Mystic, Connecticut Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Mystic, Connecticut and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, on either bank of the river, and nobody here is handing out New York style bans. The awkward part is that Mystic isn't a town, so there's no Mystic office to walk into and no Mystic permit to collect. It's a village cut in half by the Mystic River, with the western side inside the Town of Groton and the eastern side inside the Town of Stonington, both in New London County. The split runs deep enough that when downtown Mystic needed a parking study, the two towns had to commission it jointly.

That line through the middle is the whole story in 2026, because the two towns went in opposite directions. Groton wrote short-term rentals into its zoning regulations effective 15 May 2024 and then revised the section again effective 15 April 2026, so a Groton-side listing now needs a special permit won at a public hearing, and in the ordinary residential zones you have to live on the property yourself. Stonington went the other way and still doesn't regulate short-term rentals at all, which its planning department states in writing. Same village, same river, two entirely different sets of homework.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly on each bank: which zones allow what, the permit Groton makes you argue for in public, the paperwork behind it, the tax layers, how hard any of it gets enforced, and who to call when something snags. Every figure below comes from Groton's and Stonington's own regulations or from Connecticut's statutes and revenue department, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving I've said so. Since the answer changes with the parcel rather than the town, run the address through BNBCalc before you commit.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Mystic, Connecticut?

Because the river is the dividing line, the first thing to settle is which town your deed names. The two answers barely resemble each other.

West of the river, the Town of Groton Zoning Regulations define a short term rental as a furnished dwelling unit, whole or part, "providing transient lodging to the general public, for compensation, for a period of 30 days or less." The rules sit at Section 5.1-7.C, whose own heading records the history: new effective 5-15-2024, revised effective 4-15-2026. Where you can run one comes down to the zoning district, and that section names them rather than leaving you to read a table:

• Special permit plus conditions in R (Residential), RU (Rural Residential), RM (Residential Multi-Unit), MDD (the Mystic Downtown District), MTC (Mixed-Use Town Center) and MVC (Mixed-Use Village Center).
• Conditions only, no special permit, in CN and CR (the neighbourhood and regional commercial districts), IM (Industrial, Mixed-Use) and R-MI, the Residential Mouse Island district.
• Prohibited outright in the RS districts, RS-12 and RS-20, which are Groton's Residential Single Unit zones. Table 4.1 marks the short term rental row with an X there, and the same X applies in the Working Waterfront, General Industrial and Green districts.

That third bullet surprises people, so do check your zoning designation before anything else. A single-family house isn't automatically eligible, and a single-family house in an RS district is flatly ineligible. No permit exists to change that.

The conditions attached to those districts do real work too, so read them before you read the map. Only one short term rental is allowed per lot in the R, R-MI and RU districts, and it can sit either in the main house or in no more than one accessory building. You then owe one off-street parking space for every rented bedroom, all of it on the lot itself.

Beyond the count and the parking, Section 7.4's environmental performance standards apply, and on top of that you have to show affirmatively, through setbacks, buffering or topography, that the rental won't be a nuisance next door. There's to be no exterior evidence of the activity beyond a permitted sign and that parking. And in an R, RU or RM district, the owner or lessee has to keep their primary residence in the main house, in one unit of a two-unit dwelling, or in a legally permitted accessory dwelling unit.

Cross the river and the picture inverts. Stonington's Department of Planning & Land Use answers the whole question in a single line on its short-term rentals handout: "The Town of Stonington does not currently regulate short-term rentals." Properties there are held to the ordinary zoning regulations and town ordinances instead, so a violation at a short-term rental gets treated like a violation anywhere else in town.

That isn't a drafting oversight. I read the current Stonington Zoning Regulations, 29th edition, amended through 4 March 2026, and the phrase "short-term rental" appears nowhere in them. Instead, the only lodging uses defined are a Hotel and a Bed and Breakfast Facility, and even the bed and breakfast rules are narrow: owner-occupied, capped at eight transient guests in no more than four rooms, and housed in a building that pre-dates 1940.

Stonington didn't arrive there by accident, mind you. The town drafted a registration-and-permit ordinance, sent it to a townwide vote, and voters rejected it 694 to 342 on 13 March 2023 on roughly 7% turnout. Nothing has replaced it since.

