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

Do you own a place in Goodyear and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that Arizona law is squarely on your side here: no city in the state, Goodyear included, can ban short-term rentals outright, under A.R.S. § 9-500.39. Goodyear built a licensing system around that right early, too. It was one of the first Arizona cities to do so, and the rules have been live since January 1, 2023.

This guide covers Goodyear specifically: a fast-growing West Valley suburb of Phoenix, in Maricopa County, governed by Chapter 8, Article 8-2 of its own city code sitting on top of Arizona's statewide framework. Since that ordinance took effect, hosts need a city STR license, a state tax license, $500,000 in liability coverage, guest background checks, and documented neighbor notice, none of which existed here before 2023. So if what you know about Goodyear short-term rentals predates the ordinance, most of it is out of date now.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly in 2026: the license itself, what it costs, the paperwork Goodyear wants before it issues one, the tax layers that stack on a booking, how seriously the city enforces its own rules, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from Goodyear's own city pages, Arizona's Department of Revenue, or the state legislature, checked in July 2026. Run the property through BNBCalc first before you commit to that $250 license fee, since the numbers matter more than the paperwork does.

What are short term rental (Airbnb, VRBO) regulations in Goodyear, Arizona?

Two layers stack here, and knowing which one does what clears up most of the confusion. A.R.S. § 9-500.39 sits on the bottom: it bars any Arizona city or town from prohibiting short-term rentals outright and caps how far a city can go in regulating them. A city may license short-term rentals, require insurance and background checks, demand neighbor notice, and enforce ordinary zoning, safety and nuisance rules, but it can't ban the use itself or regulate it out of existence.

Goodyear built its own rules directly inside that envelope. The city council approved the new ordinance on September 12, 2022, ahead of a statewide amendment known as SB 1168 taking effect later that month, and the ordinance itself went into effect January 1, 2023. It's codified as Chapter 8, Article 8-2 of Goodyear's City Code. Mayor Joe Pizzillo framed the timing plainly in the city's own press release. The 2016 preemption law, he said, had created "a landslide of unintended consequences," and the 2022 amendment finally let cities "more evenly balance the regulatory scale."

Goodyear's own definition of a short-term rental is broad on purpose: any individually or collectively owned single-family or one-to-four-family house or dwelling unit, or any unit in a condominium or cooperative, offered for transient use. "Transient" carries the same meaning as A.R.S. § 42-5070, which generally means a stay of less than 30 consecutive days. Assuming your Goodyear property fits that description, everything below applies to you.

One detail catches out longtime owners more than anything else. Before January 1, 2023, a short-term rental in Goodyear only needed an ordinary city business license. That requirement is gone now. Owners no longer need a Goodyear business license for a short-term rental; the STR license replaces it, and the city's own guidance tells anyone still receiving a business-license renewal invoice to email the city and have that old license inactivated instead.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Goodyear

That definition covers most of what people picture when they think "Airbnb," so the next question is what actually gets you there legally. Three separate registrations stack on top of each other, and doing them out of order tends to waste money.

The first is the state's Transaction Privilege Tax license from the Arizona Department of Revenue, filed through AZTaxes.gov. It costs $12 per business location, runs the calendar year, and renews every January, and Goodyear's own application asks for that TPT number directly. Get this one first, since you can't finish the city application without it.

The second is Goodyear's own STR license, covered in detail below. The third is easy to overlook: Arizona requires every residential rental property, short-term ones included, to stay on file with the county assessor under A.R.S. §§ 33-1901 through 33-1907. For a Goodyear property, that's the Maricopa County Assessor.

Going through Goodyear's own materials, I didn't find an occupancy limit, a parking-space requirement, or a rule requiring you to live on-site. What the city regulates is who holds the license and how the property behaves once it's rented, not how many guests fit inside it. Keep in mind, too, that the license attaches to one specific property. A second rental doesn't inherit the first one's license; it needs its own application from scratch.

Goodyear sits in Maricopa County's West Valley, a few miles from Avondale and Buckeye, and the county and state layers matter as much as the city one does. If you're comparing a Goodyear property against something in the Avondale guide nearby, or want the wider county picture, the Maricopa County guide and the Arizona statewide guide cover the layers Goodyear sits inside.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Goodyear

Fine detail on registrations matters less than what actually gets you the license itself, so here's the specific part. Goodyear requires the STR license before you rent at all, and it isn't optional, negotiable, or something you can back into after your first booking.

As of July 2026, the fee is $250 per property, and it's non-refundable whether the city approves you or not. Licensing runs on a calendar-year basis with no proration: apply in March and you still pay the full $250, even though your license expires the same December 31 as someone who applied in January. Renewal costs the same $250 and has to happen every year, since every Goodyear STR license expires on December 31 regardless of issue date. You apply and renew through the city's Short-Term Rental System, an online portal built specifically for this program.

