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

Do you own a place in Sainte-Thérèse, the regional hub of the MRC de Thérèse-De Blainville just north of Montreal, and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that one legal route is still open, though it's a lot narrower than most owners expect, and whether you get to use it comes down to a single question: do you live in the property yourself? Going through zoning bylaw 1200 N.S. class by class, Sainte-Thérèse's use classification never once names a tourist rental, so a furnished unit let by the night has no category in this city to sit in.

What rescues the owner-occupier is provincial rather than local. Section 23 of Quebec's Tourist Accommodation Act says that no municipal planning bylaw may operate to prohibit someone offering accommodation in their own principal residence, by a single reservation, to one person or one group of related persons at a time, with no meals served. That override has bound older zoning provisions since 25 March 2023, and Sainte-Thérèse has published nothing that would displace it. So the resident host has a path and the investor doesn't, which is a harder line than it first sounds, because it also means the permission dies with the sale of the house.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly: which format the province will register, the notice you need signed by the city first, what CITQ charges in 2026, the three taxes stacked on a single night, how hard Revenu Québec is pushing across the Laurentides, and who to call when something doesn't fit. Every figure below comes from Sainte-Thérèse's own bylaws or Quebec's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where a document wouldn't load I've said so rather than filled the gap in. Assuming you're also weighing markets where an entire unit can legally go on Airbnb, run both through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Sainte-Thérèse, Canada?

Before you weigh anything, though, you need to know which of the two rulebooks binds you, since only one of them has anything to say about zoning.

The provincial one is the Tourist Accommodation Act (chapter H-1.01), and its reach is set by a number rather than by a business model. Section 2 makes a "tourist accommodation establishment" any establishment where at least one unit, whether a bed, a room, an apartment or a house, is offered for rent to tourists for payment for a period not exceeding 31 days. Section 4 then makes operating one subject to registration with the Minister. One spare bedroom counts. So the Act reaches you whether or not you think of yourself as running an establishment.

The municipal one is zoning bylaw 1200 N.S., consolidated through amendment 1200-93 N.S. of 22 April 2026, and this is where Sainte-Thérèse's position gets blunt. The bylaw sorts every possible use into groups and classes, so you can go and look, and its lodging uses all sit in Commerce 4 and Commerce 7: C4-05-01 Gîte du passant, a private residence offering at most five rooms with breakfast served on site, C4-05-02 Auberge de jeunesse, and C7-01-01 Établissement hôtelier. What's missing is the obvious one, since there's no résidence de tourisme, no établissement de résidence principale, and no use in that classification defined by a stay of 31 days or fewer. And one warning for anyone reading across from a neighbouring town: Commerce 12 here is cannabis retail, not short-term rental.

That absence would be harmless if the bylaw read permissively, yet it does the opposite, because its own interpretation rule for the specification tables says that a use which doesn't belong to a class authorised in the zone "est interdit dans la zone", prohibited there, subject only to what a grid specifically permits. So put the two together and the condo bought to rent by the night has nowhere in Sainte-Thérèse's zoning to land.

The additional-use chapter doesn't rescue it either, and that's usually where people go looking for a loophole. Under the same bylaw only one additional use is allowed per principal building, it has to be carried on inside that building, and a Commerce-group additional use is confined to a single-family, multifamily or collective dwelling. So inside a single-family house, the qualifying list is short:

• Professional and administrative offices, and nothing else from the Commerce group. The operator has to be domiciled in the building, one non-resident person may work there, the exterior must keep its residential character, and the use tops out at 35 m².
• A childcare service (P1-01-01) in a Habitation 1, 2 or 3 building, on the terms the Educational Childcare Act sets.
• A supplementary dwelling in an isolated or semi-detached single-family house: one per house, at most 40% of the floor area and never over 70 m², one bedroom, and its own entrance off the main façade.
• Room rental, capped at three rooms, where each let room communicates with the rest of the dwelling, one shared kitchen is allowed with no cooking appliance inside a room, one full bathroom serves every three rooms, and the ratio is half a parking space per room.
• A supervised or unsupervised residence in a single-family house, housing at most ten people counting the operator's own family.

Room rental is the closest thing there to lodging. Even so, it's a boarding arrangement rather than a tourist one, right down to the bylaw calling the occupants pensionnaires.

