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

Do you own a place in Maple Ridge, British Columbia and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and that's a newer answer than you might expect, because the City of Maple Ridge only wrote short-term rentals into its Zoning Bylaw in 2025. The same amendment that created the rules also deleted the old Bed and Breakfast use from the bylaw entirely, so anything you read about hosting here a couple of years ago is describing a route that no longer exists.

The catch is that it has to be the home you actually live in. Maple Ridge sits in the Metro Vancouver Regional District, out past Pitt Meadows at the eastern end of the Lower Mainland, and it's one of the British Columbia communities where the province's principal residence requirement applies. On top of that the city adds a minimum lot size of 371 square metres, a six-guest cap, a 30-day ceiling on any single stay, and a flat exclusion of townhouses and apartments. Then there's the sequencing, which changed on January 1, 2026: you now need the city's business licence in hand before the province will let you register at all.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in 2026: which properties qualify, what the licence costs and how long it lasts, the documents the city wants in one complete package, the two taxes that attach to a stay, how much of the framework is provincial rather than municipal, and who to call when something in the package gets bounced back. Every figure below comes from Maple Ridge's or British Columbia's own bylaws and pages, and where I couldn't open a document I've said so rather than guessed. If you're comparing a Maple Ridge basement suite against a market where a whole second property can legally go on Airbnb, run both through BNBCalc before you spend anything.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Maple Ridge, Canada?

Three documents do the work here, and once you see how they stack, everything else falls into place. Maple Ridge's Zoning Bylaw No. 7600-2019, consolidated to April 28, 2026, decides whether your property can host a short-term rental at all. The Business Licencing and Regulation Bylaw No. 6815-2011 decides what you hand in and what you pay. Sitting above both of them is British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, which is where the principal residence requirement and the provincial registry come from.

Start with the definition, because it's narrower than the word suggests. The Zoning Bylaw treats a short-term rental as a business use that's accessory to a residential use, meaning temporary overnight accommodation rented to guests for 30 consecutive days or less. It then splits into two shapes. A short-term unit rental is where you let one dwelling unit whole, while a short-term room rental is where you let up to three sleeping units individually, inside the same building you live in. Both definitions arrived with Bylaw 8029-2025, and so did section 402.31, which is the section that governs you.

Section 402.31 sets out ten conditions, and they're worth reading as a single filter rather than a list of preferences:

• A registered owner or an authorized tenant operates it. A tenant needs written authorization from the owner, which the bylaw defines as a valid form of written permission to occupy the lot.
• It has to be their principal residence, meaning the place where they live for the majority of the year.
• No single guest stays longer than 30 consecutive days. Past that you've left the short-term rental rules and you're into tenancy law instead.
• The lot must be at least 371 square metres, which is roughly 3,993 square feet. Smaller lots are out, full stop.
• One licence per property, covering either three rented sleeping units or one rented dwelling unit, never both.
• Six guests maximum at any one time, per unit.
• One unobstructed off-street parking space per listing, meeting the Off-Street Parking and Loading Bylaw No. 4350-1990.
• Nothing on the same lot that puts vulnerable people at risk. An assisted living residence, a caretaker residence or a neighbourhood daycare on the property disqualifies it.
• Agricultural Land Reserve lots answer to the ALR first, since the Agricultural Land Commission Act and its regulations prevail there.
• Only ground-oriented housing qualifies: single-detached, duplex, triplex, fourplex, secondary suite, or detached garden suite. Townhouses and apartments are not permitted.

That last one deserves a moment, because it quietly removes a large share of the housing being built in Maple Ridge's town centre and along the transit corridors. If your unit is in a stacked multi-family building, the answer here is no, and no permit or fee changes it.

One more thing the 2025 amendment did, which trips up anyone working from older advice. It deleted the Bed and Breakfast use from the Zoning Bylaw and rewrote Boarding so that boarders now stay for periods longer than 30 days. The old B&B path out of the bylaw is closed, and short-term rental is the only door left.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Maple Ridge

Those ten conditions read like a checklist until you reach the second one, and the second one is where most business plans stop. Unfortunately for anyone reading this with an investment property in mind, you can't buy a house in Maple Ridge, furnish it, and run it on Airbnb from somewhere else. The Short-Term Rental Operator Guide puts it plainly: you can only run a short-term rental on your principal residence, meaning the home you live in for most of the year.

