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

Do you own a place in Hialeah, in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is, you're allowed to. Florida law keeps cities from banning short-term rentals outright, and Hialeah, unlike Miami Beach or unincorporated Miami-Dade, has never even tried to write its own restriction. There's no dedicated Hialeah short-term rental ordinance, no local licence, and no Certificate of Use requirement of the kind Miami-Dade County runs for the areas it controls.

That last part trips a lot of people up, so it's worth being direct about it before anything else. Miami-Dade's vacation-rental rules, the annual inspection, the occupancy cap, the whole Certificate of Use process, apply only to unincorporated Miami-Dade County. The county says so itself: for a property inside a municipality, you contact that municipality instead. Hialeah is a municipality, so none of that county machinery reaches you here. What actually governs a Hialeah host is a state license, a couple of tax registrations, and the city's ordinary Business Tax Receipt process, and quite a few guides online (including, it looks like, an earlier version of this one) get that mixed up.

So this guide walks through what applies in 2026: the state licence you do need, the taxes that stack on top of a booking, how Hialeah's zoning and code compliance work, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from Florida's or Miami-Dade's own pages, or Hialeah's own site, checked in July 2026. If you're comparing a Hialeah property against other South Florida markets, run the numbers through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Hialeah

None of that Certificate of Use confusion changes what you have to do, so let's get into it. Starting a short-term rental in Hialeah means clearing three separate layers rather than one city permit: Florida's own vacation rental licence, a couple of tax registrations, and Hialeah's ordinary business paperwork.

The legal foundation is Fla. Stat. § 509.032(7)(b), which bars a city or county from prohibiting vacation rentals or regulating how often or how long you rent one, unless the local rule predates June 1, 2011. Hialeah has no such ordinance, old or new. I went through the city's recent zoning and housing ordinances directly: Ordinance 2022-018 amends the housing code with a rent-increase notice requirement, which is about long-term tenancies, not short stays. The two most recent zoning ordinances cover recreational-vehicle parking and a business-district overhaul. None of them touch short-term rentals, and Hialeah's zoning definitions never define "transient" or "short-term rental" at all.

That absence is exactly why the state preemption matters here. With nothing on the books to grandfather, Hialeah simply can't pass a duration or frequency restriction now even if a future council wanted to. Our Florida statewide guide walks through that preemption law in more depth if you want the full picture, but the short version is what's left: a real license from the state, a business tax receipt from the city, and two tax registrations, one with the state and one with Miami-Dade County. None of it is exotic, but skipping a piece is what gets hosts in trouble, so it's worth treating each one as its own step rather than assuming "no city ordinance" means "no paperwork."

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Hialeah

Since there's no city licence to chase, the one that still matters is the state's. Florida requires a vacation rental licence from the DBPR Division of Hotels and Restaurants for any unit that meets the state's definition. Hialeah properties fall under one of two classes depending on what you own: Vacation Rental - Condo for a condo or co-op unit, or Vacation Rental - Dwelling for a single-family home, duplex, triplex or fourplex, which covers most of Hialeah's housing stock.

Whether you need it turns on a frequency test that Florida rewrote in 2025. Chapter 2025-113 (SB 606), effective July 1, 2025, defines a rental as "transient," and therefore licensable, when it's rented more than three times in a calendar year for stays under 30 consecutive days. Rent it three times a year or fewer at that length, and you're "nontransient" and don't need the licence, though you may still owe tax on any individual stay under six months (more on that below). Cross that three-times threshold and the licence isn't optional.

The fee schedule, from DBPR's own lodging fee page, is modest for a single unit: a $50 application fee plus $170 for a full year or $90 for half a year, plus a $10 Hospitality Education Program fee every time. A 2-to-25-unit licence runs $180 a year ($95 half-year). Licences renew annually on a staggered schedule, and you're required to report an address change to DBPR within 30 days through your online account.

Beyond the state licence, Hialeah expects the same Business Tax Receipt it expects of any business operating inside city limits, short-term rental or otherwise. The Business Tax Division reviews zoning and building compliance as part of that application before issuing the receipt, which runs on the city's fiscal year, October 1 through September 30. What it costs depends on the classification, and the fee schedule sits in Code § 86-43; I wasn't able to pull that specific dollar figure from Municode, so check directly with the division rather than assuming a number. Do check with Miami-Dade County too, since the county expects its own Local Business Tax Receipt from businesses operating inside a municipality like Hialeah, on top of the city's.