One more boundary is worth knowing before you go house hunting. Noank sits inside the Town of Groton just west of Mystic and runs its own zoning commission, so Section 5.1-7.C doesn't reach it. The Day reported in November 2024 that the Noank commission voted unanimously to write an explicit ban into its regulations, prohibiting rentals of 30 days or less in every Noank district. I couldn't open a Noank commission document directly, so treat that as reported rather than verified, and call the commission before relying on it.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Mystic

Those two regimes produce two different businesses. It helps to be blunt about which one you're in a position to run.

On the Groton side, in the ordinary residential zones, the primary-residence condition decides everything. You can't buy a house on a residential street, furnish it, and rent the whole thing by the weekend, because you'd have to live in it. What's left is a room-share, one unit of a two-family while you occupy the other, or an accessory dwelling unit out back. The revenue to model is a spare bedroom, not a house.

The exception is the interesting part, and it's why downtown Mystic still works as an investment. That primary-residence condition in Section 5.1-7.C applies only "when located in an R, RU or RM District". It doesn't attach in the Mystic Downtown District, and it doesn't attach in the MTC or MVC mixed-use zones or in the commercial and industrial-mixed districts. So a whole-unit, absentee-owner rental is available on the Groton side, but essentially only in the mixed-use core, and only after the commission grants a special permit at a public hearing.

Then there's parking, which quietly kills more downtown plans than the primary-residence rule does. One off-street space per rented bedroom, all of it on the lot itself, is a hard ask in a nineteenth-century village centre where most buildings have no lot to speak of. Count the spaces before you offer. Watch the events rules too, since temporary events hosted by the occupants aren't allowed in the R districts at all, or in an RU district under two acres.

Stonington's side asks nothing of you today, and that freedom is real, though don't mistake it for a guarantee. The town is midway through a root-and-branch rewrite of its zoning regulations, with Phase Two explicitly covering allowed uses and permit requirements, and Connecticut has handed every town clear authority to act.

Assuming a future Stonington rule does arrive, existing operations get some protection, because state law says zoning regulations may not "prohibit the continuance of any nonconforming use, building or structure existing at the time of the adoption of such regulations" under Connecticut General Statutes § 8-2. Proving you had such a use is a fact-heavy fight, though, so keep your booking records, tax filings and listing history from day one.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Mystic

Since neither town runs anything you'd call a licence, that recordkeeping habit matters more here than a permit number would elsewhere. There's no annual registration anywhere in Mystic, no registry, no renewal cycle and no host number to print on your listing, because what Groton runs instead is a land-use approval and Stonington runs nothing at all.

On the Groton side that means two approvals stacked on each other. The special permit comes from the Planning and Zoning Commission under Section 9.4 of the zoning regulations, and separately no use may be established until the Zoning Official issues a Zoning Permit under Section 9.2-2. Applications go to the Office of Planning and Development Services on its own forms, signed by both the applicant and the property owner, and where wetlands are involved the Inland Wetlands Agency application has to be filed first or alongside. Staff won't review anything until the fee is paid.

About that fee. Section 9.1-2.D says applications must arrive with "the appropriate fee(s) as established by the Town of Groton", which puts the number in a town fee schedule rather than in the regulations, and as of July 2026 I couldn't find that schedule published on the town's planning pages or in its online code. So I won't print a figure I haven't read. Call the planning office or check the Citizen Self-Service portal, and be aware that paying online adds a 3.95% convenience charge with a $2.50 minimum, or $1.95 by ACH.

The timeline is the part people underestimate. Your application isn't officially received on the day you file it; under Section 9.1-4.A, receipt is the next regularly scheduled commission meeting or 35 days after submission, whichever comes first. From there the hearing must commence within 65 days of receipt and close within 35 days of commencing, notice gets published within 15 days of the decision, and the decision takes effect 15 days after that. Add the commission's agenda queue and you're looking at three to four months, longer if anyone asks for a traffic study.

Once you've won it, though, the Groton permit is still unusually durable. It takes effect when a copy is filed with the Town Clerk and in the land records, and any condition the commission attaches binds the property "regardless of any change in ownership". As the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments puts it in its review of short-term rental regulation in Connecticut, zoning approvals "run with the property, as opposed to the owner", so a permitted rental here is an asset that transfers with the sale rather than a licence you re-earn every year.

The flip side is Section 9.4-7, which lets the commission revoke it after notice and a public hearing where the conditions aren't strictly adhered to.

