirm your zoning location before applying using its own zoning map, then make you affirm under oath that the property meets the city's fire, health, safety, housing and zoning requirements along with the Ohio Building Code. So zoning isn't a gate at the counter. It's a promise you sign, and one the city can inspect against later.

One more scoping point, because it decides whether any of this applies to you at all. These rules belong to the City of Columbus, inside Franklin County, Ohio. Columbus city limits weave around Upper Arlington, Worthington, Grandview Heights and half a dozen other municipalities, so a Columbus mailing address and a Franklin County parcel number prove nothing on their own. Make sure you confirm which jurisdiction the property actually sits in before you spend a dollar, because the answer changes the rules completely.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Columbus, Ohio

Assuming your address really does sit inside Columbus, the business you're allowed to build here is wider than almost anywhere else in central Ohio, and it stays wide even if you never live in the place. There's no owner-occupancy requirement, no cap on how many permits one person can hold, no lottery, and no minimum stay beyond the thirty-night line that separates a short-term rental from a lease. Whether the house is your primary residence changes the fee and nothing else: $75 a year against $150.

That single fact is doing a lot of work, because it's the opposite of what the surrounding suburbs decided. WOSU reported in July 2026 that Upper Arlington, Westerville and Worthington have banned short-term rentals entirely, while Dublin, Gahanna and Hilliard run permit regimes of their own. Reynoldsburg then voted unanimously on 15 July 2026 to add one: a $225 annual permit, owner's primary residence only, a three-night minimum booking, and two occupants per bedroom.

Ten minutes' drive can be the difference between a legal non-owner-occupied rental and no business at all. Where you're shopping the metro instead of one specific street, the Franklin County short-term rental regulations give the wider view, and the Ohio statewide picture covers how far the answer moves between municipalities.

Renting instead of owning doesn't disqualify you, though the bar is specific. A tenant can hold a permit as the permanent occupant, yet the lease, land contract or management agreement has to explicitly provide consent for short-term rental use.

Silence isn't enough. Chapter 598 makes the absence of that clause a ground for denial on its own, so a generous landlord's verbal blessing gets you nowhere at the counter.

Two structural requirements shape the deal before you ever quote a nightly rate. The first is insurance. Every host has to carry general liability cover of not less than $300,000 per short-term rental, written by an insurer admitted in Ohio or an eligible surplus lines company, and the policy has to give the Director ten days' notice before cancellation. Platform-provided host liability coverage counts, as long as it clears that same $300,000 floor.

The second is disclosure. Your application has to name every other Columbus short-term rental you hold an interest in, whether that interest is ownership, licensure or management. Nothing in the code caps a portfolio, yet the city can see the whole of yours in one place, which matters once enforcement enters the picture.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Columbus, Ohio

All that disclosure only starts to matter once you hold a permit, so the next job is getting one. Applications go to the License Section of the Department of Building and Zoning Services, which the city describes as the office responsible for registering eligible hosts and administering enforcement of the short-term rental rules. You can apply at any time, and there's no window or annual cycle to wait for.

The money is straightforward, and as of July 2026 the city publishes all four numbers on one sheet. A $20 application fee gets you in the door. The permit itself is $75 for a primary residence or $150 for a non-primary one, and a background check done in person at the License Section is $32 a head. Run a property you don't live in, with a co-host and a separate 24-hour contact, and you're at $150 plus $20 plus three background checks before you've bought a single towel.

Timing is where expectations need managing. A new permit takes effect on the day it's issued and expires one calendar year later, so this isn't a calendar-year license, and two properties permitted in different months renew in different months. Where the permit rests on a lease, it expires at the end of your leasehold term or after one year, whichever comes first.

On how long approval takes, the city is refreshingly blunt. With the Letter of Good Standing in hand and the background check submitted, "it is possible you could receive your short-term rental permit in a more expedited timeline. However, more than likely, it may take a week or more to move through the entire process." An out-of-state background check takes longer still.

Once you hold the permit, a handful of ongoing duties keep it alive:

• Renew before it expires, and submit a fresh background check each time. A renewal takes effect when the old permit lapses, so renewing early doesn't cost you days.
• Report any change in your application information within ten calendar days, on the form the License Section provides. New co-host, new manager, new phone number, all of it.
• Display the valid permit at the rental, and keep the permit number on every listing.
• Keep records for four years: the address, who registered the listing, and for each guest the dates and duration of stay, the number of people scheduled per night, and the daily rate. The Director can demand them, and can get an administrative search warrant if you refuse.