Required Documents for Hialeah Short Term Rentals

Getting the licence numbers right matters less than having the paperwork ready when you apply, so here's what gets asked for. For the DBPR vacation rental licence, you'll need:

• Proof of ownership or a lease authorizing rental, matching the address on the application.
• A completed HR-7028 application, specifying the correct class (Condo or Dwelling) and unit count.
• Payment of the application and licence fees, since DBPR won't process an incomplete submission.
• A Florida sales tax registration, separate from the lodging licence itself, since anyone renting transient accommodations must register with the Florida Department of Revenue to collect and remit sales tax.

For Hialeah's Business Tax Receipt, the pre-application form asks for the business name and location, the applicant's name and driver's licence number, and a written description of the activity, which for a rental property is straightforward: describe it as short-term residential rental. Remember that the zoning review happens as part of this same application, so make sure your property's district actually permits the use before you pay the fee.

For Miami-Dade's tourist tax, you'll file a Tourist Tax Account Registration Form with the county's Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, which we cover in detail in the taxes section next. Keep every confirmation number from each of these three applications together. Between the state, the city and the county, it's easy to lose track of which office has what, and having a single folder saves a genuine headache later.

Hialeah Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, and Hialeah stacks three layers on a single booking. Two go to the state, one goes straight to the county, and because two different governments administer them, they don't file on the same schedule.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Florida state sales tax	6%	Florida Department of Revenue
Miami-Dade discretionary sales surtax	1%	Florida Department of Revenue (filed with sales tax)
Miami-Dade Tourist Development Tax package	6%	Miami-Dade County
Combined total	13%	State + county

The first two rows apply to any rental of six months or less under DOR guidance (GT-800034), and Miami-Dade's discretionary surtax has run at 1% since 1992 with no expiration date. Both get filed together on the state's Sales and Use Tax Return.

The third row is three taxes bundled into one filing: a 3% Convention Development Tax, a 2% Tourist Development Tax, and a 1% Professional Sports Facilities Franchise Tax, adding up to the 6% Miami-Dade charges countywide. Hialeah isn't one of the county's carved-out exceptions, so it doesn't matter that Miami Beach pays 7% and Surfside and Bal Harbour pay 4%. You register through a Tourist Tax Account Registration Form, submitted to the county's Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources at 11805 SW 26th Street, Suite 230, Miami, FL 33175 (305-375-5550, [email protected]), then file monthly through TouristExpress, even in months you collect nothing. Payment is due the 1st and turns late after the 20th.

Here's the part that saves most hosts the filing headache: Airbnb collects and remits this tax on your behalf already. Airbnb's own newsroom confirms it signed a Voluntary Collection Agreement with Miami-Dade County back in 2017, alongside Broward and Sarasota counties, and has collected and remitted Florida's state sales tax on every Florida booking since 2015. Vrbo's arrangement for Miami-Dade specifically wasn't something I could independently confirm on a primary source, so if Vrbo is a meaningful share of your bookings, don't assume it's covered the same way. Check the platform's own tax page before you skip a registration.

Your rental income is also ordinary taxable income on your federal return, though Florida has no state personal income tax to layer on top of it. That's one genuine break Hialeah hosts get that plenty of other states don't offer.

Hialeah-wide Short Term Rental Rules

None of that tax stack changes what you can build or rent out, and that comes down to zoning. Hialeah's residential districts under Chapter 98 run from R-1 (one-family) through R-2 (one- and two-family), R-3 and R-3-D (multifamily) and R-4 (townhouse), and short-term rental of a dwelling you already own or lease is not treated as a separate land use requiring rezoning in any of them, since there's no ordinance singling it out the way there would be in a city that actually regulates STRs.

Hialeah does keep a separate supplementary chapter for hotels and motels as their own commercial land use, restricted to specific districts with their own parking, setback and unit-count rules. That's a different animal from renting out a house you own: it governs building a standalone hotel, not listing an existing single-family home on Airbnb. I wasn't able to pull the full text of that chapter directly (Municode blocks automated access here, as it does across most of this research), so treat this as the general shape rather than a citation to specific section language.

