Busselton Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Busselton and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and the South West is one of the strongest short-stay markets in the country. Roughly 27% of every registered short-term rental in Western Australia sits in this region, according to Consumer Protection's July 2025 data release. Demand isn't the problem here.

Permission is. The City of Busselton, the local government covering Busselton, Dunsborough, Yallingup, Vasse and Geographe in the South West of Western Australia, sits outside the Perth metropolitan region, so the 90-night exemption that lets metro owners skip planning approval never reaches you. Every unhosted listing in this City needs a development approval before it takes a booking, and then a separate state registration on top. And since 12 May 2026 there are streets where the City won't grant that approval at all, because Amendment No. 61 to the local planning scheme carved out an exclusion area.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly: which side of that line your address falls on, what the City requires in 2026, what the two approvals cost, the higher council rate that comes with them, how hard any of it gets enforced, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from the City of Busselton's or Western Australia's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving I've said so. Before you spend a cent on any of it, run the property through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Busselton, Australia?

That exclusion area is a local overlay on a system with three layers, and separating them explains almost everything owners get confused about.

The bottom layer is state registration. Under the Short-Term Rental Accommodation Act 2024, registering is not optional and hasn't been since 1 January 2025. Section 9 makes it an offence to enter into, or even seek to enter into, a short-term rental arrangement for unregistered premises, and the penalty is a fine of $20,000. Section 4 defines the arrangement it captures: any stay, or run of stays, by the same person totalling no more than three months in a 12-month period.

The middle layer is planning, and it's where the hosted and unhosted split does its work. SL 2024/194 rewrote clause 61 of the deemed provisions in September 2024, so hosted short-term rental accommodation is now exempt from development approval everywhere in Western Australia. Hosted means you, or an agent who ordinarily lives there, are on the premises during the stay, and a granny flat counts either way round. Rent the spare rooms while you're home and you don't need planning permission anywhere in the state.

Unhosted is the whole dwelling with nobody living in it, capped by the regulations at 12 people a night, and that's the one that needs approval.

The 90-night carve-out written into clause 61(2)(eb) only applies where the dwelling is "wholly or partly in the metropolitan region", though, and the Department of Planning's own list of the 30 metropolitan local governments doesn't include the City of Busselton. The same page says regional councils "have the flexibility to determine planning approval requirements for unhosted STRA" for themselves. Busselton took that flexibility and required approval for all of it.

The top layer is the City's own rules, and they moved twice in the last year.

Council adopted Local Planning Policy No. 4.1 on 11 June 2025, which sets out where unhosted short-term rentals will be supported and how each application gets assessed. Then Amendment No. 61 to Local Planning Scheme No. 21 went further. The Minister for Planning approved it on 4 May 2026 and it was published in the Government Gazette on 12 May 2026, creating a Special Control Area where, in the City's own words, "new USTRA approvals will not be granted".

Existing approvals inside that area survive. New ones don't, which is a genuinely different thing from a policy that merely discourages them.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Busselton

Since the exclusion area decides whether there's a business at all, that's the first thing to check, before the furniture budget and before the cleaner.

Unfortunately, the areas the City picked are the ones a lot of investors were buying into.

The six non-preferred areas in Policy 4.1 cover parts of Dunsborough (Cape Rise Estate west of Cape Naturaliste Road, plus Dunsborough East), parts of Vasse and Kealy, parts of Abbey and Broadwater, parts of West Busselton and Busselton, parts of Bovell and Yalyalup, and parts of East Busselton and Geographe. Those are as reported by Inside Local Government, which also quotes Mayor Phill Cronin saying the City recognises the value of short stay accommodation while putting non-preferred areas in place "where short stay accommodation will not be permitted".

The boundaries are published as a map rather than a street list, so make sure you check your actual address against the City's non-preferred areas map before you assume anything. Two houses on the same road can land on opposite sides of it.

The policy is blunt about what happens if you're inside one. Under clause 5.1, "There is no performance criteria where located in non-preferred areas," which in plain terms means there's no argument you can make to get around it. And if you already hold an approval in one of those areas, the City's own consultation notes say a lapsed approval can't simply be picked back up: let it sit unrenewed for 12 months and any new application gets assessed under the current policy, which won't support it.