Approval isn't automatic, and the code splits the reasons for refusal into two piles. Some are mandatory, meaning the Director shall deny, revoke or suspend:

• A material misrepresentation or a fraudulent document on the application
• A conviction for operating or listing without a permit
• Prostitution or drug offenses on the premises, or at any short-term rental you hold an interest in
• The property not being in good standing with the Columbus Income Tax Division
• The host not being in good standing with the Income Tax Division either

That tax pairing is why the Letter of Good Standing sits so early in the process. The second pile is discretionary, and it's the one neighbors end up triggering:

• Uncorrected orders from the Columbus Division of Fire
• Patterns of felony drug, prostitution or gang activity, or repeated offenses of violence
• Three or more calls for service in a consecutive twelve-month period
• Failing to make a good-faith effort to correct violations, or hindering an inspection
• "A documented history of repeated conduct that endangers neighborhood safety or diminishes resident's quality of life"

Be aware that the standard of proof is low by design. The chapter says evidence "need only be that of de facto violation of law," and that a conviction isn't a prerequisite unless the code says so.

Lose the permit and you do get a hearing, on a clock. Denials come with a Notice of Denial inside seven calendar days listing every ground, and a revocation or suspension arrives at least seven calendar days before it bites. The exception is an emergency declared by the Director, where the order is effective immediately.

From there you appeal to the Board of Licensing Appeals: written notice within twenty calendar days, plus a $30 deposit that comes back only if the Board rules in your favor and is otherwise forfeited to the city's general fund. Filing an appeal doesn't automatically stay the order either, so you have to ask the chairperson separately for a stay.

Then there's the penalty side, where the fine is the least of it. Listing or operating without a valid permit is an unclassified misdemeanor carrying a fine of not more than $250, rising to a third-degree misdemeanor on a repeat offense, with each listing counted as a separate offense and strict liability throughout. The teeth are in the next sentence of the same section: all gross revenue from a reservation obtained in violation of the permit requirement shall be remitted to the city of Columbus, subject to forfeiture law.

Read that twice before deciding a $250 fine is a cost of doing business, because the city can come for the bookings too.

Required Documents for Columbus, Ohio Short-Term Rentals

Losing the bookings to the city is the extreme case. The everyday version is losing your fees to a returned application, so it's worth getting the paperwork right the first time. The form itself is three pages and takes twenty minutes. Assembling everything behind it is what takes a week, and the city's requirements sheet is specific enough that a reasonable-looking substitute will send you back to the start.

• The application, notarized. Submit it in person, by email to [email protected], by mail, or in the License Section drop box. Every route except in person requires notarization first, and the License Section has staff who will notarize it for you at the counter.
• One proof of identity: a state driver's license or ID, passport, military ID, or other government-issued ID.
• Two proofs of primary residence, where you're claiming the primary-residence fee. The examples given are motor vehicle registration, federal tax documents such as a W-2 or 1099, and a utility bill. Note that internet and cable bills are excluded by name.
• Your lease or rental contract, if you're not the owner, and specifically one that explicitly allows short-term rental use.
• A Letter of Good Standing from the City of Columbus Department of Income Tax, requested through the Columbus Revenue Service Portal. You need one for each property, so a second listing means a second letter.
• Background check results for every named party: you, your host if that's someone else, your 24-hour local emergency contact, and your property manager if you use one. Done at the License Section it's $32; done through an authorized WebCheck agency, the agency has to mail the results directly to the License Section at 4252 Groves Road rather than to you.
• Entity paperwork, if a company is applying: formation documents filed with the Ohio Secretary of State, plus a background check on the statutory agent, a partner, the president, or the managing member of an LLC.
• Your hosting platform list, with documentation confirming each registration. Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia and the rest all get named.
• A list of your other Columbus short-term rental interests, by name and address.

Two small traps sit in the fine print. Anyone named on the application who doesn't physically appear at the office has to supply an ID verification photo, meaning a picture of that person holding up their ID, which is an awkward thing to request from a property manager three states away. And everything you file becomes a public record. The one exception is narrow: applicants who qualify as a "designated public service worker" under Ohio Revised Code 149.43 can ask the License Office to redact their information, and they have to raise it at the time of application with supporting documentation and not afterwards.

Columbus, Ohio Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, though Columbus is simpler here than its reputation suggests. One charge attaches to the stay, one attaches to your income, and one widely-repeated charge doesn't apply to you at all.