What does apply, regardless of zoning district, is the ordinary stuff every Hialeah property owner deals with: the Florida Building Code, life-safety requirements like working smoke detectors, and whatever your specific HOA, condo association or lease actually says. Keep in mind that state preemption stops the city from banning short-term rentals, but it does nothing to stop a private HOA or condo board from writing its own restriction into its governing documents. If you're buying specifically to rent short-term, do check the association's rules before you close, not after.

Does Hialeah strictly enforce STR rules?

Given there's no dedicated Hialeah ordinance to enforce, the honest answer is that enforcement here looks nothing like Miami Beach or New York City, and that's worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. Hialeah's Code Compliance division handles the general property-maintenance and nuisance complaints that would come up around any rental, short-term or otherwise: noise, parking, overcrowding, trash. It's complaint-driven, the same as it is for any residential nuisance issue in the city, rather than built around hunting down unlicensed vacation rentals specifically.

I searched for news coverage of a Hialeah short-term-rental crackdown, lawsuit or enforcement sweep, the kind of story that turns up constantly for Miami Beach or NYC, and found nothing. That absence is itself informative. Hialeah isn't a tourist destination in the way its neighbors are, so the volume of short-term listings, and the political pressure to police them, hasn't produced the same enforcement story. Compare that to a genuine tourist market like Naples, covered in our Collier County guide, where enforcement pressure runs a lot higher precisely because the volume of listings does too.

The real enforcement risk sits one level up, with the state. Operating as a "transient" rental, more than three bookings a year under 30 nights, without the DBPR licence is an unlicensed public-lodging violation, and Florida's licensing framework carries administrative penalties for it. I couldn't pin down a specific dollar fine for Hialeah on a primary source, so I won't invent one here, but don't read the absence of local drama as an absence of consequences. Miss the state licence, and it's the state, not the city, that comes looking.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Hialeah

With the risk picture out of the way, here's the order that actually makes sense to work through, since doing these out of sequence tends to waste time on paperwork you'll have to redo.

1. Confirm your property type and rental frequency. Decide whether you'll book more than three times a year under 30 nights, since that determines whether the DBPR licence is required at all.
2. Check your HOA or condo documents first. State law can't stop the city from allowing short-term rentals, but it doesn't touch a private association's own rules, and this is the cheapest step to rule out before spending on anything else.
3. Apply for the DBPR vacation rental licence, using Form HR-7028, choosing the Condo or Dwelling class as appropriate.
4. Register with the Florida Department of Revenue for sales tax collection, separate from the DBPR licence itself.
5. Register with Miami-Dade County for the Tourist Development Tax, using the Tourist Tax Account Registration Form and setting up your TouristExpress account.
6. Apply for Hialeah's Business Tax Receipt, which bundles a zoning and building compliance check into the process, and ask about the Miami-Dade county-level Local Business Tax Receipt at the same time.
7. Confirm your platform's tax collection status. Airbnb collects and remits the Miami-Dade tourist tax and Florida sales tax automatically; verify Vrbo's arrangement directly rather than assuming parity.
8. Set up smoke detectors, egress and general Building Code compliance, since none of the licences above substitute for basic life-safety requirements.
9. Keep every confirmation number from DBPR, DOR, the county and the city in one place, since renewals on different clocks are the easiest thing to lose track of.

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

Whichever step you're stuck on, one of five offices handles it, split across two levels of government since Hialeah's rules span state, county and city.

State licensing

DBPR Division of Hotels and Restaurants issues and renews the vacation rental licence.

• Licensing page: www2.myfloridalicense.com/hotels-restaurants

State and local sales tax

Florida Department of Revenue handles sales tax registration and the discretionary surtax filing.

• Guidance: Sales tax on transient rentals

County tourist tax

Miami-Dade Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, Business Section handles Tourist Development Tax registration and filing.