Assuming your address clears that first hurdle, there's still a second set of standards for the property itself.

Policy 4.1 wants a direct frontage to a public road and a minimum lot size of 350m² used exclusively by the dwelling. It wants reticulated water or a 135,000 litre rainwater tank connected to proper catchment, kerbside refuse collection, and either reticulated sewerage or an on-site effluent system with enough capacity for the guest numbers you're proposing.

That last one catches rural owners out, since a septic system approved years ago for a family of four is not automatically approved for eight guests.

Then there's the guest cap, which is lower than most people expect. A grouped or multiple dwelling is limited to six occupants. A single house in the Residential or Rural Residential zone is limited to eight. Twelve is the absolute ceiling the state regulations impose, and the City's own acceptable standards rarely take you there.

The rest of the design standards scale off that number, and they're worth reading before you buy rather than after:

Maximum occupants	Bedrooms	Bathrooms and toilets	On-site parking bays
1 to 2	1	1 bathroom, 1 toilet	1
3 to 4	2	1 bathroom, 1 toilet	1 to 2
5 to 6	3	1 bathroom, 1 toilet	2
7 to 8	3	1 or 2 bathrooms, 2 toilets	3
9 to 10	4	1 or 2 bathrooms, 2 toilets	4
11 to 12	4	1 or 2 bathrooms, 2 toilets	5

Bedrooms also need 5.5m² per occupant where you're using ordinary beds, or 3.5m² per occupant with bunks. Tandem parking is fine two cars deep, yet not three, so a long driveway doesn't quietly solve a five-bay problem.

One more thing sits over the top of all that in this part of the state. Where the property is in a bushfire prone area on the Department of Fire and Emergency Services map, Policy 4.1 requires a Bushfire Emergency Plan prepared by an accredited level 2 or 3 bushfire practitioner, kept on the premises whenever the STRA is operating. That's a specialist consultant, not something you write yourself.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Busselton

Assuming the property survives all of that and you're able to proceed, there's still the paperwork, and it runs in two separate directions.

The City's page on unhosted STRA sets out the two steps plainly: development approval from the City to change the use of the dwelling, then registration with the state on the Short-Term Rental Accommodation Register. Neither substitutes for the other. Since 1 January 2025 the City no longer runs its own holiday home register, so anyone still describing this as a council registration is working from old information.

Step one costs less than people expect. As of July 2026, the City's planning fees schedule prices a change of use, including unhosted short-term rental in an existing dwelling, at $295.00. Neighbour consultation adds $142.80, formal advertising adds $454.30, and an agency referral adds another $142.80, so a contested application in a sensitive spot runs closer to $890 than $295.

Written planning advice before you lodge is $73.00, and honestly, that's the cheapest insurance on this list.

Do read the retrospective line before you take a single booking, though. The City charges the ordinary fee "plus twice that amount as penalty" where the use has already started, which turns a $295 application into $885 for exactly the same piece of paper.

Timing is the other cost. The Department of Planning warns that determining a development application can take up to 90 days, depending on the advertising your area requires, and Policy 4.1 sends these applications out to adjoining and nearby owners under clause 64(4) of the deemed provisions.

Your neighbours get told. In practice the City publishes each one by street address on its Your Say platform, which is how a notice like this renewal application for a Gifford Road house in Dunsborough ends up publicly searchable, complete with the proposed occupant count.

What you get at the end is deliberately short. Policy 4.1 grants an initial approval of 12 months, then reviews how you operated before granting anything longer. Renewal is assessed against "any valid complaints made in the previous approval period" and any changes you've made, and only then does the City extend to three years, and after that to five. Keep in mind that the clock starts short by design: one bad summer of noise complaints and the second approval is where it shows up.

Step two is the state register, and it runs on its own timetable. The Registration and fees page, last updated 2 July 2026, sets the initial fee at $250 and the annual renewal at $100. Section 22 of the Act keeps a registration in force for one year, and section 23 lets you apply for renewal no earlier than two months before it ends and no later than 28 days after. Miss that window and you're applying fresh.

Section 24 is the part worth reading twice, because it lists the grounds on which the Commissioner can suspend or cancel your registration outright. Among them: the premises can't lawfully be used for short-term rental of the kind you're providing, the premises or their use don't comply with a development approval, they fail a building standard under the Building Act 2011, or a strata or community-title by-law prohibits short-term rental.