Charge	Rate	Who collects and remits it
Columbus lodging excise tax on short-term rentals	5.1% of the guest's total bill	You, or your platform if it remits to the Columbus Income Tax Division
Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority hotel tax	4% countywide plus 0.9% inside Columbus	Hotels with five or more rooms, so not a short-term rental
Columbus municipal income tax on your rental profit	2.5%	You, on your own city return

The city charge is the one you handle yourself. Columbus levies a 5.1% lodging excise tax on short-term rental stays under the authority of Chapter 371, effective 1 March 2019. The Income Tax Division's own rate table puts the short-term rental rate inside the City of Columbus at 5.1%, with no county component sitting behind it. The same page says that "property owners are responsible for collecting the 5.1% short-term rental excise tax from guests." Charge it on the total transaction the guest pays, so cleaning, service and extra-guest fees all count.

That middle table row is where a lot of published guidance goes wrong, so let's be precise about it. The Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority does levy a hotel tax, 4% countywide plus another 0.9% inside Columbus city limits, unchanged since 1988. Its own tax regulations define the taxable establishment as one "in which five or more rooms are used for the accommodation of such guests".

A Columbus short-term rental is five guestrooms or fewer by definition, so it falls outside that. The city's own rate table makes the gap plain: 10.0% for a hotel room inside Columbus and Franklin County, against 5.1% for a short-term rental in the same neighborhood. Anyone quoting you a combined Columbus rate near 10%, or stacking a 7.5% sales tax on top, is describing a hotel and not a house.

Filing runs monthly, electronically, and without exceptions. Returns go through the Columbus Revenue Service Portal and are due by the 20th of the month for the month before, so March's tax is due 20 April. Every excise account has to file monthly regardless of whether any rental activity occurred, which trips up seasonal hosts more than any other rule on the list.

Miss a deadline and the penalty is a 10% charge plus 1% daily interest compounded on the total penalty. Keep your lodging and tax records four years. Three categories of receipt come out of the base: stays longer than thirty days, government entities billed directly, and charitable lodging for transient indigent individuals.

Don't assume your platform is handling any of this. The city's rule is conditional. You skip the return only if your platform genuinely remits to the Columbus Income Tax Division. Airbnb's own Ohio tax page lists exactly three Ohio jurisdictions where it collects and remits, being Cuyahoga County, Cincinnati and Cleveland. Columbus isn't among them. So plan on collecting and remitting the 5.1% yourself unless your platform tells you in writing that it doesn't work that way.

One 2026 change is worth knowing even though it doesn't cost you a cent. Council passed Ordinance 2063-2026 on 29 June 2026 by a 9-0 vote, moving the Affordable Housing Trust's 0.43% slice of the bed tax into the convention and visitors' bureau share, which rises to 2.82% effective 1 July 2026. The city separately committed $12.5 million to the Trust over five years while it hunts for a replacement funding stream.

The rate you collect is untouched at 5.1%. What did change is that the city's own short-term rental tax FAQ, last revised in June 2023 and still bundled into the 2026 application pack, now describes a distribution that no longer exists. To see how that 5.1% and the permit costs land against nightly rates by neighborhood, BNBCalc Markets is built for exactly that comparison.

Ohio Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That 5.1% is a city tax, and that's the pattern for the whole state: Ohio leaves short-term rentals to local government. There's no statewide short-term rental license, no state registry, and no state-level occupancy cap or minimum stay. State hotel licensing exists, yet it's written around buildings with more than five sleeping rooms, so a normal house never reaches it.

What's left is a patchwork where the rules change at every municipal line. The Cuyahoga County rules around Cleveland and the Hamilton County rules around Cincinnati look nothing like these ones.

The statehouse has been trying to end that patchwork for over a year. Senate Bill 104 and House Bill 109 are companion bills in the 136th General Assembly, and between them they would:

• Bar local governments from banning short-term rentals, including through zoning
• Bar caps on how many properties a single operator can run
• Bar owner-occupancy requirements and permit lotteries
• Cap what a city can charge to register a short-term rental
• Cap the combined lodging tax on a short-term rental at 7.5%
• Require the booking platforms to collect and remit the tax themselves

Realtor and business groups back the package. The Ohio Municipal League and the township associations are fighting it, and so far they're winning.

Neither bill has passed. Both were still parked in committee in July 2026, and State Senator George Lang, a Republican, was blunt about the odds when Fox19 covered the fight: "I don't think it has any traction in our caucus."