So what's actually left? Three shapes, and the third is the interesting one.

You can rent bedrooms inside your own home, up to three of them listed individually. You can rent your whole home while you're away, within the six-guest cap and the 30-day ceiling. Or, and this is the version that behaves most like a real rental business, you can host out of a registered secondary suite or a detached garden suite on the same property you live on.

That third shape lines up exactly with what the province allows, since British Columbia's principal residence requirement permits your usual home plus one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit on the same property. Maple Ridge is named on that list, and the province last updated it on July 23, 2026.

Do check whether the suite is registered before you get attached to the idea, though. The city's Short-Term Rental Application Appendix asks directly whether the rental sits in a secondary suite or detached garden suite and, if so, whether that suite is registered. The operator guide then requires every dwelling unit used this way to be a permitted, permanent structure carrying a valid occupancy permit, meeting both the BC Building Code and the BC Fire Code. An unpermitted basement conversion doesn't become legal by being nice.

A few other traps come out of those same two documents, and the first one catches people with more than one property, because you can't hold more than one short-term rental business licence in Maple Ridge no matter how many you own. A licence also won't be issued to a property that already carries a business licence for services to a vulnerable sector, which rules out most home daycares.

Then there are the two questions that depend on where the property sits. If it's in a registered strata, you need signed strata approval in the package. And a fair amount of Maple Ridge sits inside the Agricultural Land Reserve, where the ALR rules govern before the city's do.

Assuming none of that rules you out, it's worth sanity-checking the numbers against somewhere the rules are looser before you commit. Across the Fraser, Abbotsford and Chilliwack run different frameworks and different tax layers, and Mission sits immediately east of Maple Ridge with its own set of rules again.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Maple Ridge

Assuming your property does clear all of that, then comes the licence, and that's still where the money starts going out. Schedule A of the Business Licencing and Regulation Bylaw, as amended by Bylaw 8022-2025, sets a Short Term Accommodation Application Review fee of $500.00 and a Short Term Accommodation licence fee of $200.00, both payable when you apply. So the first year costs $700 before you've had a single guest, and the operator guide confirms both amounts as of July 2026.

Keep in mind that section 6.3.4 of the same bylaw adjusts every Schedule A fee each January 1 by the Consumer Price Index, so treat those as the scheduled figures rather than numbers frozen forever.

The licence itself runs on the calendar. Business licences in Maple Ridge are issued for no more than one calendar year, starting January 1 and expiring December 31, and the renewal is due in full by December 31 of the preceding year or a $25 late fee applies. The city mails a renewal invoice rather than making you reapply, and it charges $50 to transfer a licence if you move. None of it comes back if you stop operating, since the bylaw says no reduction or refund is made when a licensee ceases to own or operate the business.

Section 7.30 of the bylaw then adds the duties that only short-term rental operators carry. You have to promptly respond to and address any complaint the City or the police receive about your operation, and you have to enter into a Short-Term Rental Accommodation Agreement with the City as a condition of getting a new licence or amending an existing one.

That agreement isn't a form you mail in, though, since the operator guide says you sign it on-site with a Bylaw Compliance Officer. Its eleven clauses then commit you to the Noise Bylaw, the Nuisance Bylaw, the Unsightly Premises Bylaw, the Wildlife and Vector Control Bylaw, the Littering Prohibition Bylaw, the Off-Street Parking and Loading Bylaw, the Sign Bylaw's home occupation rules, and $1,000,000 of liability insurance kept current.

Two of those clauses are the ones I'd read twice. Clause 7 says any non-compliance with City bylaws or criminal activity may be brought to the Director of Bylaw, Licensing & Community Safety or to Council and may trigger a licence suspension or revocation hearing, while clause 8 goes further still: if your licence is suspended or cancelled and incidents keep happening, the City may pursue increased fines or legal injunctive action. Separately from all that, the Licence Inspector can suspend or cancel a licence for reasonable cause at any time, and if that happens you have ten business days to ask Council to reconsider.

There's an inspection stage too. The city's October 31, 2025 announcement confirms that a Building Inspector and a Bylaw Compliance Officer both visit before a licence is issued, and the city's general guidance on business licences that require inspections is to expect up to 10 business days or more. Applications are still paper only, submitted in person at the Bylaw, Licensing and Community Safety Department in the Randy Herman Building; the project page states that online submissions are not currently available.