To be approved, Goodyear wants your Arizona TPT license number, an emergency contact who can physically reach the property within one hour of an emergency, and a complaint contact who can respond by phone or email within 24 hours once the city has made contact. Arizona law backs a fast timeline on the city's side too: under A.R.S. § 9-500.39, Goodyear has to issue or deny a license application within seven business days.

Here's the part I want to be direct about, because I couldn't confirm it from Goodyear's own ordinance text no matter how many times I tried the city's code site. The city's own news release says a violation "could face civil or criminal penalties, and suspension" of the STR license, but it doesn't publish a dollar figure. What I can confirm is the ceiling state law sets for any Arizona city. A first verified violation tops out at $500, a second within 12 months at $1,000, and a third at $3,500, or one, two or three nights' advertised rent, whichever is greater. A city can also suspend a permit for up to 12 months after three violations in a year, or immediately for a felony, a serious injury or death, or unpermitted commercial use, and can fine an owner up to $1,000 a month for simply never applying. Treat those as the state-authorized maximum Goodyear operates within, not a confirmed local figure, since Goodyear's specific schedule sits behind a page I genuinely could not read.

Required Documents for Goodyear Short Term Rentals

Since that $250 doesn't come back, it's worth getting the application right the first time rather than guessing at what the portal wants. Goodyear's own STR page lists what has to be in place before you submit, and a few of these are easy to skip past on a first read.

• Your Arizona TPT license number. Apply through AZTaxes.gov first if you don't already have one; the city's application asks for it directly.
• The $250 STR license fee, paid at submission, non-refundable regardless of outcome.
• Emergency contact information, for someone able to physically respond to the property within one hour of an emergency.
• Complaint contact information, for someone who can respond by phone or email within 24 hours once the city reaches out.
• Proof of neighbor notification. Before your first rental, notify every single-family residential property adjacent to, directly across from, and diagonally across the street from the STR. In a multi-family building, notice to residents on the same floor counts as sufficient.
• Proof of $500,000 liability insurance, or documentation that you're advertising exclusively through an online lodging marketplace that provides equal or greater coverage.
• Confirmation of sex-offender background-check compliance, either performed by you on every booking guest or satisfied automatically because your booking platform performs one.

Make sure you display your Goodyear STR license number on the listing itself once it's issued. Don't forget that a lapsed or never-renewed license makes the listing non-compliant even if nothing else about the property changed.

Goodyear Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you clear all of that and are able to get the license issued, there's still tax to sort out before your first guest checks in. Three layers stack on a Goodyear short-term stay, and because two different governments run them, they show up differently even though they're paid together.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
State TPT (Transient Lodging)	5.5%	Arizona Department of Revenue
Maricopa County excise tax	1.77%	Arizona Department of Revenue (county portion)
Goodyear city transient lodging tax	5.0%	Arizona Department of Revenue (city portion)
Combined total	12.27%	Arizona Department of Revenue

All three are filed and administered through the Arizona Department of Revenue under one TPT license, not three separate returns. Maricopa County's 1.77% rate includes a 1% piece tied to Proposition 302. Goodyear's own city profile with the Arizona Department of Revenue breaks the city's 5% into two pieces: a 2.5% hotel tax (business code 044) plus a 2.5% "additional" hotel/motel tax (code 144) that's been on the books since January 1, 2005. The city's own Restaurant/Hotel tax page confirms the same 5% total, describing it as covering "hotels, motels, and businesses renting or leasing to persons staying less than six consecutive months," which is a wider window than the 30-day line that defines a licensed short-term rental. Keep that in mind if you ever host a guest for, say, six weeks: that stay falls outside Goodyear's STR licensing regime entirely, yet it can still owe city hotel tax since it's under six months.

Here's the part that saves most hosts the paperwork: book through Airbnb or Vrbo, and the platform collects and remits all three layers automatically on Arizona bookings, since both operate as registered online lodging marketplaces under state law. You still need the TPT license yourself, and you still file a return, even if it comes out to $0 because 100% of your income ran through a collecting platform. Book directly, off-platform, or through your own website instead, and the full 12.27% becomes your job to collect and remit. One more thing worth knowing if you're weighing a pivot to longer stays. Since January 1, 2025, long-term residential rentals of 30 days or more have been exempt from Goodyear's own city TPT altogether, under Laws 2023, Chapter 204 and A.R.S. § 42-6004(H). That exemption doesn't touch a rental under 30 days, though.

Goodyear wide Short Term Rental Rules

Collecting the right tax is one ongoing duty. Running the property day to day carries its own set of obligations, and Goodyear's own program page spells most of them out plainly.