• Address: 11805 SW 26th Street, Suite 230, Miami, FL 33175
• Phone: 305-375-5550
• Email: [email protected]
• File and pay: TouristExpress

City business tax and zoning

Hialeah Business Tax Division issues the city's Business Tax Receipt, reviewing zoning and building compliance as part of the process.

• Address: 501 Palm Avenue, 1st Floor, Hialeah, FL 33010
• Phone: 305-883-5890
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:30 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

Hialeah Building Department and Planning & Zoning share a floor and handle permits, certificates of occupancy and zoning questions.

• Address: 501 Palm Avenue, 2nd Floor, Hialeah, FL 33010
• Phone: 305-883-5825
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. (open through lunch), plus the first Saturday of each month, 9 a.m.–1 p.m.

Complaints and code compliance

Hialeah Code Compliance handles nuisance and property-maintenance complaints, the same office a neighbor would call about noise or parking regardless of whether the property is a short-term rental.

• Address: 501 Palm Avenue, 2nd Floor, Hialeah, FL 33010
• Phone: 305-883-5832
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m., plus the first Saturday of each month, 9 a.m.–1 p.m.

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

Given how thin the enforcement story is, it's not surprising the online discussion is thin too. I looked for Hialeah-specific threads on BiggerPockets and couldn't find one that stayed on Hialeah rather than drifting into Miami or Miami Beach generally, which are genuinely different regulatory environments. Reddit wasn't part of this research at all; the platform blocks the kind of automated access this refresh relies on, and its own Responsible Builder Policy restricts exactly the commercial reuse a guide like this would need, so I'm not going to pretend to have surveyed it.

What I can say, from going through the wider Miami-Dade investor conversation, is that Hialeah rarely comes up as its own topic the way Miami Beach, Wynwood or Brickell do. When it does, it's usually framed as the affordable, workforce-housing alternative to the tourist corridor, a place investors buy for cash flow on longer stays rather than a nightly-rate Airbnb strategy. That tracks with everything else in this guide: no dedicated ordinance, no big enforcement story, and a market that's never been built around short-term tourism in the first place.

Take that as a read on sentiment rather than a survey, since it is one. If you're set on Hialeah specifically, the more useful comparison than a forum thread is the actual market data for the area, which the Hialeah - Miramar market page on BNBCalc breaks down at the neighborhood level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Hialeah in 2026?

Yes. Hialeah has no ordinance banning or restricting short-term rentals, and Florida's 2011 preemption law stops the city from passing one now, since there's no pre-2011 ordinance to grandfather. Hosts do need a Florida DBPR vacation rental licence if they rent more than three times a year for under 30 nights, plus registration for state sales tax and Miami-Dade's tourist tax, and Hialeah's own Business Tax Receipt.

Does Miami-Dade County's Certificate of Use apply to a rental in Hialeah?

No. Miami-Dade's Certificate of Use and vacation-rental inspection program applies only to unincorporated Miami-Dade County. Hialeah is an incorporated municipality with its own zoning and Building Department, so the county's CU process doesn't reach it. Hialeah hosts instead go through the state's DBPR licensing process and the city's own Business Tax Receipt.

How much tax do you owe on a short-term rental in Hialeah?

Expect 13% combined on a stay of six months or less: 6% Florida state sales tax, 1% Miami-Dade discretionary surtax, and 6% in Miami-Dade Tourist Development Tax (a blend of convention, tourist and sports-facility taxes). Airbnb collects and remits all of this automatically under its agreement with Miami-Dade County; confirm Vrbo's collection status directly rather than assuming it matches.

What licence do you need to run a short-term rental in Hialeah?

The main one is Florida's DBPR vacation rental licence, required once you rent a unit more than three times a year for stays under 30 consecutive days. It costs $50 to apply plus $170 a year (or $90 for half a year) and a $10 education fee. On top of that, Hialeah requires its ordinary Business Tax Receipt, and Miami-Dade County expects its own countywide Local Business Tax Receipt as well.

Does an HOA in Hialeah override state law and ban short-term rentals?

Yes, potentially. Florida's preemption law stops the city government from banning short-term rentals, but it has no effect on a private HOA, condo association or lease. Those documents can restrict or ban short-term rentals independently of what the city or state allows. Check your association's governing documents, or your lease if you're a tenant, before assuming state law settles the question.

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