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

Do you own a place in Kimberley, British Columbia and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and you don't have to live in the property to do it. Kimberley sits on the province's list of communities exempt from the principal residence requirement, so the rule that wiped out investor-owned short-term rentals across most of British Columbia in 2024 never applied here. That puts this small East Kootenay city in a shrinking minority.

The catch is zoning, and it's a real one. In Kimberley's ordinary residential zone, the only short-term rental you're allowed to run is a bed and breakfast attached to the home you live in. Renting a whole house or a suite by the night takes one of about fourteen specific zones, most of them clustered around the alpine resort, and no amount of paperwork moves a property from one zone into another. On top of that sits a city licence, a separate provincial registration, and a tax stack that adds 15% to every nightly rate.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in the City of Kimberley, up in the Regional District of East Kootenay: which zones permit what, what the licence costs and how long it lasts, the provincial registration that now gates your listing, the three taxes on a nightly stay, and how hard the city pushes when a neighbour picks up the phone. Every figure below comes from the city's or the province's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where I couldn't confirm something I've said so plainly.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Kimberley

Since zoning decides everything else, that's where any Kimberley plan has to start, and it's worth checking before you look at a single listing photo.

The city publishes a 2026 Short Term Rental Permitted Zones chart that does the job of about forty pages of bylaw text. It splits the question in two, because Kimberley recognises two different kinds of short-term rental and they aren't interchangeable:

• Tourist Accommodation is the whole-home or whole-suite version, defined in the city's Short-Term Rental Guidebook as a building or part of one containing habitable rooms let to visitors on a daily or weekly basis. That's permitted in RTA-3, RTA-4, RTA-6, RTA-7, RTA-9, CP-1, DMU-1, DMU-2, RMTA-1, RMTA-2, CD-3 and CD-6, and in RRSTA and RSTA on tighter terms covered below.
• Bed and breakfast is the hosted version: the rental of no more than four bedrooms in a single family dwelling used as the operator's principal residence, with breakfast provided. Only four zones allow it, namely RRSTA, RS, DMU-2 and CD-6.
• A secondary suite let nightly is narrower still. The chart permits tourist accommodation in a secondary suite in RTA-7 and RRSTA only.

Look at where RS sits in that list, because it matters more than anything else on this page. RS is Residential Standard, the city's general-purpose residential zoning, and Zoning Bylaw No. 1850 permits within it only "bed and breakfast as an accessory use to the principal dwelling unit of a single unit dwelling". Tourist accommodation isn't on the list.

So buying a standard Kimberley house and renting it whole on Airbnb isn't a licensing problem you can solve. It's not a permitted use.

The RTA and RRSTA zones live in a separate bylaw, the Zoning (Alpine Resort Area) Bylaw No. 2016, which governs the resort lands up the hill. That's the geography behind the guidebook's own description of where short-term rentals cluster in Kimberley, and it's why ski-in inventory and downtown inventory play by noticeably different rules.

A few zones carry extra strings, and the asterisked ones carry the strings that change a plan. CP-1, DMU-1 and CD-3 come with additional building requirements, while DMU-2 caps you at two tourist accommodation units per parcel.

RSTA and RRSTA are the ones to read closely. Both permit a single unit dwelling to be used for tourist accommodation "of not more than eight guests when not occupied for residential use", and in RRSTA a secondary suite used that way is capped at four guests. So the bylaw's twelve-guest ceiling isn't what applies in those two zones.

CD-6 is tighter again, allowing tourist accommodation only as an accessory use to single unit and duplex dwellings, in specific locations identified at subdivision and regulated by covenant. Do read the zone text, or call Planning Services, before you treat a checkmark on that chart as permission to sleep twelve.

Assuming your zone does clear, there's still the question of whether you personally qualify, and the Short-Term Rental Unit Business Licence and Regulation Bylaw No. 2697, 2021 answers it.

You have to own the property, since the bylaw defines an Operator as an Owner who rents out a unit, which rules tenants out entirely. Where the unit sits in a strata, you'll need written confirmation that the strata bylaws don't prohibit the use. A bed and breakfast operator has to live there and be the responsible person themselves.

And across the city the licensing bylaw allows no more than twelve guests at once, with only one booking in the unit at a time, unless your zone sets a lower number as RSTA and RRSTA do.

One more thing that catches longtime owners. British Columbia stripped legal non-conforming use protection away from short-term rentals in section 36 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, so a rental that predates the current zoning no longer carries a grandfathered right to continue. Being there first stopped being a defence in 2024. Before you buy anything on the strength of its rental history, run the address through the zone chart and then run the numbers through BNBCalc.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Kimberley

Once the zone permits the use, you're facing two licences rather than one, because the city and the province each run their own gate and neither accepts the other's paperwork.