That fourth one matters in Dunsborough's apartment stock, so if you're in a strata scheme, do check the by-laws before you pay anyone anything.

Those two systems used to run in parallel. They now interlock, which is the change most owners have missed.

The WA Government's media release, Short stay register now open for owners, states it in one line. "From 1 January 2026, STRA properties will be required to demonstrate they meet development approval requirements in order to remain registered." So an unapproved Busselton listing is no longer just a planning problem quietly waiting to be found. It's a registration you can lose.

Required Documents for Busselton Short-Term Rentals

Since the City can refuse an application that arrives incomplete, it's worth assembling the file properly the first time.

The City's development application checklist, version 18 dated 16 July 2026, lists what has to be in the envelope before assessment even begins:

• The application form, signed by every landowner. Company-owned land needs a current company statement from the corporate regulator, and signatures from two directors, or a director and the company secretary.
• A current Certificate of Title, plus copies of every notification, easement, restrictive covenant and caveat listed on it. Both come from Landgate.
• A covering letter describing the proposal, the guest numbers and the parking arrangement, and justifying any variation you're asking for.
• An Operational Management Plan, on the City's template.
• A Bushfire Emergency Plan, where you're in a bushfire prone area, from an accredited level 2 or 3 practitioner. This replaced the old Bushfire Management Plan requirement when the new bushfire guidelines took effect on 18 November 2024.
• A bedroom sleeping configuration checklist, bedroom by bedroom, with dimensions, bed types and guest numbers.
• A site plan and a floor plan, both to scale. The site plan has to show the parking layout, and each bay must measure at least 2.4m by 5.4m, with another 0.3m where it sits against a wall or fence. The floor plan has to mark any rooms guests can't use.

The Operational Management Plan is where most of the ongoing obligations live, so treat it as the operating manual rather than a form.

It carries your manager's contact details, and that manager has to give a direct, non-automated response within 12 hours. It sets out arrival and departure procedures, plus the location of a sign no larger than 0.2m² visible from the street with the manager's number on it. Then come the designated parking bays and transport alternatives, noise measures, a complaints procedure with a written complaints register, pet limits, waste procedures, and an emergency evacuation plan with a marked assembly point.

Attached to that is a Code of Conduct, displayed prominently inside the dwelling. It states the maximum occupants, bans visitors after 10pm, caps the number of vehicles, forbids anyone sleeping in a tent or campervan on site, and makes the occupant responsible for the behaviour of anyone they invite over.

The state register asks for a different set of facts, and they're mostly about safety.

Regulation 10 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodation Regulations 2024 records whether you're the owner or a tenant, and whether a tenancy or a strata by-law prohibits short-term rental. It records whether at least two residual current devices are installed, and whether smoke alarms comply with Part 8 Division 3 of the Building Regulations 2012.

It also records whether any private swimming pool barrier has been inspected under Part 8 Division 2 within the four years to your most recent application. Where you plan to feed guests, it records whether you've notified the City under the Food Act 2008.

That pool line is easy to trip over. Barrier inspections run on a four-year cycle, and yours has to be current at the moment you apply or renew, not merely at some point in the past.

Busselton Short-Term Rental Taxes

Get that paperwork current and, assuming both approvals land, the tax side is where this state finally gives you something back. Western Australia has never introduced the bed tax that owners elsewhere in the country now pay.

There's no state accommodation levy here at all. The Department of Treasury's Overview of State Taxes and Royalties 2025-26 enumerates every state tax, duty, fee and levy WA charges, from payroll tax and land tax down to the Perth parking levy and the landfill levy, and no short-stay levy appears anywhere in it. Victoria, by contrast, has charged a short stay levy on the total booking fee since 1 January 2025. WA hosts don't collect anything from guests, and platforms have nothing to remit on your behalf.