Your emergency contact has to be able to physically reach the property within one hour, not just answer a phone. Your separate complaint contact needs to respond by phone or email within 24 hours once the city has made contact, and be aware these are two distinct roles with two distinct clocks, even if one person fills both.

Neighbor notification isn't a one-time courtesy. Before you offer the STR for rent the first time, you (or your designee) have to notify every single-family property adjacent to yours, directly across the street, and diagonally across the street. If your STR sits in a multi-family building, notifying residents on the same floor satisfies the requirement. Watch out for this one specifically, since it has to happen before your first listing goes live, not after a neighbor complains.

Your license number has to appear on the listing itself, on whichever platform you use. Maintain $500,000 in liability insurance, or list exclusively through a marketplace that already carries equal or greater coverage, since Airbnb and Vrbo both do. Run a sex-offender background check on every booking guest, or rely on the platform's own check where one exists, again something both major platforms already provide. And don't forget the county-level piece: your property needs to stay on file with the Maricopa County Assessor under state law, a separate requirement from the city license itself.

Arizona's preemption statute lets a city bar specific bad uses at a licensed short-term rental, things like housing a registered sex offender, running a sober-living home, or violating the state's public-nuisance statute. Whether Goodyear's own ordinance spells out that exact list the way some neighboring cities do, I genuinely could not confirm, since the full text of Article 8-2 sits behind a page that blocked every access method I tried, direct and archived alike. Do check the ordinance yourself, or ask the Finance Department directly, before assuming a use is fine simply because it isn't mentioned here.

One honest gap worth naming plainly: nowhere in Goodyear's own materials, or in any independent source I could verify, did I find a cap on guest counts or a minimum parking requirement tied specifically to short-term rentals. Assuming your property already meets ordinary zoning and building code, Goodyear's STR-specific rules don't appear to add occupancy math on top of it.

Does Goodyear strictly enforce STR rules? Is Goodyear Airbnb friendly? (Compared to other cities) Do hosts operate in Goodyear despite the rules?

That absence of a published occupancy cap doesn't mean Goodyear treats the ordinance as optional. The mechanism is real, even if the city doesn't publish a running scoreboard of it the way some larger Arizona cities do.

Goodyear doesn't publish a public count of violations issued, licenses suspended, or lawsuits filed over short-term rentals, and I couldn't find one on an official page or in reputable news coverage. Treat that number as unknown rather than assume it's low or high. What is public is the mechanism itself. A license can be suspended, a violation can draw a civil or criminal penalty, and the license requirement means an unlicensed listing is fairly easy for a neighbor or the city to spot, since the number has to appear on the listing itself.

Zoom out to the state, and the picture gets more contested. Arizona's legislature has spent 2025 and 2026 fielding repeated attempts to let cities regulate short-term rentals more tightly. House Bill 2429 would have let cities cap overnight occupancy and lengthen the violation-counting window; it passed the House but got no Senate hearing and died for 2026. Senate Bill 1076 would let smaller cities cap the number of STR permits issued and set minimum distances between them; its final 2026 disposition wasn't confirmed on a primary source as of this writing. The League of Arizona Cities and Towns has said it plans its own bill revisiting the 2016 preemption altogether. None of that has changed Goodyear's own rules yet, and it's worth watching if you're planning to hold a Goodyear property for years rather than one season.

Goodyear's ordinance is still relatively young, heading into its fourth year in 2026. That's not long enough for a pattern of contested suspensions or lawsuits to build up the way a market like New York City's has. I found no news coverage of a legal challenge to the ordinance itself, or organized host pushback specific to Goodyear. Whether that reflects genuinely light enforcement, or simply a program that hasn't been tested yet, isn't something I can confirm from where I'm sitting, so hold that thought loosely rather than as reassurance either way.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Goodyear

Knowing how enforcement actually works changes the order you'd want to do all of this in, so here's the sequence that avoids paying twice or getting denied over something preventable.

1. Register for the state TPT license first. File through AZTaxes.gov, pay the $12 fee, and get your license number before you touch Goodyear's own application.
2. Confirm the property is on file with the Maricopa County Assessor, as Arizona law requires for every residential rental.
3. Line up your $500,000 liability policy, unless you're booking exclusively through a marketplace whose own coverage already meets that threshold.
4. Notify your neighbors before your first booking. Adjacent, directly across, and diagonally across the street, or same-floor residents in a multi-family building.
5. Set up guest background-check compliance, either your own process or confirmation that your booking platform already runs one.
6. Apply for Goodyear's STR license through the Short-Term Rental System, paying the $250 fee. Expect a decision within about seven business days.
7. Add your license number to every listing before it goes live, on every platform you use.
8. Sort out your tax filing before your first guest. Confirm whether your platform collects Arizona TPT for you, and file your own return either way, even if it's a $0 return.
9. Diarize your renewal date. Every Goodyear STR license expires December 31 regardless of when you got it, and renewal isn't automatic.