The city's licence comes from Bylaw No. 2697 and is priced per unit. As of July 2026 it costs $300 a year, plus $50 if you designate someone other than yourself as the responsible person, and a short-term rental manager who acts as responsible person for units they don't own needs their own $75 a year licence.

Each licence runs the calendar year, from January 1 to December 31, and renewal means a complete renewal form and payment before January 15 of the following year. The fee pro-rates quarterly, but only in your first year of operation, so a licence bought in October covers three months and then needs renewing.

Licences are non-transferable and the fees are non-refundable, which the city states on the Short Term Rental Unit Application itself. Completed applications go to [email protected] or in person to City Hall at 340 Spokane Street, and you can't start taking bookings until the licence has been issued.

Then there's the marketing rule, which is stricter than most cities bother with. Section 7.1 of the bylaw requires every listing, advertisement or promotional item to carry three things: the licence number, the approved habitable room count, and the approved maximum occupancy. Remember that the room count and occupancy come from what the city approved on your floor plan, not from what you'd like to advertise, and advertising a bedroom the city never approved is one of the offences the guidebook names by example.

The responsible person requirement is the operational core of the whole bylaw. That person has to be contactable 24 hours a day whenever guests are in the unit, and has to respond to a nuisance complaint within two hours. They must also attend the unit in person within two hours when the bylaw officer, fire chief, building official, police, operator or a guest asks them to.

Their name and phone number goes on display inside the entryway. You then have to notify the neighbouring owners and residents on every adjacent side that you're operating, giving them that same contact. Where you run a bed and breakfast in your own home, you're the responsible person by default and you can be away overnight while renting for no more than five days a calendar year.

The provincial layer is newer and, in practice, harder to ignore. Every host in British Columbia now registers each unit with the provincial short-term rental registry, which charges $100 a year where you live in the property and $450 a year where you don't, each plus a $1.50 service fee, renewed annually. The registration asks for your local business licence number where the local government requires one, and Kimberley does, so the city licence effectively comes first in the queue.

Both numbers then have to appear on the listing. Section 13 of the Act requires a valid registration number and, where a business licence requirement applies, a valid business licence number on every offer. Miss that and the province is blunt about what follows: your listings stop being advertised, your existing bookings get cancelled, and you can't accept new ones.

Required Documents for Kimberley Short-Term Rentals

Since the city won't process an incomplete file and won't refund the fee once it's paid, it's worth assembling all of this before you send anything in. Section 6.7 of the bylaw and the guidebook's checklist between them ask for:

• Evidence that you own the premises, in a form the Business Licence Inspector accepts.
• Strata confirmation, where the unit sits in a strata, showing the use doesn't contradict the strata bylaws or the Strata Property Act.
• Proof of principal residence, in any zone where the only permitted short-term rental is a bed and breakfast. Government identification can be requested to back up that declaration.
• The responsible person's name and contact details, plus their short-term rental manager licence number where that person isn't you.
• A floor plan marking smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, fire extinguishers, fire exits, every habitable room, the type of bed in each room, and the location of any sofa beds.
• A parking plan that complies with the zoning bylaw's parking requirements.
• A self-evaluation safety audit and attestation, on the city's form.
• A signed Good Neighbour Agreement, which binds you to Parts 6 and 9 of the bylaw and references Good Neighbour Bylaw No. 2671.
• Your proposed maximum number of guests at any one time.

That safety audit is a real checklist rather than a signature line. It asks you to initial ten items, several of them held to the BC Fire Code standard.

• Smoke alarms tested and logged monthly
• Fire extinguishers serviced annually by a certified technician
• Carbon monoxide alarms tested annually
• The fire safety plan posted, reviewed and updated annually
• Means of egress operable and unobstructed, doors and windows both
• A propane or natural gas barbecue leak-tested each year
• The chimney cleaned, where there is one

You attest to all of it, then repeat the exercise every year as a condition of licence.

Keep an eye on your headcount while you're planning the floor plan, too. The guidebook warns that occupancies of more than ten people, counting operators as well as guests, may require a whole building fire alarm system. That's the difference between a $300 licence and a five-figure retrofit, so it's the number I'd settle first.