There's a coastal wrinkle too, and in Mystic it catches a lot of properties. Section 9.5-5.A makes a special permit application subject to coastal site plan review whenever any part of the site falls inside the adopted coastal area boundary, which along the Mystic River covers a great deal of what you'd want to buy. That section was revised effective 15 July 2025 and again on 15 April 2026, narrowing the exemption list at Section 9.5-5.B, and the regulations' own amendment record describes the change as eliminating the exemption for single unit dwellings.

Remember to ask the planning office whether your parcel sits inside the boundary before you budget the timeline, because coastal review adds submissions rather than replacing them.

As for the ordinance route, Groton's Town Council drafted a registration ordinance and then held off while the Connecticut Supreme Court decided a short-term rental zoning case, and as of my last check in July 2026 nothing has been adopted. Statewide the picture is the same, since the registry bill that would've created one died without a floor vote. So today, Mystic hosts register with nobody but the state tax department.

Required Documents for Mystic Short-Term Rentals

Since Stonington asks for no filing at all, everything below is Groton-side paperwork. The volume of it is why that three-to-four-month timeline holds.

A special permit application under Section 9.4-3 has to carry:

• A narrative covering three things: the existing and proposed uses and the surrounding neighbourhood, how the special permit criteria in Section 9.4-6 are satisfied, and how the Section 5.1 conditions for a short term rental are met.
• A location map meeting the requirements of Section 9.5-3.B.
• A plan showing your property boundaries, the location and height of every existing and proposed building and use, every structure within 200 feet, the parking and loading arrangement, wetlands and watercourses, flood hazard areas, topography and proposed grading, and any open space, screening or buffer areas.
• Signatures from the applicant and from the owner, where those differ.
• A Zoning Permit application with a plot plan prepared by a land surveyor registered in Connecticut, plus a copy of the recorded special permit. The Zoning Official can reduce the plot plan requirements where the detail isn't needed, so ask before you commission a full survey.

The commission can demand more on top of that, and Section 9.4-3.C lists what "more" looks like: a traffic report, a stormwater plan, an erosion control plan, an evaluation of public utility capacity, elevations, a landscape plan, a signage plan, a noise projection study, or identification of historic and archaeological resources. Most of those have to be sealed by a licensed Connecticut professional unless the commission waives it, which is where the budget goes. For anything complicated the regulations themselves encourage a pre-application meeting, and that's the cheapest hour you'll spend on the whole exercise.

Two items sit outside the zoning file and get forgotten. The regulations don't prescribe how you evidence a primary residence in an R, RU or RM district, so ask the planner what they'll accept rather than guessing. And where the property runs on septic or a private well, Ledge Light Health District is the local health authority for both towns and handles those permits.

Mystic Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to open a calendar, there's still tax to deal with. Here at last the two banks agree completely.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Room occupancy tax, short-term home rental	15%	CT Department of Revenue Services
Room occupancy tax, bed and breakfast establishment	11%	CT Department of Revenue Services
Town lodging tax (Groton or Stonington)	none	not applicable
County lodging tax (New London County)	none	not applicable

Connecticut charges 15% on rent from hotels, motels, lodging houses and short-term home rentals, and 11% on a bed and breakfast establishment, and the tax reaches the first 30 consecutive calendar days of a stay. Past day 30, that same guest's occupancy stops being taxable, which is the mechanism behind the mid-term furnished market you see all over southeastern Connecticut in the off season.

There's no municipal layer on top, and no county layer either, because Connecticut has no county government to levy one. The legislature abolished it outright by Public Act 152 in the 1959 session, so New London County is a line on a map rather than a taxing authority. Quoted a combined Mystic rate above 15%? Somebody has added the state sales tax by mistake.

Whether you personally collect that 15% depends on how you book. Any operator charging for occupancy of 30 days or less has to register with the Department of Revenue Services, which costs $100 through myconneCT as of July 2026 and is waived if you already hold a sales and use tax permit, and then file Form OP-210 monthly and electronically.

Platforms above a threshold of Connecticut business are treated as the retailer of record and collect on your behalf, though. Airbnb confirms on its own help pages that it collects the Connecticut State Room Occupancy Tax at 15%, or 11% for bed and breakfast establishments, on the first 30 nights of a reservation, with reservations over 90 nights falling out of tax entirely. Vrbo's position is the one gap I couldn't close, since its help pages describe lodging tax collection without naming the state, so ask Vrbo directly rather than assuming parity. And keep in mind that one direct booking outside a collecting platform puts the filing obligation back on you.