Then there's the provincial layer on top, and the order matters. Since January 1, 2026 the city requires you to hold the municipal business licence before registering with the provincial short-term rental registry, which costs $100 a year plus a $1.50 service fee where you live in the property and $450 where you don't. Your provincial registration number and your city business licence number both have to appear on the listing.

Required Documents for Maple Ridge Short-Term Rentals

Since that $500 review fee doesn't come back either, it's worth getting the package right the first time, and the city will only accept it as one complete submission. The operator guide lists seven items, and section 7.30.4 of the business licence bylaw makes five of them mandatory in its own words:

• The Rental Property Business Licence Application form, with Option 1, "Short-Term Rental of Principal Residence", selected.
• The Short-Term Rental Application Appendix, which asks the eligibility questions: registered owner, principal residence, parcel over 371 square metres, registered strata, whole unit or how many bedrooms, registered secondary suite or garden suite, insurance, Agricultural Land Reserve, parking, and the Life Safety Checklist.
• A floorplan showing the area designed for the short-term rental, whether that's the whole home or specific bedrooms.
• A fire safety and emergency evacuation plan, posted at every exit and entrance and inside each bedroom. The city asks you to lean on symbols and images over text so guests can follow it regardless of reading ability or language.
• A parking plan on an aerial photo or site plan, labelling each stall, with a minimum of one stall per listing measuring at least 2.5 metres wide, 5.5 metres long and 2.1 metres high, on top of whatever the residence itself needs.
• The signed Fire and Building Safety Checklist, initialled section by section.
• Proof of $1,000,000 in general liability insurance.
• Strata council authorization, where the property sits on a strata lot.

The safety checklist is the item that most often means real work rather than paperwork. You're attesting that smoke alarms are interconnected and tested and logged monthly, that a certified technician holding a valid Maple Ridge business licence checks the fire extinguisher annually, and that carbon monoxide alarms get tested every year too. You're also confirming that the evacuation plan is reviewed annually, that bedroom doors and windows work as egress and stay unobstructed, that any propane or natural gas barbeque gets a soap leak test, and that indoor wood-burning appliances are registered and conform to Metro Vancouver's Indoor Wood Burning Bylaw 1303, 2020.

Be aware that the checklist ends with a line saying the City or Maple Ridge Fire Department may conduct random inspections annually for safety compliance, so this isn't a one-time attestation.

One easily missed field sits on the application form itself. You must name an emergency contact for Fire and RCMP use who can respond within 30 minutes of being contacted. It can be you, but if you're away for the weekend while your suite is booked, it can't be.

The city runs free 20-minute "Meet with a Planner" sessions to check eligibility before you apply. On a $700 first-year outlay, that's twenty minutes well spent.

Maple Ridge Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get all of that in and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, though Maple Ridge is genuinely lighter here than most of its neighbours. Two charges attach to a stay, not three, and both are collected above the municipal level.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST	5%	Your booking platform where you aren't GST registered, otherwise you
BC PST on accommodation	8%	The platform as an online marketplace facilitator, otherwise you
Municipal and regional district tax (MRDT)	none in Maple Ridge	not applicable

That third row is the one worth pausing on, because the province's Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation, consolidated current to August 11, 2026, lists every municipality and regional district area where the MRDT applies, and Maple Ridge appears in neither of its schedules. Abbotsford next door charges 3%, and so does Surrey, so this is a real cost difference rather than a rounding one. City tourism pages lag that schedule by years, so check the regulation itself.

The 8% provincial sales tax on accommodation is the bigger of the two, and in practice Airbnb and its competitors handle it, because British Columbia requires online marketplace facilitators to register and collect PST on accommodation sold through their platforms. You still need to register and collect yourself on any booking that doesn't come through a platform, mind you. Three exemptions are worth knowing: accommodation occupied continuously for 27 days or more, accommodation charged at $30 a day or $210 a week or less unless it's listed on a marketplace, and providers earning under $2,500 a year from accommodation that isn't listed on a marketplace at all.