Where Busselton takes its cut instead is council rates, and that one is real money. The City runs a separate differential rating category for unhosted STRA, renamed from "Holiday Home", and the rates it advertised for 2026/27 under section 6.36 of the Local Government Act 1995 put that category well above residential.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Council rates, GRV Unhosted STRA	$0.110496 in the dollar, minimum $2,550	City of Busselton
Council rates, GRV Residential	$0.073245 in the dollar, minimum $1,842	City of Busselton
Council rates, UV Unhosted STRA	$0.003541 in the dollar, minimum $2,948	City of Busselton
Land tax	Nil under $300,000, then $300, rising to 2.67c per $1 above $11m	Commissioner of State Revenue
GST on residential rent	None payable	Nobody, it doesn't apply
Income tax on net rental profit	Your marginal rate	Australian Taxation Office

Read the first two rows together, because that gap is the point. The unhosted short-term rental rate sits about 51% above the residential rate in the dollar, and the minimum payment is $708 higher before a single guest arrives.

The City proposed a 7.0% average increase across its categories for 2026/27, then 15.8% for the short-term rental categories specifically. It said it wanted "parity between USTRA and traditional tourism accommodation in the commercial rating category", and it set the Gross Rental Value rate at 90% of the commercial rate.

Council adopted the 2026/27 budget on 29 July 2026, and the page carries the usual note that Council may vary the advertised figures, so treat these as the numbers put to the community rather than the final gazetted ones. Before you model any of it, the honest test is whether the property still clears its costs at the higher rate, which is the kind of thing BNBCalc exists to answer.

Land tax is the quieter cost. It's assessed on the aggregated unimproved value of your land at midnight on 30 June, and the same Treasury overview sets the scale: nothing up to $300,000, a flat $300 from $300,001 to $420,000, then $300 plus 0.25 cents per dollar above $420,000, climbing through $1,750 above $1 million and $8,950 above $1.8 million. Your principal place of residence is exempt, which is exactly why an owner-occupier who hosts is in a different position from an investor who bought a beach house to let.

Federal tax is simpler than most people fear. The ATO's guidance on renting out all or part of your home says you don't pay GST on residential rent, and that GST only enters the picture for commercial residential premises like a boarding house. Rental income is ordinary assessable income, deductions are apportioned to the part of the property and the part of the year that was actually let, and capital gains tax applies when you sell.

Australia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

None of that comes from a national rulebook, because Australia doesn't have one for short-term rentals.

Tax is the only genuinely federal layer, and the ATO handles it identically whether your property is in Busselton or Byron. Everything else is set by the state and then filled in by the council, which is why an owner with houses in two states ends up running two different compliance systems.

Western Australia's version is the register plus local planning approval, and its distinguishing feature is what it leaves out. The Department of Planning says outright that the 2024 changes "do not introduce a cap on the number of nights a property can be leased on the short-term market", provided the approvals are in place. Get your development approval in Busselton and you can let the house 365 nights a year.

New South Wales went the other way. Its short-term rental accommodation framework charges $65 to register and $25 a year to renew, both non-refundable, and caps non-hosted stays at 180 days a year across the Greater Sydney region.

A mandatory Code of Conduct has run there since 18 December 2020, enforced by NSW Fair Trading and backed by an exclusion register operating since August 2022. Every dwelling also has to meet a fire safety standard covering evacuation plans and interconnected smoke alarms. Byron Shire went further still, dropping to a 60-day cap for most non-hosted stays from 23 September 2024.

Victoria took the third route, which is to price rather than to cap, through the short stay levy that started on 1 January 2025 and is collected by the booking platform or the host.

So Western Australia is the loosest of the three on nights and the strictest on entry. Nobody is counting how often you let the house. Getting permission to let it at all is where the friction sits, and in Busselton that's tighter than in most of the country.

Does Busselton Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Yes, and that tightness gets enforced, though mostly not by an inspector knocking on the door.

Two chokepoints do the work, and the first is advertising.

Sections 10 to 16 of the STRA Act make it an offence to publish an advertisement for unregistered premises, or one without the registration number displayed conspicuously, or one carrying a false number, and each of those carries a $20,000 fine. The liability reaches you, your agent, the publication and the booking platform itself, which the Government's release puts at up to $20,000 for an individual and $100,000 for a corporation. Airbnb and Stayz have every reason to enforce it for the state.

The second is the booking data. Under regulation 13, an electronically integrated booking platform has to notify the Commissioner of the particulars of every booking by API within 24 hours, and within 24 hours again of any change. Take bookings outside a platform and you report them yourself by the 5th day of the following month. Miss that and it's a $5,000 fine. Nobody has to guess how a registered Busselton property is being used, because the data arrives automatically.