Which brings us back to the provision that changes the answer for one group of people and nobody else. Section 23 overrides local zoning directly for a principal residence let by a single reservation to one person or related group at a time, with no meals. Section 52 then phased that in, so where a provision was already in force on 25 March 2021, the override reached it only from 25 March 2023. The escape hatch a municipality gets is an amending bylaw passed through Division V of the land use planning act, the referendum-approvable route, with the petition threshold halved. Sainte-Thérèse's zoning bylaw carries no such provision, and its conditional-use bylaw 1351 N.S., adopted on 2 December 2024, reaches cabarets, bars, taverns, clubs and dance halls, and nothing else.

One honest gap before you plan around any of that. The 169 per-zone specification grids of Annexe B sit on the city's separate map host, which wouldn't accept a connection from here on any route I tried and has no Internet Archive capture either. So I can't tell you which zones permit a gîte du passant, nor rule out a one-off provision written into a single grid. What a grid can't do is invent a use, since it can only reference codes that exist in bylaw 1200 N.S., and none of those is a tourist residence. Make sure you check your own address with the urbanisme department anyway, because they hold both the grid and the pen that signs your compliance notice.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Sainte-Thérèse

Unfortunately for most people reading this, that provincial override is also the ceiling. It protects one shape of rental and nothing wider. So if the plan was to buy a second unit near the commuter line, furnish it and run it at nightly rates, no permit in Sainte-Thérèse unlocks that and no fee buys the right.

What survives is a principal residence establishment, and the CITQ's category page defines it tightly: accommodation offered by a single reservation, in the operator's main residence, to one person or a single group of related persons at a time, with no meals served on site. Every clause in that is doing work. One reservation at a time means you can't let two bedrooms to two unrelated parties over the same weekend, and the moment you do, you've become a general establishment, which is the class the zoning bylaw has no room for. No meals means breakfast turns you into a bed and breakfast, which here is C4-05-01 and needs a grid to permit it. Even "main residence" is defined rather than assumed, since section 2 ties it to the home where you usually live, where you centre your family and social life, and whose address you give most government departments.

Renting rather than owning doesn't disqualify you, mind you, though it does add a signature to collect. CITQ asks for the co-ownership declaration or the lease provisions permitting tourist accommodation, and where those documents say nothing, a signed authorization from the landlord, the syndicate or the co-owner instead. Be aware that from 1 September 2026 the consent stops being a one-time formality, because the Ministry of Tourism's March 2026 announcement requires it again at every annual renewal, on standardised forms.

One more rule catches buyers and sellers alike. Section 7 of the Act says no person may transfer the registration of a tourist accommodation establishment, and CITQ repeats it plainly: the rights don't pass to a purchaser, who has to apply from scratch. So a rental history isn't an asset that conveys with the house, whatever a listing sheet implies, and a buyer who won't live there can't inherit the permission at all.

Assuming none of that fits, there's still one honest pivot left, and it's to stop counting nights. A unit rented for more than 31 consecutive days falls outside the Act's definition of a tourist accommodation establishment altogether, and outside the tax on lodging with it, which puts it under ordinary landlord and tenant law instead. Plenty of Quebec inventory went exactly there after 2023. And if you're still choosing where to buy, remember that the municipal answer changes a lot from one town to the next, so the Chambly guide, the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu guide and the Granby guide are the useful next reads.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Sainte-Thérèse

Assuming the home you're listing is the one you live in, and you're able to get that far, the paperwork lands on two desks rather than one, and the order between them matters more than the paperwork itself.

Sainte-Thérèse issues no short-term rental licence, because it runs no short-term rental regime to license. What it does issue is a certificat d'occupation, and bylaw 1206 N.S. on the administration of the planning bylaws requires one before you add an additional use to a Habitation-group building or introduce or change a principal use in a Commerce, Industrie or Communautaire one. The fee is $75, and the designated officer has 60 days to issue it or refuse it. An incomplete file suspends that clock rather than restarting it, while a non-conforming application draws a written notice naming what's wrong inside the same 60 days. It can also be revoked later. That follows where it was granted in error, granted on a false document, or where the work drifts from what was approved. Once you hold one, don't forget to display it inside the dwelling where the use is carried on.