Federal GST works on a similar split. The CRA applies 5% GST to platform-based accommodation occupied for less than one month at more than $20 a night, and where the host isn't GST registered, the platform operator has to collect and remit it. Once your taxable supplies pass $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters you generally have to register yourself, and from that point you charge and collect it, including on platform bookings.

Possible Write-Offs and Deductions

Your rental income is ordinary taxable income, and the usual deductions apply, though renting a suite or a bedroom inside your own home means apportioning almost everything by floor area and by days rented. That part is fiddlier than it looks on a spreadsheet.

The rule that changes the numbers, though, is federal, and it's aimed squarely at hosts like you. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions outright for a "non-compliant short-term rental", which it defines as one operating in a place that doesn't permit short-term rentals, or one that fails to meet all applicable registration, licensing and permit requirements. The denied share is your expenses multiplied by non-compliant days over total short-term rental days. So an unlicensed Maple Ridge listing isn't merely exposed to a city ticket, it also loses the mortgage interest, the utilities and the depreciation that made the numbers work. And there's no hiding from it, because Part XX of the Income Tax Act makes rental of immovable property a reportable activity, so platforms report host and property data to the CRA directly.

British Columbia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Most of that tax sits with the province, and so does most of the short-term rental law above the city. Maple Ridge's bylaws are deliberately built to sit under British Columbia's framework rather than beside it, and the operator guide says as much: the city's regulations are aligned with the provincial legislation to support consistent oversight.

The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act does four things that reach every host in the province. It limits short-term rentals in participating communities to the host's principal residence plus one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit. It requires a valid business licence number on the listing wherever the local government issues one, and obliges platforms to remove non-compliant listings when a local government asks. It removed the legal non-conforming use protection that once let long-running operations continue in defiance of a local bylaw. And it built the registry.

Registration has been mandatory since May 1, 2025 for hosts, platforms and strata hotel platforms, and the number goes on every listing. Platforms validate those numbers against the registry and share monthly listing data with local governments. Enforcement came in two steps during 2025: from June 2 platforms had to stop advertising unregistered listings, and from June 23 cancel their future bookings. Bookings longer than 90 days need no registration at all, which is the cleanest way out of the whole regime if your unit suits monthly tenants.

The province also handed local governments much sharper tools, since municipal ticket maximums rose from $1,000 to $3,000 per infraction, per day, and fines on prosecution rose from $2,000 to $50,000. Alongside that, a Compliance and Enforcement Unit inside the Short-Term Rental Branch at the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs investigates hosts and platforms directly, takes public tips through an online form, and works from a regulated fee schedule whose maximums climb with each successive contravention.

One thing not to plan around: the principal residence list moves every year. A council can pass a resolution by February 28 to opt out, effective June 1, but only where the rental vacancy rate has held at 3% or more for two consecutive years, and communities can opt in by the same February deadline for a November 1 start.

Kelowna has a one-time exemption letting it drop the requirement from June 1, 2026. Maple Ridge is on the list as things stand, and given how tight rental supply is across Metro Vancouver, I wouldn't build a plan on it coming off. Smaller Fraser Valley and Fraser Canyon communities sit differently again, which is why the Hope guide reads so differently from this one.

Does Maple Ridge Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Those provincial powers matter, because a municipal program this young can only push so hard on its own, and Maple Ridge's is barely a year old. The framework was endorsed by Council in April 2025, existing operators had until December 31, 2025 to be licensed or in the queue, and the licence-before-registry requirement only took effect on January 1, 2026.

Staff presented a Year One Review to Council on April 14, 2026, which the project page links to, but the city's meeting portal blocks automated access and I couldn't open the report, so I can't tell you what it found or how many licences have been issued. Treat any number you see quoted elsewhere with suspicion unless it cites that report directly.

What I can tell you is what the enforcement machinery looks like on paper, and it's a mix of gentle and not gentle.

The gentle end is the ticket, and Schedule A of Bylaw Notice Enforcement Bylaw No. 7626-2020 sets the penalty for operating without a business licence at $300, reduced to $250 on early payment and rising to $350 if you pay late, with no compliance agreement available. That consolidation runs only to an amending bylaw from 2022 and carries no short-term rental line at all, so as far as the published bylaws go, $300 is the number. British Columbia now permits municipal tickets of up to $3,000 a day, and whether Maple Ridge has adopted a short-term rental item at that level isn't visible in anything I could open.