Layer the January 2026 rule on top of that, where registration now depends on demonstrating development approval, and the two systems check each other. The state can see the bookings. The City knows which addresses hold approvals. Section 24(g) of the Act lets the Commissioner cancel a registration where the premises or their use don't comply with a development approval, which is a much faster remedy than a prosecution.

On the City's side, the numbers are unfriendly if it goes badly. Section 218 of the Planning and Development Act 2005 makes it an offence to carry out development contrary to a planning scheme or a condition of approval, and section 223 sets the general penalty at $200,000, plus a further $25,000 for every day a continuing offence continues. That's not a one-time fine. It accrues, and that's exactly where owners who "start now, apply later" get badly hurt.

The smaller stuff is handled by infringement rather than court. Schedule 1 of the Regulations sets a $2,000 modified penalty for entering into an arrangement for unregistered premises and $500 for failing to notify the Commissioner of a change, so the cheap version of getting caught still isn't cheap.

Then there's the neighbour layer, which is the one that actually generates complaints in a beach town. Every unhosted application gets advertised to adjoining owners, your operational plan has to include a complaints register, and your first approval only runs 12 months before the City weighs those complaints. Watch out for the quiet consequence of that design: the people best placed to end your approval are the ones living next door, and the City has already given them the form.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Busselton

Since the neighbours are that involved, and the map still decides so much before them, the order below matters even more than it looks. The early steps tell you whether the later ones are worth paying for.

1. Check the map before anything else. Compare your address against the City's non-preferred areas map and ask Planning Services whether you fall inside the Special Control Area gazetted on 12 May 2026. Inside it, a new unhosted approval isn't available, and no amount of application quality changes that.
2. Decide hosted or unhosted, honestly. Staying on site during every booking makes you hosted, which is exempt from development approval across Western Australia. You still have to register.
3. Test the property against Policy 4.1. Direct road frontage, 350m² of lot used exclusively by the dwelling, water, sewerage or effluent capacity, kerbside collection, and the bedroom, bathroom and parking counts for the guest number you want.
4. Get written planning advice for $73 if there's any doubt. It's the cheapest step here and it's the one that stops you paying $295 for a refusal.
5. Commission the Bushfire Emergency Plan if you're in a bushfire prone area. An accredited level 2 or 3 practitioner has to write it, and lead times are real.
6. Assemble the file from the City's checklist: signed form, title, encumbrances, covering letter, Operational Management Plan, Code of Conduct, sleeping configuration, site plan and floor plan to scale.
7. Lodge and pay, then allow up to 90 days. Expect your neighbours to be notified, and expect a 12-month approval rather than an open-ended one.
8. Register with the state once the approval is granted. It's $250 to start, $100 a year after that, and your registration number has to appear in every advertisement.
9. Set up the operating obligations on day one. Signage under 0.2m², the Code of Conduct on the wall, the complaints register open, and the manager reachable with a real human response inside 12 hours.
10. Diarise both expiry dates. State registration runs 12 months, with renewal open from two months before to 28 days after. The City's first approval also runs 12 months, and a clean complaints record is what buys you the three-year renewal.

Who to Contact in Busselton about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Wherever you get stuck in that sequence, three offices cover almost all of it between them, and knowing which one owns your question will save you a lot of transferred calls.

Development approval, zoning and the exclusion area

City of Busselton Planning Services determines every unhosted STRA application, holds the maps, and administers Policy 4.1 and Scheme No. 21.

• Address: City of Busselton Administration Building, 2 Southern Drive, Busselton WA 6280
• Postal: City of Busselton, Locked Bag 1, Busselton WA 6280
• Phone: (08) 9781 0444, Monday to Friday 8.30am to 4.30pm, or Planning Services direct on 9781 1731
• Email: [email protected], or [email protected] for scheme and policy questions
• In person: the Administration Building, Monday to Friday 8.30am to 4.30pm, except public holidays

The switchboard stays open 24 hours for emergencies, though a zoning question at 2am will still wait until morning.

State registration

The Short-Term Rental Accommodation Register sits with the Department of Local Government, Industry Regulation and Safety, and handles applications, renewals, booking reporting and cancellations.