Tax Deductions and Write-Offs

Rental income is ordinary taxable income, and the usual deductions apply: mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, utilities, cleaning, supplies, platform fees, repairs and depreciation. Two Mystic-specific notes are worth carrying into your accountant's office. Groton's primary-residence condition means most hosts on that bank are renting part of a home they live in, which forces you to apportion nearly every shared expense by square footage or by days of rental use rather than deducting it whole.

The special permit process itself also generates deductible professional fees, surveyor and engineer costs among them, and those are easy to lose because they arrive months before your first booking. Don't forget to log them as they're incurred.

Connecticut Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Groton and Stonington can diverge this sharply because the state above them sets almost no floor. That's unusual, and it's worth understanding on its own terms.

Connecticut has no statute preempting local short-term rental regulation, and if anything the legislature moved the other way. Public Act 24-143, Section 7, codified at Connecticut General Statutes § 7-148qq, took effect on 1 October 2024 and expressly authorises any municipality, by vote of its legislative body, to "adopt an ordinance requiring the licensure of short-term rental properties in such municipality and regulating the operation and use of such properties", and even to hire consultants to help draft it.

Before that, whether towns held the authority at all was genuinely unsettled. There's no state ceiling either, so whatever Groton has adopted stands on its own local authority.

There's no state registry, though there very nearly was. House Bill 5536 would've required operators advertising outside a facilitator to register each property annually with the Department of Revenue Services for $100, and it cleared the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee 36 to 18 on 30 March 2026 before being tabled for the House calendar on 16 April. Then the 2026 session adjourned on 6 May without a floor vote, so it isn't law. Watch for a successor bill in 2027, because a state-run registry would change what every Connecticut host has to do.

The other piece of state-level context is judicial rather than legislative, and it explains the caution you see in town halls all along the shoreline. In the Pine Orchard case, Wihbey (docket SC 20839), the Connecticut Supreme Court considered whether short-term rentals of a single-family dwelling were permissible under a 1994 set of zoning regulations that said nothing about rental duration. The court then ruled 5 to 2 in the owner's favour, holding that a "residence" can include short-term rentals and doesn't require a degree of permanency.

The Council of Governments summarises the reasoning this way: "in the absence of clear language in the original zoning regulations restricting the duration of rentals, the court cannot impose a restriction." So the lesson for towns was that silence protects the host, which is exactly why Groton wrote an express definition into Section 2.1 rather than trusting interpretation. That case came out of Branford, and the Branford guide covers what it left behind locally, while the Connecticut short-term rental guide sets out the statewide framework.

Does Mystic Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Since the state hands enforcement down to the towns without a common mechanism, the honest answer still differs by bank, and neither answer is dramatic.

Groton enforces through zoning, which the regulations assign to the Planning and Zoning Commission acting through the Zoning Official. Section 9.2-1.C says a violator is "fined in accordance with the General Statutes of the State of Connecticut", and those statutory numbers turn out to be modest.

Under Connecticut General Statutes § 8-12, that means a zoning violation draws a fine of not less than $10 and not more than $100 for each day it continues, rising to between $100 and $250 a day where the violation is wilful, with up to ten days' imprisonment for each day of violation to a thirty-day maximum. Ignore a served order for ten days and a civil penalty of up to $2,500 becomes payable to the town treasurer. Towns may adopt their own citation ordinances under Section 8-12a as well, though those are capped at $150 per day.

Read those numbers next to a summer nightly rate in Mystic and you can see the problem the town has, because a daily fine at the low end costs less than one booked night. The real deterrent isn't the money, then. It's Section 9.4-7, the revocation power, and the fact that a special permit is an asset attached to the property that a future buyer will pay for. Lose it over a noise complaint and you've written down the value of the house, not just paid a fine.

Then again, the Council of Governments is unusually candid about how this works day to day, and its point applies to Groton exactly. Zoning regulations, it says, "are enforced by Zoning Enforcement Officers, who typically work a Monday through Friday daytime schedule and are not available at night and on weekends, when most noise and parking complaints occur."

So enforcement here is complaint-driven, retrospective and slow, and it lands hardest on the operator whose neighbours have already documented a pattern. Watch out for the parking condition in particular, since a car on the street is the one violation any neighbour can photograph and any officer can verify days later.