The not-gentle end is everywhere else. Part 8 of the business licence bylaw makes operating without a licence an offence prosecutable on summary conviction, and it states that each day a violation continues is a separate offence, so a summer of unlicensed hosting isn't one fine. Your licence can be suspended or cancelled for reasonable cause by the Licence Inspector. The agreement you signed already spells out a revocation hearing and, past that, injunctive action. And your fire and safety attestation is subject to random annual inspections by the City or the Fire Department.

Then there's the practical bit that decides how often anyone actually looks. Maple Ridge's Bylaw, Licensing & Community Safety department has Bylaw Compliance Officers on duty seven days a week, from 8 am to 8:30 pm. This is a program built around complaints from neighbours. That's exactly why the city front-loads the parking plan, the noise clauses and the 30-minute emergency contact, so annoy the street and the file gets opened.

Honestly though, the sharpest tool isn't municipal at all. A Maple Ridge listing without a provincial registration number gets pulled by the platform, and future bookings on it get cancelled. That happens without an inspector ever visiting, and since the registry now requires you to upload your city business licence, the municipal and provincial systems check each other.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Maple Ridge

Given how much of that lands after you've already paid, the order below is the one that costs you least if the answer turns out to be no.

1. Check the two disqualifiers first. Is the lot at least 371 square metres, and is the housing form single-detached, duplex, triplex, fourplex, secondary suite or detached garden suite? An apartment or townhouse ends it here, and neither the $500 nor the $200 comes back.
2. Confirm it's your principal residence, or, if you're renting, get written authorization from the owner before anything else.
3. Book a free "Meet with a Planner" session. Twenty minutes with city planning beats finding out at the counter, and the booking link sits on the city's short-term rental page.
4. Sort out the unit's legal status. A secondary suite or garden suite has to be registered, permitted and carrying a valid occupancy permit, and it has to meet the BC Building Code and BC Fire Code.
5. Get strata approval if you're on a strata lot, and check the Agricultural Land Reserve position if your property is rural.
6. Buy the insurance and build the package. $1,000,000 general liability, floorplan, evacuation plan, parking plan on an aerial photo, signed safety checklist, appendix, application form.
7. Submit in person and pay $700. The Bylaw, Licensing and Community Safety Department in the Randy Herman Building takes paper packages only.
8. Get through the inspections and sign the agreement. A Building Inspector and a Bylaw Compliance Officer both attend, and you sign the Short-Term Rental Accommodation Agreement on-site.
9. Only then register with the province, upload the city licence, and put both numbers on every listing. Remember to diarize December 31, because the city licence expires with the calendar year and a late renewal costs $25 on top.

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

Somewhere in those nine steps you'll want a person rather than a PDF, and Maple Ridge splits the work across four city departments plus the province. Knowing which one owns your question saves an irritating amount of time.

The licence, the fees and the application package

Business Licensing, inside the Bylaw, Licensing & Community Safety Department, handles the application, the fees, renewals and the short-term rental appendix.

• Phone: 604-467-7440 (or 604-467-7305)
• Email: [email protected]
• In person: Randy Herman Building, 11996 Edge Street, east side of the building
• Mail: City of Maple Ridge, 11995 Haney Place, Maple Ridge, BC V2X 6A9
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8 am to 4 pm

Zoning, eligibility and the planner session

Planning answers whether your lot and housing form qualify under section 402.31, and it runs the 20-minute eligibility consultations.

• Phone: 604-467-7341
• Email: [email protected]

Occupancy permits, floorplans and building code

Building Services holds the drawings the city may already have on file for your property, which is where to go if you need a floorplan for the application.

• Phone: 604-467-7311
• Email: [email protected]

Fire safety, the checklist and evacuation plans

Maple Ridge Fire & Rescue Services owns the fire safety side, including the checklist and the random annual inspections.

• Phone: 604-463-5880
• Email: [email protected]

Complaints and bylaw enforcement

Bylaw Compliance Officers take complaints about noise, parking and unlicensed operation, and they're the ones who sign your agreement.

• Phone: 604-467-7305
• Email: [email protected]
• Officers on duty: seven days a week, 8 am to 8:30 pm

The provincial registry

Registration, renewals and questions about the principal residence requirement belong to the Province, not the city.