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

Whichever step trips you up, Goodyear splits STR questions across a small number of desks, and knowing which one owns your particular question saves an irritating amount of back-and-forth.

Short-Term Rental Licensing (Finance Department)

• Address: 1900 N Civic Square, Goodyear, AZ 85395
• Phone: 623-882-7887, option 4
• Email: [email protected]
• Apply or renew: the Short-Term Rental System
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Zoning, Code Violations and Complaints (Code Compliance, Development Services)

• Address: 1900 N Civic Square, Goodyear, AZ 85395
• Phone: 623-882-7815
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
• Code Compliance investigates a reported violation, issues a notice within one business day of the initial complaint, and escalates in roughly 14-day windows if the property doesn't come into compliance.

State Tax (Arizona Department of Revenue)

• File and pay: AZTaxes.gov
• General guidance: the Short-Term Lodging page

General City Line

• Phone: 623-932-3910
• Address: 1900 N. Civic Square, Goodyear, AZ 85395

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

Every contact above assumes you already know what you're walking into, and that's where actual host sentiment gets harder to pin down. I didn't access Reddit for this guide at all. Reddit blocks automated research tools outright, and its own Responsible Builder Policy bars the kind of commercial data use a guide like this would need, so I'm not going to pretend to have surveyed threads I never read.

BiggerPockets is a different story, and searching it directly for Goodyear-specific commentary came up thin. That absence is itself worth noting: this isn't a market people argue about online the way they argue about Scottsdale or Sedona.

What I can say with more confidence sits one level up, at the state. Arizona's legislature has fielded a genuine wave of bills in 2025 and 2026 trying to let cities cap permits, limit occupancy, or set minimum distances between short-term rentals, and the League of Arizona Cities and Towns has said it intends to push its own restriction bill. None of that has passed yet, and none of it has touched Goodyear's ordinance specifically. Still, if you're investing here on a multi-year horizon rather than treating it as a one-season play, that legislative pressure is worth tracking rather than assuming today's rules are permanent.

My own read, and it's a read rather than a sourced fact, is that Goodyear fits the pattern of a West Valley suburb. It's a lower-cost entry point than Scottsdale or central Phoenix, with less competition among licensed listings, though also less of the built-in tourist demand that makes those destination markets worth the trouble in the first place. Weighing that tradeoff against actual numbers, rather than a vibe, is exactly what the Arizona market page is for if you want to see how Goodyear stacks up against the rest of the state.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Goodyear in 2026?

Yes. Arizona state law bars any city, Goodyear included, from banning short-term rentals outright, and Goodyear's own ordinance, in effect since January 1, 2023, sets rules rather than a prohibition. You'll need a Goodyear STR license, an Arizona Transaction Privilege Tax license, $500,000 in liability insurance, neighbor notification before your first rental, and guest background checks. No published cap limits how many licenses Goodyear issues, and nothing requires you to live on-site.

How much does a Goodyear short-term rental license cost?

It's $250 for a new license and $250 again at renewal, non-refundable either way. Licensing runs on a calendar year with no proration, so applying mid-year still costs the full fee even though every license expires the same December 31. You apply and renew through the city's online Short-Term Rental System, and the city aims to issue or deny an application within seven business days under state law.

What happens if you run a short-term rental in Goodyear without a license?

Goodyear's own materials say an unlicensed operator can face civil or criminal penalties plus suspension of the license itself, though the city hasn't published its own specific dollar figures. Arizona law caps what any city can charge at up to $500, $1,000 and $3,500 for a first, second and third verified violation within 12 months, or up to $1,000 a month for simply never applying. An unlicensed listing is also fairly easy to spot, since a valid license number has to appear on the listing itself.

How much tax do you pay on a Goodyear Airbnb?

A combined 12.27%: 5.5% Arizona state transaction privilege tax, 1.77% Maricopa County excise tax, and 5.0% Goodyear city transient lodging tax. Book through Airbnb or Vrbo and the platform collects and remits all three layers automatically, since both operate as registered online lodging marketplaces in Arizona. You still need your own state TPT license and still have to file a return, even if it's a $0 return because the platform already collected everything.

Does Goodyear require background checks on Airbnb guests?

Yes. The host or their designee has to perform a sex-offender background check on every booking guest, unless the booking platform already performs one, which Airbnb and Vrbo both do. This sits alongside the $500,000 liability insurance requirement as one of the two coverage-style obligations Goodyear will ask you to confirm on the license application, and both can be satisfied automatically by booking exclusively through a marketplace that already provides them.

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