Kimberley Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, and in Kimberley it stacks three deep before you've earned a dollar.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST	5%	Canada Revenue Agency
Provincial sales tax on accommodation	8%	BC Ministry of Finance
Municipal and Regional District Tax	2%	BC Ministry of Finance, remitted to Kimberley

The province's accommodation tax bulletin sets the 8% provincial sales tax and caps MRDT at 3%. Kimberley's own MRDT rate is fixed at 2% by the Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation, whose City of Kimberley row shows 2% with an expiry of April 1, 2027.

That expiry is about to matter. The Kimberley Bulletin reported on May 27, 2026 that council adopted a renewal two days earlier at 3% for a five-year term starting April 1, 2027, on roughly $280,000 of MRDT collected in 2025. I couldn't find the adopting bylaw itself on the city's document portal, so treat the 3% as a reported council decision rather than a rate you're charging today.

Who actually collects the provincial pieces depends on how you sell. An online marketplace facilitator such as Airbnb has to register and collect PST and MRDT on the bookings it facilitates, and a host who sells only through such a platform doesn't have to register separately. Sell any nights directly, though, by phone, by email or through your own website, and you're required to register and collect on those.

Two exemptions are worth knowing: no PST or MRDT applies to a continuous stay of 27 days or more, and the small-seller exemption below $2,500 of gross revenue is unavailable to anything listed on an online marketplace, which is almost everyone reading this.

GST works on the same split. It's 5% in British Columbia, a host who is GST registered charges and collects it themselves including on platform bookings, and where the host isn't registered the platform operator collects and remits instead. Registration is generally required once taxable supplies pass $30,000 over twelve months.

The federal rule that surprises people has nothing to do with collection. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions for a "non-compliant short-term rental", meaning one operating where short-term rentals aren't permitted or one that fails to meet every registration, licensing and permit requirement. The denial is proportional, calculated as expenses multiplied by non-compliant days over total short-term rental days.

So an unlicensed Kimberley rental risks more than a municipal ticket. It loses the mortgage interest, the utilities and the maintenance as deductions for every day it ran out of compliance.

British Columbia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

The province is doing more of the work in that federal calculation than it looks, because "compliant" now means compliant with two governments, and British Columbia rebuilt its half of the system between 2023 and 2025.

The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, SBC 2023 c 32 is the governing statute. Its section 14 is the famous one: outside exempt land, a short-term rental has to be in the host's principal residence, plus at most one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit on the same property. That rule took effect on May 1, 2024 and reshaped the market in every BC city of any size.

Kimberley is exempt from it, and the exemption is specific rather than incidental. Schedule 1 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Regulation, B.C. Reg. 268/2023 prescribes the exempt land, and paragraph (b) of that schedule names the City of Kimberley outright. Kimberley Alpine Resort gets its own entry as item 8 of Table 1 under paragraph (c), with a mapped boundary. Being exempt buys you one thing only, mind you, and that's freedom from the principal residence test. Everything else in the Act still applies here in full.

Registration is the part that applies hardest. Since May 1, 2025 a BC listing has to display a valid provincial registration number, and the province paired that with real teeth: platforms had to stop advertising unregistered listings from June 2, 2025 and cancel their future bookings from June 23, 2025. Enforcement runs through a Compliance and Enforcement Unit inside the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs, which can investigate, demand records, issue compliance orders, levy administrative monetary penalties and seek injunctions in the Supreme Court.

Local governments got sharper tools in the same package. The province's legislation summary records three changes that matter to a Kimberley host. The maximum municipal ticket fine rose from $1,000 to $3,000 per infraction per day. Non-conforming use protections stopped applying to short-term rentals, while other land uses kept theirs.

And platforms now hand local governments monthly data on the listings in their jurisdiction, which quietly ended the era of a small city not knowing what was operating inside it.

Because those provincial rules sit above every BC municipality while the local layer varies enormously, comparing a few is the fastest way to see the range. The Merritt guide and the Hope guide cover two other smaller interior communities, while the Chilliwack guide and the Maple Ridge guide show what the principal residence requirement does to a market once a city crosses that population line.

Does Kimberley Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Kimberley has more information about its rentals than it used to, thanks to that monthly platform reporting, and it built its own complaint machinery well before the province arrived.

The city runs a dedicated short-term rental complaint line, (778) 745-0434, staffed 24 hours a day, alongside an online tip form. Neighbours are told to use it for noise, parking, trash "or other problems with a short-term rental", and explicitly for anything they think is an illegal rental. That's a low-friction route from an irritated neighbour to an open file, and in a city the City of Kimberley puts at 8,115 residents, neighbours notice.