• Phone: 1-833-828-2240 (ServiceBC)
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:30 am to 5 pm

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

Those phone numbers are the official version of how this works, and host sentiment is the unofficial one. Let me be straight about the limits here: Reddit blocks automated access and its platform terms don't permit the commercial use this would need, so I haven't read those threads and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What follows is my read of where the friction sits, drawn from the city's own documents and from how these programs behave elsewhere in British Columbia. Weigh it accordingly.

• The lot size floor is the quiet exclusion. A 371 square metre minimum plus a ban on townhouses and apartments removes most of the newer, denser housing in the town centre and along the Lougheed corridor, which is exactly where the smaller, more affordable units are. The people most likely to want a mortgage helper are the people most likely to be ineligible.
• $500 to review a $200 licence reads badly, whatever the staff time behind it justifies. Paying two and a half times the annual fee for the privilege of being assessed, with no refund if you're refused, is the sort of structure that pushes marginal operators toward staying invisible rather than applying.
• Paper-only applications are an outlier in 2026. You print the package, drive it to Edge Street, and wait, while every other licence transaction in the city can be done by email or online payment.
• The sequencing change is the thing people actually get wrong. Since January 1, 2026 the city licence has to exist before you register with the province. Hosts who did it in the old order, provincial registration first, are the ones who end up delisted while they wait.
• The 30-minute emergency contact is underrated. It sounds administrative until you realise it effectively requires a named person within about half an hour of the property for the length of every booking.

If you want to see how those constraints show up in what a listing can actually earn here versus elsewhere in the country, the Canada market data is the place to compare Metro Vancouver against the interior and the Island before you commit $700 and a weekend of paperwork.

The broader pattern is worth carrying past Maple Ridge. When a city writes a short-term rental use into its zoning bylaw for the first time, the headline usually reads as permission, and the details usually read as a residency test. Whether a place is open to you has stopped being a question about the property and become a question about where you sleep at night, and that's true now in most of British Columbia and a growing share of the country. Work out which side of that line you're on before you work out anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Maple Ridge in 2026?

Yes, with real limits. Maple Ridge permits short-term rentals as an accessory use in single-detached homes, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, secondary suites and detached garden suites, on lots of at least 371 square metres, and only in the operator's principal residence. Townhouses and apartments are excluded. You need a city business licence and a provincial registration, and no single guest may stay longer than 30 consecutive days.

How much does a Maple Ridge short-term rental licence cost?

$700 in the first year. Schedule A of the Business Licencing and Regulation Bylaw sets a $500 Short Term Accommodation Application Review fee plus a $200 annual Short Term Accommodation licence fee, both payable when you apply and neither refundable. The licence runs to December 31 and renews annually, with a $25 late fee after that date. Provincial registration is separate, at $100 a year where you live in the property and $450 where you don't. Fees adjust each January by the Consumer Price Index.

Can you rent out a whole investment property in Maple Ridge on Airbnb?

No. Section 402.31 of the Zoning Bylaw limits a short-term rental to the registered owner's or authorized tenant's principal residence, meaning where they live for the majority of the year, and British Columbia's principal residence requirement applies in Maple Ridge as well. A second property you don't live in cannot be licensed. The legal alternatives are renting bedrooms in your own home, renting a registered secondary suite or detached garden suite on the property you live on, or letting the unit for stays of more than 30 days.

What tax do you pay on a short-term rental in Maple Ridge?

Two layers, and no municipal accommodation tax. British Columbia charges 8% provincial sales tax on accommodation, and Canada charges 5% GST on stays under one month costing more than $20 a night. Booking platforms generally collect both, since marketplace facilitators must register for PST and the platform collects GST where the host isn't registered. Maple Ridge appears in neither schedule of the Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation, so no municipal and regional district tax applies.

What happens if you operate without a business licence in Maple Ridge?

The bylaw notice penalty for operating a business without a licence is $300, reduced to $250 on early payment and $350 if paid late. Beyond the ticket, each day the violation continues is a separate offence prosecutable on summary conviction, and British Columbia now allows municipal fines of up to $3,000 per day and up to $50,000 on prosecution. The bigger practical cost is federal: section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions for a non-compliant short-term rental, so expenses stop being deductible.

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