Hope, Canada Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Hope, British Columbia, and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you almost certainly can, and unusually for this province, you don't even have to live in it. Hope sits in the Fraser Valley Regional District, and the District's Zoning Amendment Bylaw No. 1603, 2025 made short-term rentals a permitted use in designated zones, whole-dwelling rentals included. Because Hope is on the Province's exempt list for the principal-residence requirement, a non-owner-occupied house can be rented short-term here. That's the opposite of Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Mission and Maple Ridge just down the highway.

There's a catch, though, and it's a recent one. None of this was legal until autumn 2025, so any older guidance you find is describing a town that wouldn't issue you a licence at all. Council adopted Bylaw 1603 on 8 September 2025, and separately voted to opt in to the provincial registry and require every operator to hold a District business licence as of 1 January 2026. So you're now running two permits at once, a local one and a provincial one, and both numbers have to appear on the listing before a platform will keep it live.

What follows is the 2026 picture, checked in July 2026 against Hope's own bylaws, its council minutes, and the Province's short-term rental pages, with the spots where something is still moving flagged as such. We'll walk through where you can operate and where you can't, what the licence and registration cost, the three layers of tax that ride on a nightly stay, how hard any of it gets enforced, and who to call when you get stuck. If you're comparing a Hope property against other B.C. towns, it's worth running the numbers through BNBCalc first, because a legal market and a profitable one aren't always the same place.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Hope, British Columbia?

Since you're juggling a local permit and a provincial one, it helps to see that the rules come from two governments that each do a different job. The Province decides who has to register and where whole-home rentals are even allowed; the District of Hope decides which properties, in which zones, can host at all. Get either one wrong and the rental is non-compliant, so keep both in view.

Start with the local layer, because that's the one that changed. Before September 2025, short-term rental simply wasn't a listed use in Zoning Bylaw No. 1324, 2012, which meant the District had no basis to license one. Bylaw 1603 fixed that by writing two new uses into the zoning bylaw, then setting the rules for each. A short-term rental (guest unit) is a room rented to paying guests inside a home you also live in, whereas a short-term rental (dwelling unit) is a whole home rented out short-term. Either way, the use regulations in section 8.13 cap you at 8 guests, confine the rental to a one-family residence, allow only one such use per parcel, and limit any single stay to 28 days. The guest-unit version carries one extra rule that the whole-home version doesn't, since the operator has to be on site at all times and the rental can use one bedroom fewer than the house actually has. Rent the whole dwelling, though, and nobody needs to be there, which is the freedom most investors are looking for.

Now the provincial layer, and this is where Hope catches a real break. The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act forces hosts in most B.C. communities over 10,000 people to run their rental out of their own principal residence, which quietly kills the classic buy-and-list model. Hope is small enough, and far enough from a larger neighbour, that the Province lists it as exempt. So a Hope owner can legally short-term rent a second property, or a home they don't live in, in a way a Chilliwack owner 40 minutes west cannot. Keep in mind that this exemption is the single most valuable thing about the market here, and it's also the thing most likely to change, so we'll come back to how you'd see that coming.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Hope

So unlike a lot of the guides on this site, this is one where there genuinely is a business to start, provided your property is the right kind in the right zone. That "right kind" part does most of the filtering, though, so be honest about your building before you spend anything.

The District's own short-term rental guide is blunt about what doesn't qualify. Because 8.13 ties the use to a one-family residence, a short-term rental can't run out of a secondary suite, a duplex, a townhome, an apartment, or an accessory dwelling unit like a coach house, and you can't list an RV or a camper as one either. The Community Development page confirms the flip side just as plainly, since it says Hope's zoning "permits short-term rentals, including both guest units within a home and full dwelling unit rentals, in designated zones." Those designated zones run across the residential, rural, agricultural and a few commercial and comprehensive-development areas, so a standard detached house in town is usually fine, while a condo downtown is usually not.

Watch out for the one-per-parcel rule, too, because it trips up anyone picturing a duplex where each side goes on Airbnb. Only one short-term rental use is allowed per parcel, whichever form it takes. Once you've confirmed your property clears all of that, the work then becomes paperwork rather than construction, and that paperwork is where the licence comes in.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Hope

That paperwork starts with the District business licence, which has been mandatory for every Hope operator since 1 January 2026. It isn't optional and it isn't the same thing as the provincial registration, so you'll be filing for both. Make sure you don't treat one as covering the other.