My read is that this stays stuck while local enforcement pressure keeps building. A bill in committee is not a rule, though, so don't underwrite a purchase on the assumption that it passes.

Meanwhile, local government is moving the other way. The suburbs around Columbus have been tightening through 2025 and 2026, and the trigger is easy to point at. On 4 July 2025 a shooting at a party in a Columbus short-term rental near Nationwide Children's Hospital killed a 17-year-old and injured five more people. Smaller Ohio markets have been writing their own rules over the same period, so where you're weighing Columbus against a tourism market instead of a metro one, the Logan and Hocking Hills rules and the Canton regulations make the sharper comparison.

Does Columbus, Ohio Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

While the statehouse argues and the small towns write their own rules, Columbus keeps enforcing the chapter it already has, and how it enforces matters more than how strictly. Enforcement here runs on complaints, not on blocked payments. New York City made the platforms verify a registration number before processing a transaction, so a non-compliant listing there can't earn at all. Columbus put a similar duty on platforms in Chapter 598, yet nothing sits behind it as a verification gate, which means an unpermitted Columbus listing can and does take bookings. That one design difference explains why the penalty reaches for your revenue instead of leaning on a fine.

Enforcement usually starts with a neighbor. The city's own instruction for anyone with a problem short-term rental is to use 311 to document the situation and email [email protected], after which a licensing officer responds. Keep in mind that this cuts both ways: it's the number you call about a neighboring party house, and it's the number they call about yours. From there the escalation paths are all in the code, and they're wider than a fine schedule suggests:

• Calls for service accumulate against the address. Three or more in a rolling twelve months is a stated ground for denial, suspension or revocation, and the definition includes calls alleging a noise or refuse problem, not only crime.
• Inspection authority is broad. Police, Fire, Building and Zoning Services, Code Enforcement and Columbus Public Health may all inspect a short-term rental for compliance, and refusing simply moves the process to an administrative search warrant.
• Your insurance is a live tripwire. Cancellation triggers automatic revocation of the permit, so a lapsed policy costs you the business instead of earning you a warning letter.
• Tax standing is a licensing matter. Falling out of good standing with the Income Tax Division is a mandatory ground for denial or revocation, which makes a missed monthly excise return a permit problem and not just a tax problem.
• Emergency revocation exists, effective immediately, whenever the Director decides public health and safety requires it.

The rules themselves are also under active review, which is the clearest signal about where this is heading. Council's Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee held a public hearing on short-term rentals in December 2025, then another on 21 April 2026 to discuss potential updates to the City's ordinances and procedures, with presentations from the License Section both times. Nothing has been introduced. Chapter 598 hasn't been amended since 2021, and everything circulating online about 200-foot neighbor notifications or biennial safety inspections in Columbus describes options discussed at a hearing, not law.

One honest limit on all of this: Columbus doesn't publish a running count of active short-term rental permits, and going through the city's pages and its open data portal in July 2026 I couldn't find an official figure anywhere. Numbers do circulate out of committee testimony. Treat any you see quoted elsewhere as unverified, because none of them sit on a page the city stands behind.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Columbus, Ohio

The city may not tell you how crowded the field is, though it does tell you exactly what to file and in what order. Getting that order right saves the most money, because the early steps tell you whether the later ones are worth attempting at all.

1. Confirm the property is inside Columbus city limits. Check the jurisdiction before anything else, since Upper Arlington, Westerville and Worthington ban short-term rentals and several other suburbs require owner occupancy. A Franklin County address proves nothing.
2. Check your zoning and your paperwork constraints. Look the parcel up on the city's zoning map, and confirm the bedroom count the Franklin County Auditor has on record, because your application has to match it and your guest cap is three times the number of rooms.
3. Read your lease, if you rent. You need a clause that explicitly consents to short-term rental use. Absence of one is a ground for denial, so get it amended in writing before you apply.
4. Open your tax accounts and get a Letter of Good Standing. Set up income tax and excise accounts through the Columbus Revenue Service Portal, then request the letter for that specific property. Nothing moves until this arrives.
5. Book the background checks. Every named party needs a fingerprint check through an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation approved provider: you, your host, your 24-hour local contact, and your property manager. Out-of-state applicants should start here first, because it's the slowest step by a distance.
6. Bind the insurance. At least $300,000 of general liability per rental, from an insurer admitted in Ohio, or confirm in writing that your platform's host coverage clears that floor.
7. Notarize and submit the application with the $20 fee and the $75 or $150 permit fee, plus your identity and residency proofs, lease pages, platform registrations and other-property disclosures. Expect roughly a week, longer if a background check is still in transit.
8. Add the permit number to every listing before you go live, and display the permit inside the property. Remember that the code counts each non-compliant listing as its own offense.
9. Set up the monthly discipline on day one. File the 5.1% excise return by the 20th every month even in a month with no guests, start the four-year record of stays and rates, and diarize your permit expiry date so the renewal and the next round of background checks don't creep up on you.