• Address: Level 2, 140 William Street, Perth WA 6000
• Phone: 1300 304 054
• Email: [email protected]
• Online: applications and renewals run through the department's Registration and fees page

The state planning rules themselves

Questions about the regulations rather than your specific application belong with the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage Tourism Policy Team on (08) 6551 8002, which is the contact its own planning reforms page publishes.

For strata by-laws, which decide whether an apartment can be used this way at all, Landgate's Strata Enquiry Line is (08) 9273 7047.

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Busselton on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Those by-laws and boundaries are also what owners here argue about, and the arguments have shifted noticeably since the exclusion area landed. What follows is my read of the recurring themes rather than a survey. I couldn't get at the Reddit threads directly, and I found no BiggerPockets discussion specific to Busselton, so weigh it accordingly and don't treat it as a headcount.

• The map is the whole conversation now. With around 8% of Busselton properties registered as unhosted STRA, according to Inside Local Government's reporting on the policy, plenty of owners bought into estates that later turned up on the non-preferred list. The complaint I see most often isn't about the rules being strict. It's about the line being drawn after people had already committed.
• The renewal cliff worries existing operators more than new applicants. An approval inside the Special Control Area survives, yet only while it keeps being renewed on time, so letting one lapse loses it for good. Anyone selling a Busselton short-stay property is now selling an approval as much as a house, and buyers have started asking about the expiry date.
• The new rates category is the bill nobody budgeted for. A minimum payment of $2,550 against $1,842 for the same house as a residence is the kind of number owners repeat to each other, especially in a year when the STRA categories rose 15.8% while everything else rose 7.0%.
• Nobody argues any more that this goes unenforced. That debate ended when the state register started collecting bookings by API and platforms began requiring a registration number in the listing. What people argue about now is whether the balance between tourism and housing is right, which is a different and more honest conversation.

If you're weighing a Busselton property against another South West town, or against a metro suburb where the 90-night exemption applies, the Busselton market data is the place to check what the nightly rates and occupancy actually support before you commit to the approval process.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Busselton in 2026?

Yes, with two approvals. An unhosted listing, where guests have the whole dwelling, needs development approval from the City of Busselton and then registration on Western Australia's Short-Term Rental Accommodation Register. A hosted listing, where you stay on the premises during the booking, is exempt from development approval anywhere in Western Australia but still has to be registered. Since 12 May 2026, a Special Control Area in parts of the City blocks new unhosted approvals entirely.

How much does it cost to get a short-term rental approved in Busselton?

The City of Busselton charges $295 for a change of use application covering unhosted short-term rental accommodation in an existing dwelling. Neighbour consultation adds $142.80 and formal advertising adds $454.30 where they're required. State registration then costs $250 initially and $100 a year to renew. Applying after the use has already started costs the ordinary fee plus twice that amount as a penalty, so $885 instead of $295.

Is there a night limit on short-term rentals in Western Australia?

No. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage states that the 2024 planning changes introduce no cap on the number of nights a property can be let, provided the necessary approvals and registration are in place. A 90-night exemption from needing development approval exists, but it applies only to the 30 local governments in the Perth metropolitan region. The City of Busselton is not one of them, so unhosted properties there need approval regardless of how few nights they let.

What council rates do short-term rentals pay in Busselton?

The City of Busselton rates unhosted short-term rentals in their own differential category, separate from residential. For 2026/27 it advertised a Gross Rental Value rate of $0.110496 in the dollar with a $2,550 minimum payment, against $0.073245 and a $1,842 minimum for residential property. Unimproved Value short-term rentals were set at $0.003541 with a $2,948 minimum. The category rose 15.8% while other categories rose 7.0%.

What happens if you run an unregistered short-term rental in Western Australia?

Section 9 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodation Act 2024 makes it an offence to enter into a short-term rental arrangement for unregistered premises, with a $20,000 fine or a $2,000 infringement. Advertising unregistered premises carries a further $20,000, and booking platforms carry that liability too. Operating without a required development approval is a separate offence, penalised under the Planning and Development Act 2005 at up to $200,000 plus $25,000 a day.

The owners who do well here checked the map before they signed anything. Buy first and ask afterwards and you're negotiating with a council that already decided. That order holds in any market that runs on permits.

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