The local fee depends on which use you're running. As of July 2026, Hope's Fees and Charges Bylaw, as consolidated after Council adopted Amendment Bylaw No. 1621 on 13 April 2026, sets the short-term rental business licence at $150 for a guest unit and $200 for a dwelling unit, with a $25 fee if you ever transfer a licence between premises. Those figures went up in April 2026, so be aware that the District's printed short-term rental guide still shows the older $75 and $150, and the bylaw is the number that governs. The licence runs on a calendar year under the Business Licence Bylaw No. 1124: it covers 1 January to 31 December, you get a 10% discount for paying by 15 December, a 10% penalty applies after 31 January, and the licence lapses entirely if you don't renew within 60 days of the new year. So diarize the renewal the same way you'd diarize an insurance premium.

Layered on top is the provincial registration, which the Province runs separately from the town. Registering as a host costs $100 a year where you live in the property and $450 where you don't, plus a $1.50 service fee, and none of it comes back if you're denied. Since Hope is exempt from the principal-residence rule, plenty of hosts here will be paying the $450 tier, and that's fine, because it's the price of running a property you don't live in. The Province also asks for a copy of your local business licence when you register, and that's the clearest sign these two permits are built to interlock. The town licenses the property, the Province registers the host, and each one expects to see the other.

Once you hold both, there's still the number-display rule to deal with. Under the Act, your listing has to show a valid provincial registration number and, because Hope opted in, your District business licence number as well. The Business Licence Information page describes a three-step application reviewed by the Planning, Bylaw, Fire and Corporate Services departments, and says a complete application is typically processed within 10 to 14 business days. So don't leave it to the week before your first booking.

Required Documents for Hope Short-Term Rentals

Because that review pulls in four departments, the application asks you to prove the property is genuinely eligible rather than just collect a fee. The District's short-term rental business licence checklist lays out exactly what you'll be answering, and it's worth reading before you start so nothing sends the file back.

The checklist asks for the property address and the listing's title and link, then confirms the things section 8.13 cares about:

• Whether the rental sits entirely within the primary single-family dwelling, rather than a suite or an outbuilding.
• The unit type, and whether it's a guest unit with the operator on site or a whole dwelling unit.
• How many bedrooms you're renting against the total number in the home, which matters for the guest-unit rule that keeps one bedroom back.
• Whether there's a separate kitchen, and whether parking signage has been installed as 8.13 requires.
• Confirmation that this is the only short-term rental on the parcel.

On the provincial side, host registration wants a different bundle: your property's PID, your social insurance number and date of birth, details of any co-host or property manager, and, again, a copy of that District business licence. You verify your identity with a BC Services Card, and the slower BCeID route needs a notarised identity affidavit, so if you're going that way, start early. Remember to report any change to your registration within 14 days, because a stale registration is treated as a non-compliant one.

Hope Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get the licence and the registration sorted and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, and in Hope it arrives in three separate layers from three different governments. The rates are small individually, but they stack, so it's worth seeing them side by side rather than one surprise at a time.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST	5%	The host if GST-registered, otherwise the platform
Provincial PST on accommodation	8%	Online marketplace facilitator (the platform)
Municipal and Regional District Tax (MRDT)	2%	Online marketplace facilitator (the platform)

The federal piece is GST at 5%, which applies to accommodation of under a month costing more than $20 a night. Who remits it depends on you: a host who's GST-registered charges and collects it themselves, even on platform bookings, while an unregistered host has the platform collect and remit instead. You generally only have to register once your taxable revenue crosses $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters, the small-supplier threshold, so a single modest rental often stays under it.

The provincial and regional pieces are simpler for you, because the platform handles both. B.C. charges 8% PST on short-term accommodation and up to 3% MRDT in participating areas, and Airbnb and its competitors, acting as online marketplace facilitators, must register to collect them. Hope's MRDT is set at 2%, not the 3% some of its neighbours charge, and it flows to the Hope Business and Development Society under item 17 of the Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation. That still leaves roughly 15% in combined tax riding on a Hope nightly rate once you add the three together. One relief worth knowing: accommodation supplied to the same person for 27 or more continuous days is PST-exempt, which is part of why the 28-day cap in the zoning bylaw is such an awkward line to sit near.