The provincial desk is the CITQ, and it won't open your file without the city's signature first. Its registration page is unusually direct about the sequence, telling operators that an application not accompanied by a compliant document from the competent authority cannot be processed. So the order is fixed. You complete the Notice of Compliance, take it to the urbanisme department for signature, and only then apply. CITQ's fee schedule, set by sections 6 and 7 of the Tourist Accommodation Regulation and effective 1 January 2026, is where the three categories separate, and as of July 2026 they read:

Registration category	Annual fee	What it covers
Principal residence establishment	$54	Your own main residence, one reservation at a time, no meals
Youth tourist accommodation	$131	Dormitory-based establishments
General tourist accommodation	$156	Tourist homes, hotels, bed and breakfasts, everything else

Registration runs 12 months, and the display rules tightened this year. Since 9 April 2026, the duty to state your registration number, and where applicable your establishment name, in any advertising and on any website now extends to social media too. A transactional listing has to carry the certificate's expiry date on top of the number. And the certificate itself now goes at the establishment's main entrance in view of the tourist clientele, rather than at the building entrance in view of the public, which finally lets an apartment operator display it indoors.

Those duties bite because the platforms carry matching ones. Section 20.1 bars a booking platform from showing an offering that lacks the registration number or the expiry date, and from letting anyone book a stay of under 32 days at an establishment that's unregistered, expired, suspended or cancelled, while section 20.2 makes it verify that the number really belongs to that establishment. A platform breaching either faces $5,000 to $50,000, or $10,000 to $100,000 if it isn't a natural person, which is why a non-compliant listing here tends to vanish rather than quietly earn.

Your own exposure sits in sections 28 to 30, and it's worth reading before you decide the risk is theoretical. Operating unregistered, making a false declaration, or putting a false, inaccurate or expired number in a listing or its advertising all draw $2,500 to $25,000 for a natural person and $5,000 to $50,000 for anyone else. Operating while your registration stands refused, suspended or cancelled draws $5,000 to $50,000 and $10,000 to $100,000, and section 30 doubles both ends for a second offence and triples them after that. Separately again, bylaw 1206 N.S. fines a zoning breach at $200 to $1,000 for an individual and $400 to $2,000 for a company, rising to $400 to $2,000 and $800 to $4,000 on a repeat inside two years. That isn't a single ticket, though. A continuing breach counts day by day as a separate offence.

Required Documents for Sainte-Thérèse Short-Term Rentals

Since the province's smallest fine runs to roughly forty-six times the $54 registration it would've replaced, it pays to assemble the file properly the first time. CITQ's list is short but specific, and a reasonable-looking substitute gets an application held rather than processed:

• The signed Notice of Compliance from the urbanisme department, the borough or the MRC. This one comes first, and nothing else moves until it's in hand.
• Proof you hold the place, meaning the property title, the municipal tax account or the lease.
• Proof of civil liability insurance of $2,000,000 per event. Do check that your home policy actually extends to paying guests, because a standard one usually doesn't.
• Exterior and interior photographs of the place, the ones that may end up shared with a booking platform.
• Consent where somebody else's rights are engaged: the co-ownership declaration or the lease provisions permitting tourist accommodation, or a signed tenant, owner or co-owner authorization where those documents say nothing.
• Two proofs that the place is your principal residence, from 1 September 2026 onward. One was enough before that, so anyone renewing in the autumn should dig out a second now.

The city's certificat d'occupation file is separate and lighter. It takes the city's own form signed by you, the owner's and applicant's names and contact details, the address and cadastral number, the existing and the projected use, and proof of business registration.

Neither file covers safety equipment, which sits in its own bylaw and is worth reading before a guest arrives rather than after. Bylaw 1177 N.S. on fire prevention puts at least one smoke alarm on every storey of a multi-storey dwelling, adds another for each 130 m² past the first, and requires hardwired alarms in any building permitted after January 1980. The upkeep duty only shifts to an occupant staying six months or more, so on a short stay it stays with you, and you have to fit a fresh battery whenever the dwelling or room is let to a new tenant. A carbon monoxide alarm is required too wherever the building has an attached garage or a wood, pellet, oil, gas or propane appliance.

Sainte-Thérèse Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all of that and are able to take a first booking, there's still tax to deal with, and three separate charges stack on a single night here:

Charge	Rate	Who collects it
Tax on lodging	3.5% of the price of the overnight stay	The registered platform where it receives the whole payment, otherwise you
GST	5% of the selling price	You, if you're GST-registered, otherwise the platform
QST	9.975% of the selling price excluding GST	You, if you're QST-registered, otherwise the platform

The tax on lodging is regional rather than municipal, and Sainte-Thérèse falls inside a region that charges it. Revenu Québec's list of prescribed tourism regions covers 21 of the province's 22, with Nunavik as the sole exception, and the Laurentides is on it. The tax applies to principal residence and general tourist accommodation establishments where a unit is offered to tourists for payment for 31 days or fewer on a regular basis and its availability is public. Keep in mind that "regular basis" is deemed satisfied the moment you list through a platform registered for the tax, so the occasional-rental exemption isn't open to anybody advertising on Airbnb.