Stonington's position follows from having no short-term rental rules to enforce. Its own handout says violations at a short-term rental "will be addressed the same as any other property within the Town", so noise, blight, parking and health complaints run through the ordinary channels and the Zoning and Inland Wetland Enforcement Officer. Nobody there will cite you for operating. They'll cite you for what the guests do.

What neither town has is the transaction-layer enforcement that changes behaviour in New York or San Francisco. No platform is required to verify a Mystic permit number before processing a booking, so a non-compliant Groton listing keeps taking reservations until somebody complains. That cuts both ways, depending on which side of the complaint you end up on.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Mystic

Given how much is decided before you spend a dollar, the order below matters more than it looks. The first three steps are the ones that save the money.

1. Establish which town the parcel is in. The 06355 postal code covers both banks and tells you nothing useful, so check the assessor's record or the deed, and if the answer is Groton, get the zoning district too.
2. On the Groton side, check that district against Section 5.1-7.C before anything else. RS-12 and RS-20 are dead ends. R, RU and RM mean you must live there. MDD, MTC, MVC, CN, CR and IM are where an absentee whole-unit rental is possible.
3. Count the off-street parking spaces on the lot, one per bedroom you plan to rent, and confirm they're on the property rather than the street. This is the condition most likely to shrink your bedroom count or kill the plan.
4. Ask the planning office whether the parcel falls inside the coastal area boundary, since a special permit application inside it triggers coastal site plan review under Section 9.5-5.
5. Take the pre-application meeting. The regulations encourage it, staff will tell you which of the Section 9.4-3.C studies they'll want, and it costs nothing.
6. File the special permit application with the narrative, map and plan, signed by applicant and owner, with the fee, then diarize the hearing dates.
7. Get the Zoning Permit from the Zoning Official once the special permit is recorded with the Town Clerk, and hold on to the recorded copy.
8. Register for Connecticut room occupancy tax through myconneCT, budget the $100, and set the monthly Form OP-210 reminder. Confirm in writing which taxes your platform collects, and treat any direct booking as your own liability.
9. On the Stonington side, skip steps 2 through 7 and start a paper trail instead. Booking logs, tax filings, listing screenshots and dated photographs. Should the town ever regulate, that file is what establishes a pre-existing use under Section 8-2.

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

Whichever of those steps you stall on, four offices handle nearly all of it between them. Know which bank you're calling from. It saves the first five minutes of every conversation.

Groton side: Office of Planning and Development Services

This office administers the zoning regulations, takes special permit and zoning permit applications, and staffs the Planning and Zoning Commission.

• Address: 134 Groton Long Point Road, Groton, CT 06340
• Main line: 860-446-5970
• Director of Planning and Development Services: Jonathan J. Reiner, [email protected], 860-446-5980
• Assistant Director: Deborah Jones, [email protected], 860-446-5972
• Manager of Planning Services: David Prescott, 860-448-4088
• Code enforcement: Tom Zanarini, Planner I, 860-448-4091
• Apply and pay online: the Citizen Self-Service portal
• Town Hall: 45 Fort Hill Road, Groton, CT 06340, open Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm

One caution on the town's own website. Its short term rentals landing page still describes Groton as "considering ways to regulate STRs", two years after the regulations took effect. Work from the regulations document instead. If anyone quotes that page back to you, ask them to open Section 5.1-7.C.

Stonington side: Department of Planning & Land Use

• Address: 152 Elm Street, Stonington, CT 06378
• Phone: 860-535-5095, fax 860-535-1023
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 4:00 pm
• Director of Land Use: Paul Dickson
• Zoning and Inland Wetland Enforcement Officer: Candace Palmer
• Planning and Zoning Specialist: Adrianna Bancroft-Jones

Stonington's planning office is also the one to watch. Its zoning rewrite runs virtual working sessions on the fourth Wednesday of each month, and Phase Two covers allowed uses and permit requirements, which is where a short-term rental provision would surface if one ever does.

State taxes

The Connecticut Department of Revenue Services administers room occupancy tax, registration and the monthly return.

• Register and file: myconneCT, linked from the room occupancy tax information page
• Registration fee: $100, waived where you already hold a sales and use tax permit
• Return: Form OP-210, monthly, filed electronically

Health, septic and wells

Ledge Light Health District is the local health department for Groton, Stonington and seven neighbouring towns, covering septic and well permits and lodging inspections.