Who to Contact in Columbus, Ohio about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, three offices handle nearly all of it between them, and knowing which one owns your question will save you an afternoon.

Permits, eligibility and the rules themselves

The License Section of the Department of Building and Zoning Services issues short-term rental permits and administers enforcement. It's the right first call for applying, renewing, correcting an application, or reporting a change.

• Address: 4252 Groves Road, Columbus, OH 43232
• Phone: (614) 645-8366, with a fax line at (614) 645-8912
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:00 am to 3:30 pm
• Email: [email protected] for regulation and application questions, and [email protected] to submit a notarized application

Complaints, in both directions

Columbus 311 takes non-emergency service requests, and the city asks that short-term rental problems be logged there and then emailed to the License Section so a licensing officer can pick them up.

• Phone: (614) 645-3111, staffed Monday to Friday, 7:00 am to 7:00 pm
• Online and mobile app: the 311 Customer Service Center takes requests 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• Follow-up email: [email protected], describing the situation

The 5.1% tax and your Letter of Good Standing

The Columbus Income Tax Division collects the lodging excise tax as well as the city's 2.5% income tax, and it's the office that issues the Letter of Good Standing your permit depends on.

• Main line: (614) 645-7370, with a dedicated hotel/motel excise tax line at (614) 645-8328 and portal support at (614) 645-8899
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm
• Mailing address: Columbus Income Tax Division, PO Box 182158, Columbus, OH 43218-2158
• Online: returns, payments, letters and secure messaging all run through the city's revenue portal. Note that the Division no longer takes returns or payments in person at 77 N. Front Street

Addresses outside the city limits

Where the parcel turns out to sit in unincorporated Franklin County instead of in Columbus or a suburb, zoning belongs to Franklin County Economic Development and Planning.

• Address: 150 S. Front Street, FSL Suite 10, Columbus, OH 43215
• Phone: 614-525-3095 main, or 614-525-3094 for zoning and 614-525-7268 for planning
• Email: [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you run an Airbnb in Columbus, Ohio in 2026?

Yes. Columbus allows short-term rentals citywide, including properties the owner doesn't live in, provided you hold a valid permit under Chapter 598 of the Columbus City Code before the listing goes live. The permit covers dwellings of five guestrooms or fewer rented for less than thirty consecutive days. It costs $20 to apply plus $75 a year for a primary residence or $150 for a non-primary one, and it has to be renewed annually with fresh background checks.

How much does a Columbus short-term rental permit cost?

The City of Columbus charges a $20 application fee, then an annual permit fee of $75 if the property is your primary residence or $150 if it isn't. A fingerprint background check through the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation costs $32 per person at the License Section, and it's required every year for the applicant, the host, the 24-hour local emergency contact and the property manager. Budget for the checks separately, because several people usually need one.

Do you have to live in a Columbus short-term rental to get a permit?

No. Columbus has no owner-occupancy requirement and issues non-primary-residence permits for $150 a year, which is what makes the city more permissive than most of Franklin County. The host must be either the owner or the permanent occupant, and a tenant applying as the permanent occupant needs a lease that explicitly consents to short-term rental use. Several nearby suburbs, including Upper Arlington, Westerville and Worthington, ban short-term rentals entirely.

What tax do you collect on a Columbus, Ohio short-term rental?

One lodging charge applies: a 5.1% Columbus excise tax on the guest's total bill, including cleaning and service fees. The host collects it and files monthly through the city's revenue portal by the 20th of the following month, even in months with no bookings. The Franklin County hotel tax reaches establishments with five or more rooms, so it doesn't apply. Your rental profit is separately subject to the city's 2.5% income tax.

What happens if you list a Columbus property on Airbnb without a permit?

Listing or operating without a valid permit is an unclassified misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $250, rising to a third-degree misdemeanor on a repeat, with each listing treated as a separate offense. More seriously, Columbus City Code requires that all gross revenue from bookings obtained in violation be remitted to the city, subject to forfeiture law.

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