Who actually pays it over turns on one condition rather than on a platform's brand. Revenu Québec's registration page excuses you from registering for the tax on lodging only where you rent exclusively through platforms whose operators are registered for it and that take the whole payment from the guest. Where a platform isn't registered, or is registered yet doesn't take everything, you have to register, collect and hand it over yourself. The registered-operator list, last updated 29 April 2026, carries Airbnb Ireland from October 2017, HomeAway from January 2020, Booking.com from March 2024, Agoda from October 2025 and Trip.com from March 2026. Watch out for the piece that catches GST-registered hosts, though: even where the platform handles the lodging tax, your GST and QST are still calculated on the amount including it.

Sales tax registration has a threshold of its own, and a busy year clears it faster than owners expect, since Revenu Québec sets it at $30,000 in total worldwide taxable supplies, yours and your associates' together, in one calendar quarter or across the four preceding ones. Below that line you're a small supplier, so the platform handles the sales taxes. Above it, the filing is yours, at 5% GST and 9.975% QST, with the QST worked out on the price excluding GST rather than on top of it.

Then there's income tax, where the federal rule has sharper teeth than people expect. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies expense deductions for a non-compliant short-term rental, meaning one run somewhere short-term rentals aren't permitted, or one that misses any registration, licensing or permit requirement that applies to it. So an unregistered Sainte-Thérèse listing isn't only running a fine risk. It also loses the mortgage interest, the insurance, the utilities and the cleaning against the rent it collected, and over a full season that usually costs more than the fine would've cost.

Quebec Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That federal deduction rule leans entirely on provincial compliance, so it's worth stepping back to see how Quebec's system is built, because it explains why Sainte-Thérèse's own bylaws are so quiet on the subject.

Quebec runs one of Canada's few genuine provincial registration systems, and it does the work municipal licensing does in most Ontario and Alberta cities. Every tourist accommodation establishment registers with the Minister of Tourism, in practice through the CITQ, which issues a numbered certificate valid 12 months. Section 21.1 then makes the Minister keep a public register of each establishment's class, number, dates and status, and the Répertoire des établissements d'hébergement touristique enregistrés is where a guest, a neighbour or a city inspector goes to check you. Section 5 is the hinge between the two levels, because it makes a municipal conformity document part of the application. That's how city zoning becomes a precondition of provincial registration rather than a parallel track.

Municipalities keep real power on top of that, though only through one door. Section 23 stops a planning bylaw prohibiting a principal-residence rental, and its second paragraph reopens the question for any city willing to pass an amending bylaw through Division V of the land use planning act, where the number of applications needed to force a referendum poll is cut by half. Several Quebec municipalities have taken that route to confine tourist rentals to named zones, yet Sainte-Thérèse, on everything it publishes, has not.

The system is also getting measurably tighter rather than looser. In its March 2026 announcement the Ministry put the compliance rate for offers listed on both Airbnb and Vrbo at 87.6% in 2025, against 34.5% in 2022, and set two waves of amendments running: the display changes of 9 April 2026, then the two-proofs-of-residence and annual-consent requirements arriving on 1 September 2026. Watch the timing on that second wave. If your registration expires on or just after 1 September, it may reach you sooner than the date suggests, since a renewal has to be filed inside the 60 days before expiry.

Does Sainte-Thérèse Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Yes, although not in the way that question usually means, because the body doing the enforcing isn't the city at all. Revenu Québec handles the inspections, the investigations and the penal provisions under the Tourist Accommodation Act, and it publishes what it finds every quarter. So you can put a number on the risk here rather than guess at it.

Across Quebec in 2025-2026 it ran 2,720 inspections and found 850 non-compliant, served 1,134 constats d'infraction, won 874 convictions and imposed $3,632,677 in fines. The current year is running hotter still, since the single quarter to 30 June 2026 already carried 561 inspections, 223 of them non-compliant, 215 tickets, 213 convictions and $862,086 in fines.