There's a fourth consideration that isn't a tax rate but behaves like one. The federal Income Tax Act denies deductions for a non-compliant short-term rental, meaning one operating somewhere it isn't permitted or without the required licences. Run Hope without your business licence or provincial registration, and Ottawa can disallow your expenses for the days you were offside, which turns a local paperwork lapse into a federal tax bill. So the licence pays for itself twice over. And do check your own platform statements rather than assuming, since whether Vrbo, Booking.com and Expedia each handle PST and MRDT the way Airbnb does is something the Province's rule covers in general but doesn't guarantee line by line.

British Columbia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Those platform tax duties are one corner of a much larger provincial framework, and the rest of it shapes how Hope's own bylaw operates. B.C.'s short-term rental legislation built a provincewide registry that went live for hosts on 1 May 2025, and since then platforms have had to validate registration numbers and pull any listing a local government flags. That validation is the enforcement engine, because a listing without a good number can't stay up regardless of what the host does.

The registry's teeth are in Regulation 268/2023, whose Schedule 4 sets escalating administrative penalties: failing to register runs $5,000, then $7,500, then $10,000, while leaving your business licence number or registration number off a listing runs $500, $750 and $1,000. The Province's Compliance and Enforcement Unit can demand records, obtain compliance orders through the B.C. Supreme Court, and levy those penalties directly, and it publishes its decisions. So the provincial layer bites whether or not the town ever knocks on your door.

Here's where Hope's exemption really shows its value, though. The principal-residence requirement is the rule that limits most B.C. hosts to their own home, and the Province's list decides who's covered. Hope is exempt, whereas the Chilliwack guide, the Abbotsford guide, the Mission guide and the Maple Ridge guide all describe communities where that rule bites and a non-owner-occupied listing is off the table. Up the Coquihalla, the Merritt guide covers another small interior town worth comparing against. That contrast is the whole reason a Hope property can pencil out where a bigger neighbour's can't.

One thing to keep an eye on, since the exemption can move. A community can opt in to the principal-residence requirement by passing a resolution by 28 February, which then takes effect the following 1 November. Hope's council hasn't done that, and the Province's list still showed the town as exempt as of 1 June 2026, but the February deadline is the date to watch each year if you're buying a property whose whole case rests on the exemption. Also worth noting: Hope isn't in a speculation and vacancy tax area, unlike Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Mission, so that particular annual bill isn't part of the math here.

Does Hope Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given both a provincial unit and a District that just built this framework from scratch, enforcement is best treated as real even though the track record is short. The honest answer is that Hope only started licensing these rentals in 2026, and I found no published count of tickets, prosecutions or revoked licences yet, so nobody can point to a body of cases. What we can point to is exactly what the penalties are, and they're not trivial.

When the District adopted its Bylaw Notice Enforcement Bylaw No. 1627 in May 2026, its Schedule "A" put a price on the two things a rogue rental breaks, and neither is cheap. A zoning contravention carries a $500 penalty, dropping to $400 if you pay within 14 days and rising by a $100 surcharge if you drag past 28, while a business-licence breach runs $200, or $150 early and $50 more if you're late. Those are per-notice amounts, mind you, and a compliance agreement can halve them, but the bylaw also preserves the heavier hammer: a summary conviction fine of up to $10,000, with each day an offence continues counting as a separate offence. Stack that daily multiplier against a listing that keeps taking bookings, and the arithmetic gets ugly fast.

On top of the town's own tools sits the provincial Compliance and Enforcement Unit and the platform-validation system, so a Hope listing is exposed on two fronts at once. If a neighbour is the one who reports you, the District's bylaw enforcement page says the complaint has to carry a name, address and phone number before it's investigated, and a noise complaint wants around ten dated incidents. In other words, the town screens for genuine problems rather than acting on anonymous tips. Even so, the smart read is that the rules are enforceable by design, because the platform can switch your listing off without anyone visiting the property at all.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Hope

Since the penalties reward getting it right the first time, the order you tackle things in matters more than it looks. Work the early steps before spending on the later ones, because the first two decide whether the rest is even worth doing.