• Address: 216 Broad Street, New London, CT 06320
• Phone: 860-448-4882

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

Those offices give you the official position, and the unofficial one is harder to pin down, so I'd rather tell you why than pretend otherwise. Reddit blocks automated access, which means I haven't read the Mystic threads and won't characterise them. The BiggerPockets Connecticut discussions I could open are about entry prices, seasonality and how Mystic compares with Westerly and Narragansett across the Rhode Island line, and regulation barely comes up. Make of that what you will.

What does exist, and what I'd point you to instead, is Stonington's own record of what its residents and owners said while the town was deciding. The town published summaries of its community conversations on short-term rentals, held on 20 June and 20 July 2022, and the themes are the ones you'd expect from a village that draws this many visitors.

Owners described the properties they'd improved and the repeat guests they'd built up. They asked the town not to "do a one sized fit all solution that negatively impacts the STR who aren't causing problems." Neighbours, meanwhile, raised noise, parking, safety code violations and the erosion of neighbourhood feel, and several argued that non-owner-occupied rentals were commercial businesses sitting in residential streets. Owner-occupancy split the room hardest. That's the line Groton eventually drew and Stonington's voters declined to.

Reading across all of it, three things seem fair to say about sentiment in Mystic in 2026. Hosts on the Groton side treat the special permit as an annoying but survivable cost of entry, and the ones who complain tend to be complaining about parking arithmetic rather than the principle. Hosts on the Stonington side know they're operating in a window that could close, so the cautious ones are documenting their operations accordingly. And investors comparing Mystic against the rest of the state keep coming back to the fact that southeastern Connecticut is a two-season market, which shapes the economics far more than the rules do.

To see how that compares with an inland, year-round Connecticut market, the Hartford market is the useful contrast. Closer to home, the Norwich guide covers the nearest sizeable New London County town, and the New Haven County guide covers the shoreline west of here.

A village that sits in two towns is an extreme case, though the lesson generalises much further than Mystic does. Regulation rarely follows the name on the sign or the postal code on the envelope, and the boundary that decides whether your plan is legal is usually one an outsider can't see from the street. So before you write an offer anywhere, find that line, work out which side of it you're on, and read that jurisdiction's own words rather than a summary of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Mystic, Connecticut in 2026?

Yes, on both sides of the river, but under different rules. Mystic is split between the Town of Groton and the Town of Stonington. Groton requires a special permit from its Planning and Zoning Commission under Zoning Regulations Section 5.1-7.C, prohibits short-term rentals entirely in its RS single-unit districts, and requires the owner or lessee to live on site in the R, RU and RM residential zones. Stonington has no short-term rental regulation at all.

Do you need a licence or registration for a short-term rental in Mystic?

Neither town runs a short-term rental licence, registry or annual renewal. On the Groton side you need a special permit plus a zoning permit, both of which attach to the property rather than to you and transfer with a sale. On the Stonington side there's nothing to file locally. Every host in Mystic does need a Connecticut room occupancy tax registration, which costs $100 through the state's myconneCT system unless you already hold a sales and use tax permit.

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

Connecticut charges a 15% room occupancy tax on short-term home rentals and 11% on a bed and breakfast establishment, applied to the first 30 consecutive days of a stay. Neither Groton, Stonington nor New London County adds a local lodging tax, because Connecticut abolished county government in 1959 and no statute lets towns layer one on. Airbnb collects and remits the state tax on bookings it processes. Direct bookings remain your own responsibility, filed monthly on Form OP-210.

Can you buy a house in Mystic purely as an Airbnb investment?

Only in some places. On the Groton side, the primary-residence condition in Section 5.1-7.C applies in the R, RU and RM districts, so a whole-house absentee rental there isn't permitted. It is available in the Mystic Downtown District and the other mixed-use and commercial zones, subject to a special permit and one off-street parking space per rented bedroom on the lot. On the Stonington side, nothing currently restricts it.

How long does it take to get a short-term rental permit in Groton?

Plan on three to four months. Your application isn't officially received the day you file it: receipt is the next regularly scheduled commission meeting, or 35 days after filing, whichever comes first. The public hearing then has to open within 65 days of receipt and close within 35 days of opening. Notice of the decision publishes within 15 days, and the decision takes effect 15 days after that. A commission request for a traffic study or a noise projection stretches all of it.

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