The Laurentides share of that quarter is the number to sit with. Fifty inspections, twenty-five found non-compliant, twenty-three tickets, twenty-five convictions and $101,836 in fines, all inside three months and all inside one of twenty-one regions. So half of what they looked at was out of order, and the average conviction landed a little over four thousand dollars.

The city's own layer runs underneath that and works differently. Under bylaw 1206 N.S. the designated officer who finds a planning breach must notify the owner in writing and order them into conformity, may attach a constat d'infraction to that notice, and may issue a separate constat for each day the breach continues. Nothing there needs a neighbour to complain first, though in practice a complaint is what starts the file.

Noise is the usual trigger, and Sainte-Thérèse measures it rather than arguing about it. The quality-of-life bylaw 1155-3 N.S. prohibits any noise that disturbs the peace of the neighbourhood outright, then adds admissible emergence limits at the property line: 14, 9 and 5 dB(A) by day depending on how long the noise lasts, dropping to 12, 7 and 3 dB(A) between 22:00 and 07:00. A first offence runs $100 to $1,000 for an individual and $200 to $2,000 for a company, each day counts as a distinct offence, and the court can order the nuisance removed at your expense on top. Since Boisbriand, Lorraine, Rosemère and Sainte-Thérèse pooled their policing in 2004 and harmonised these penal provisions so a shared force could apply them, the officers who turn up come from the Régie intermunicipale de police Thérèse-De Blainville rather than a municipal bylaw squad.

What I couldn't find anywhere is a published count of Sainte-Thérèse short-term rental complaints, tickets or prosecutions. The city doesn't publish one. So treat the Laurentides figures above as the closest honest proxy and nothing more precise than that.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Sainte-Thérèse

Given how much of that turns on one eligibility question, the order below matters more than it looks. The early steps tell you whether the later ones are worth paying for.

1. Settle whether the property is your principal residence. Not a second home, not a unit you own and visit. The address you give most government departments, where you usually live. Everything downstream depends on this one answer.
2. Call the Service de l'urbanisme et du développement durable before you spend anything. Give them the address, ask which zone it falls in, and ask directly whether they'll sign a Notice of Compliance for a principal residence establishment there. Get the answer in writing.
3. Read your lease or your co-ownership declaration. You'll need a clause permitting tourist accommodation or a signed authorization, and from 1 September 2026 you'll need that consent again at every renewal.
4. Apply for the certificat d'occupation if the city says the use needs one, and budget $75 and up to 60 days for it.
5. Sort out insurance. Civil liability of $2,000,000 per event, evidenced, and confirm with your insurer that paying guests are covered rather than assuming it.
6. Register with CITQ, sending the signed compliance notice, your title or lease, the insurance proof, the photographs, the consents and two proofs of principal residence. That category costs $54 a year.
7. Put the number everywhere it's required: the listing, any advertising, your website, your social media, with the certificate's expiry date on any transactional listing and the certificate itself at the establishment's main entrance.
8. Decide who's collecting which tax before your first guest checks in, then diarise the renewal 60 days ahead of expiry so a lapsed number never sits live on a platform.

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

Whichever step you get stuck on, four offices cover almost all of it between them. Knowing which one owns your question saves an irritating amount of time.

Zoning, the compliance notice and the occupancy certificate belong to the Service de l'urbanisme et du développement durable, which is the first call and the one that gates everything else.

• Address: Hôtel de ville, 6, rue de l'Église, Sainte-Thérèse (Québec) J7E 3L1
• Phone: 450 434-1440, extension 2208
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Thursday, 8:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 16:30; Friday, 8:00 to 12:00
• Bylaws and the zoning map: the city's urbanism bylaws page, which links the map and every annexe

Registration, the certificate and the fees belong to the CITQ, which runs the register on the Minister of Tourism's behalf. Its contact page carries the current details, and its registration page holds both the application and the Notice of Compliance form. Questions about your own file go there, not to the city.

Taxes and enforcement both belong to Revenu Québec, a pairing people find odd until they remember it also runs the inspections. Registration for the tax on lodging, GST and QST all starts from its tax on lodging pages, and its quarterly inspection statistics are public.

Noise, parties and anything happening at 2am go to the Régie intermunicipale de police Thérèse-De Blainville. Its Sainte-Thérèse post is at 150, boulevard Ducharme, Sainte-Thérèse (Québec) J7E 4R6, on 450 435-2421, though anything urgent goes to 911 instead. Tickets already issued are handled by the municipal court at the Hôtel de ville on 450 434-1440, extension 2622, or [email protected], while the fire service at 200, boulevard Ducharme on 450 435-2422 will confirm the alarm requirements for your own building.