Inspection powers are broad. Section 3.2 of Bylaw 2697 gives the city, its bylaw enforcement officers, the fire chief, the building official and the police the right to enter any owner's property at reasonable times to check compliance with city bylaws. The guidebook goes further and says the city "actively inspects" short-term rentals, that operators must provide access on request, and that staff may audit licences, demand evidence behind an application, request booking records and request records of fire safety inspections.

The safety audit form adds that random annual inspections may be conducted. Keep the guest registry current, since the bylaw requires a written record of everyone who has stayed and requires you to produce it to the Licence Inspector on request.

The guidebook names its example offences, and they tell you what the city is watching for.

• Operating without a valid short-term rental unit business licence
• Advertising a rental without referencing a valid business licence
• Advertising more bedrooms than the licence approves
• Running a bed and breakfast somewhere that isn't your principal residence
• Operating an unsafe or nuisance property
• Refusing entry for inspection by the Business Licence Inspector or a City representative

Repeat offenders, the guidebook adds, may face escalated prosecution and higher fine amounts per offence per day.

On the penalties, I have to be straight with you about a gap. Bylaw 2697 makes every contravention ticketable "to a fine set out in the Municipal Ticket Information Bylaw", and adds that on summary conviction the maximum is $50,000, six months' imprisonment, or both, with each day an offence continues treated as a separate offence. The city's published consolidation of Municipal Ticket Information Bylaw No. 2540 predates the short-term rental bylaw and contains no short-term rental schedule, and neither does its 2021 amendment.

So the per-ticket amount isn't something I can quote from a city document. What is certain is the daily accrual, which is where this gets expensive, and the provincial ceiling of $3,000 per infraction per day that Kimberley is now permitted to set.

Set against all of that, the sharpest enforcement lever isn't municipal at all. An unregistered listing gets pulled from the platform and its forward bookings cancelled, so the loss arrives as an empty calendar rather than as a fine in the mail.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Kimberley

Given how much of that depends on facts you can check before spending anything, the order below is doing real work. The first two steps decide whether the rest are worth attempting at all.

1. Confirm the zoning before anything else. Look your address up against the city's 2026 permitted zones chart, and be clear about which use you're checking, since tourist accommodation and bed and breakfast are permitted in different places. If your property sits in RS, a whole-home rental isn't available to you at any price.
2. Check ownership and strata. You have to own the unit, and a strata's own bylaws can shut the plan down independently of the city's.
3. Settle your maximum occupancy and floor plan early. Twelve guests is the bylaw ceiling, eight is the zoning ceiling in RSTA and RRSTA, one booking at a time is the rule, and going past ten people on site may trigger a whole building fire alarm system.
4. Do the fire and safety work, then the audit. Interconnected smoke alarms, an extinguisher on each floor, CO alarms where there are gas or wood appliances, posted evacuation plans, and the ten-item self-evaluation signed off.
5. Line up a responsible person who can genuinely be there in two hours. If that's not you, budget the extra $50 designation fee and make sure they hold the $75 manager licence.
6. Notify your neighbours on every adjacent side with the responsible person's name and phone number. It's a licence condition, not a courtesy.
7. Submit the application and pay the $300 to [email protected] or at 340 Spokane Street, with the floor plan, parking plan, safety audit, Good Neighbour Agreement and strata approval attached. Don't take a booking until the licence is issued.
8. Register with the provincial registry at $100 or $450 depending on whether you live there, using your new city licence number. Don't forget to put both numbers plus the approved room count and maximum occupancy into every listing afterwards.
9. Sort out tax before your first guest. Confirm whether your platform is collecting PST and MRDT for you, register for GST if you're near the $30,000 threshold, and remember that section 67.7 links your deductions to staying compliant.
10. Diarize January 15. The city licence renews on the calendar year, the provincial registration renews annually on its own date, and the safety audit is an annual submission too.

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

Most of those steps run through one of four offices, and knowing which one owns your question saves a lot of transferred calls.

Zoning and permitted use questions belong to Planning Services, which is also who the city's own zone chart tells you to call about anything marked as subject to additional regulation.

• Planner: 250-427-9665, [email protected]
• Zone lookup: planning.kimberley.ca

Licence applications, renewals and fees are handled by the Business Licence Inspector's side of City Hall.

• Applications: [email protected], or in person at City Hall
• Address: 340 Spokane Street, Kimberley, BC V1A 2E8
• Phone: 250.427.5311, fax: 250.427.5252
• General email: [email protected]
• Office hours: 8:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., Monday to Friday, closed statutory holidays

Complaints, enforcement and fire safety split across two departments.