1. Confirm the property qualifies. Check that it's a one-family residence in a designated zone, not a suite, duplex, townhome, apartment or coach house, and that there's no other short-term rental already on the parcel.
2. Decide which use you're running. A guest unit means you're on site during every stay and keep one bedroom back; a whole dwelling unit means nobody has to live there, but it's the $200 licence rather than the $150 one.
3. Register with the Province first. Get your provincial registration number through the host registry, budgeting $100 if you live in the home or $450 if you don't, plus the $1.50 fee.
4. Apply for the District business licence. Work through the short-term rental checklist, submit to the town, and expect the Planning, Bylaw, Fire and Corporate Services review to take 10 to 14 business days.
5. Put both numbers on every listing. Your provincial registration number and your District licence number have to appear before a platform will keep the listing live.
6. Set up the stay to match 8.13. Cap it at 8 guests, keep any single booking to 28 days or fewer, install the parking signage, and meet the BC Building Code, Fire Code and Fraser Health requirements.
7. Sort out tax before your first guest. Confirm whether you need to register for GST, and check that your platform is collecting the 8% PST and 2% MRDT on your bookings.
8. Diarize the renewals. The District licence runs to 31 December and the provincial registration renews annually, and letting either lapse makes the rental non-compliant for tax and enforcement alike.

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

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, the District office handles most of it from one building, while the Province handles the registry, and knowing who owns which question saves a fair bit of time on the phone.

Start with the District of Hope for zoning, the business licence and enforcement.

• Address: 325 Wallace Street, P.O. Box 609, Hope, BC V0X 1L0
• Phone: 604-869-5671
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
• General email: [email protected]
• Planning and Community Development: Robin Beukens, Director, at [email protected], for zoning and whether a property qualifies
• Bylaw enforcement and complaints: [email protected]

For the provincial registration, the number-display rule and the principal-residence exemption, go to the Province rather than the town. The B.C. host registry handles registering, renewing and reporting changes, and the Compliance and Enforcement Unit handles provincial penalties and record demands. Tax questions split by government: GST goes to the Canada Revenue Agency, while PST and the MRDT belong to B.C.'s accommodation tax pages.

Before you commit to a purchase on the strength of the exemption, it's worth pressure-testing the returns, and the Canada short-term rental market data on BNBCalc is a reasonable place to see how a small Fraser Valley town stacks up against the rest of the country.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I run an Airbnb in Hope, Canada in 2026?

Yes. Hope permits short-term rentals in designated zones under Zoning Amendment Bylaw No. 1603, adopted in September 2025, and both guest-unit rentals and whole-dwelling rentals are allowed. You'll need a District of Hope business licence, mandatory since 1 January 2026, plus a provincial registration number, and both numbers must appear on your listing. The property has to be a one-family residence, capped at 8 guests, with any single stay limited to 28 days.

Do I have to live in the property to short-term rent it in Hope?

Not for a whole-dwelling rental. Hope is on the Province's exempt list for the principal-residence requirement, so you can legally short-term rent a home you don't live in, which most larger B.C. communities prohibit. The one exception is a guest-unit rental, where the operator must be on site at all times and can rent one bedroom fewer than the home contains. Keep an eye on the Province's list each February, since a town can opt in to the requirement.

How much does a short-term rental licence cost in Hope?

The District business licence is $150 a year for a guest unit and $200 for a whole dwelling unit, with a 10% discount for paying by 15 December. On top of that, provincial host registration costs $100 a year if you live in the property or $450 if you don't, plus a $1.50 service fee, and it isn't refundable if you're denied. Budget for both, because Hope requires the local licence and the Province requires the registration.

What taxes apply to a Hope short-term rental?

Three layers. GST at 5% applies federally, the province charges 8% PST on accommodation, and Hope adds a 2% Municipal and Regional District Tax, so roughly 15% in total rides on a nightly rate. The platform collects the PST and MRDT for you as an online marketplace facilitator, while GST is yours to collect if you're registered, or the platform's if you're not. Renting without your licences can also cost you your income-tax deductions.

What happens if I run a short-term rental in Hope without a licence?

You're exposed on two fronts. The District's enforcement bylaw prices a zoning breach at up to $500 per notice and a licence breach at up to $200, with a summary-conviction fine reaching $10,000 and each day counting separately. Provincially, failing to register runs $5,000 to $10,000 in administrative penalties, and platforms must pull a listing that lacks a valid number. On top of that, an unlicensed rental loses its federal income-tax deductions.

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