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Sainte-Thérèse on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Since the city publishes no enforcement data of its own, host discussion is the obvious place to look next, and here I should be straight about what I could reach. Reddit blocks automated access, and its developer terms don't permit the commercial use a proper survey would need, so I haven't read Reddit threads and won't characterise them. I found no Sainte-Thérèse-specific BiggerPockets discussion either, which is unsurprising for a city of 27,230 people that isn't a tourist destination. What follows is my read of the sourced material rather than a survey, so do weigh it accordingly.

• The compliance argument is over, and the numbers say so. When the Ministry reports conformity on offers listed on both Airbnb and Vrbo going from 34.5% in 2022 to 87.6% in 2025, the "everyone ignores it" position has stopped being tenable. Platform-side blocking under section 20.1 did most of that, because a listing without a valid number and expiry date can't be shown at all.
• The complaint that lands hardest is about proof, not principle. Quebec hosts report friction at the municipal conformity notice rather than at the CITQ file, since that's the step where an official can decline to sign. In a city whose zoning bylaw never mentions tourist accommodation, that's exactly where a Sainte-Thérèse application gets interesting.
• Investors have generally written this kind of market off. Where the only legal format needs you living in the unit, no version of the spreadsheet works for an absentee owner, so the discussion moves to 32-plus-night furnished rentals or to towns that zoned for tourist residences on purpose.
• Nobody who has read section 23 argues it makes zoning irrelevant. It protects one format, one booking at a time, no meals. Step outside that and the city's bylaw applies again in full.

Take the second point seriously if you're buying rather than already living here, because the risk isn't a fine arriving later. It's a signature that never arrives, leaving you with a property you can't legally list. And if you want to see how Sainte-Thérèse compares with places where a whole unit can go on Airbnb, the Canada short-term rental market rankings are the quickest way to line the two up.

The broader lesson generalises past this one city. When a rulebook is silent on the thing you want to do, silence usually reads as no, and the exception you're relying on will be provincial, narrow and written for somebody who actually lives at the address.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Sainte-Thérèse in 2026?

Only in one format. Sainte-Thérèse's zoning bylaw contains no tourist-rental use, and its own interpretation rule prohibits any use that doesn't belong to a class authorised in the zone, so an entire investment unit let by the night has nowhere to sit. What remains legal is a principal residence establishment: your own main residence, one reservation at a time, one person or one group of related persons, with no meals served. That format is protected from municipal prohibition by section 23 of Quebec's Tourist Accommodation Act.

How much does it cost to register a short-term rental in Sainte-Thérèse?

CITQ charges $54 a year for a principal residence establishment, $131 for youth tourist accommodation and $156 for a general tourist accommodation establishment, effective 1 January 2026 and renewable every 12 months. On the municipal side, a certificat d'occupation for adding or changing a use costs $75. You'll also need civil liability insurance of $2,000,000 per event, which is a statutory condition of registration rather than an optional extra.

What taxes apply to a short-term rental in Sainte-Thérèse?

Three. The 3.5% Quebec tax on lodging applies because Sainte-Thérèse sits in the Laurentides tourism region, plus 5% GST and 9.975% QST. Where you rent only through a platform registered for the tax on lodging that receives the whole payment, that platform collects and remits the lodging tax. Sales tax registration becomes mandatory once your taxable supplies pass $30,000 in a quarter or across the four preceding quarters.

What happens if you rent on Airbnb in Sainte-Thérèse without registering?

Operating an unregistered tourist accommodation establishment carries a fine of $2,500 to $25,000 for an individual and $5,000 to $50,000 otherwise, doubled for a second offence and tripled after that. Platforms are separately barred from listing you, so an unregistered advert usually gets pulled rather than taking bookings. Section 67.7 of the federal Income Tax Act also denies expense deductions on a non-compliant short-term rental, which often costs more than the fine.

Can you rent a property in Sainte-Thérèse for longer stays instead?

Yes, and it's the standard workaround for anyone who doesn't live in the unit. Quebec's Tourist Accommodation Act only reaches stays of 31 days or fewer, so a rental of more than 31 consecutive days isn't a tourist accommodation establishment, needs no CITQ registration and attracts no tax on lodging. It falls under ordinary landlord and tenant rules instead. Count the nights carefully, since 31 is inside the Act and 32 is outside 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.