• Bylaw Officer: 250-427-9663, [email protected]
• Short-term rental complaint hotline: (778) 745-0434, 24 hours a day
• Kimberley Fire Department: 250-427-3473

Provincial registration and tax don't go through the city at all, so don't waste a call to City Hall on either.

• BC short-term rental registry, via Service BC: 1-833-828-2240, [email protected], Monday to Friday 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
• BC PST and MRDT enquiries: 1-877-388-4440, [email protected], Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

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

Those phone numbers get used, which tells you something about how engaged Kimberley operators are, and there's an organised version of that engagement too.

Before the themes, a caveat about what this section is and isn't. I went looking for Kimberley-specific host discussion on the big forums and didn't find enough of it to report honestly. This is a town of about 8,100 people, and the BC conversation on Reddit and BiggerPockets is dominated by Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna, where the principal residence requirement did the damage. So what follows is my read of the local record rather than a survey, and you should weigh it accordingly.

• Kimberley hosts organised, which most small markets never do. The Kimberley Short Term Rental Alliance, KISTRA, exists to be an industry voice and says its aims are to "ensure adequate representation during any policy-making process" affecting local short-term rentals and to advocate for policy that protects the sector's economic contribution. Groups like that form when operators expect the rules to keep moving.
• The exemption is the whole conversation in the East Kootenays. Kimberley, Fernie, Golden, Invermere and Revelstoke all appear on the province's exempt communities list, which makes them the obvious destination for anyone whose Kelowna or Vancouver plan died in 2024. Expect competition for the resort-zoned inventory to reflect that.
• The friction is local and practical rather than existential. Reading the city's own guidance, the recurring pressure points are the ones any operator would predict: the two-hour responsible person standard, the approved room count that has to match the listing, and annual renewal falling in the middle of ski season.
• Nobody sensible is arguing the rules go unenforced any more. Platform delisting settled that argument province-wide in mid-2025.

If you're weighing Kimberley against another market, or against a different property in the same town, the Kimberley short-term rental market data is the place to see what the resort-adjacent inventory is actually earning before you commit to a zone.

Rules like Kimberley's reward the person who reads the zoning map before signing anything, and punish the person who reasons backwards from a listing they've already bought. That order, zone first, then licence, then registration, then tax, holds in every market with a map and a bylaw. Getting it the wrong way round is what turns a good property into an expensive one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you run an Airbnb in Kimberley, BC in 2026?

Yes, and unusually for British Columbia you can do it in a property you don't live in. The City of Kimberley is named as exempt land in Schedule 1 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Regulation, so the provincial principal residence requirement doesn't apply. You still need a zone that permits the use, a $300 annual city licence for each unit, and a provincial registration number displayed on every listing.

How much does a Kimberley short-term rental licence cost?

The city charges $300 per unit per year, plus $50 to designate a responsible person other than the owner. A short-term rental manager who acts as responsible person for units they don't own pays $75 a year for their own licence. Fees are non-refundable and licences are non-transferable. On top of that, provincial registration costs $100 a year where the host lives in the property and $450 where they don't, each plus a $1.50 service fee.

Which Kimberley zones allow short-term rentals?

Tourist accommodation is permitted in RTA-3, RTA-4, RTA-6, RTA-7, RTA-9, RRSTA, RSTA, CP-1, DMU-1, DMU-2, RMTA-1, RMTA-2, CD-3 and CD-6, according to the City of Kimberley's 2026 permitted zones chart. In RSTA and RRSTA a single unit dwelling may be let to no more than eight guests when it is not occupied for residential use, which is tighter than the bylaw's general twelve-guest ceiling. Bed and breakfast is permitted in RRSTA, RS, DMU-2 and CD-6. The Residential Standard zone, RS, allows a bed and breakfast only, so a whole-home nightly rental is not available there.

What happens if you operate without a licence in Kimberley?

Every contravention of Bylaw No. 2697 is ticketable, and on summary conviction the maximum is a $50,000 fine, six months' imprisonment, or both. Each day the offence continues counts as a separate offence, so the exposure compounds. British Columbia also lets municipalities set ticket fines as high as $3,000 per infraction per day. Separately, an unregistered listing gets removed by the platform and its future bookings cancelled.

What taxes apply to a short-term rental in Kimberley?

Three layers apply, adding roughly 15% to a nightly rate: 5% GST, 8% provincial sales tax on accommodation, and a 2% Municipal and Regional District Tax specific to Kimberley. Where a host sells only through an online marketplace such as Airbnb, the platform registers and collects the PST and MRDT on those bookings. Neither provincial charge applies to a continuous stay of 27 days or more, and GST drops away once a stay runs a month or longer.

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