Santa Clara County, California Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Santa Clara County, California and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that nobody here bans short-term renting outright, and the county government itself asks remarkably little of you. Going through the County of Santa Clara's Zoning Ordinance, there's no short-term rental section in it at all, no county permit, no day cap, and no registration beyond a tax account.

The catch is that the county only writes rules for its unincorporated land, a thin slice of a place with nearly two million residents, so for most owners here the binding rulebook belongs to a city. And the fifteen cities disagree with each other more than you'd expect. Sunnyvale and Milpitas allow hosted stays only, meaning you have to be there, while Mountain View lets you leave for 60 nights a year, the City of Santa Clara for 90, and San José is looser still. The tax ranges from 8% in the unincorporated pockets to 15.5% in Palo Alto, and San José's own rate moves to 12% on October 1, 2026 after voters passed Measure A.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in 2026: which of the two governments above you is the one that matters, what the county does and doesn't require, what the big cities demand on top, the tax you'll owe and who collects it, how any of it gets enforced, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from the county's, the cities' or the state's own pages, and where a source wouldn't open for me I've said so instead of guessing. If you're weighing a Santa Clara County property against a market with lighter rules, run both through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Santa Clara County, California?

Since the answer turns almost entirely on which side of a city line your parcel sits, the first job, then, is separating the two layers of government that could be regulating you.

The bottom layer is the County of Santa Clara, and it reaches only the unincorporated area: San Martin, the Santa Cruz Mountains parcels, Stanford lands, the rural stretches east of Morgan Hill, and various pockets between city boundaries. I read the county's Zoning Ordinance end to end in its published version, and it never uses the phrase "short-term rental", so there's no use classification for it, no supplemental use regulation, and nothing in the permit tables.

Two neighbouring classifications do exist, though, and knowing where their edges sit keeps you out of trouble. Hotels & Motels means "establishments providing more than six guest units", so a house or a condo can't be one. Bed & Breakfast Inns means "establishments providing short term overnight accommodations with a maximum of six guestrooms, including kitchen and dining room facilities for guests", they need a Use Permit, and § 4.10.060 attaches a rule that quietly rules out the ordinary Airbnb model: "No guest shall occupy the premises more than 14 days within any 30-day period."

So renting your own house by the night falls between those two definitions rather than inside either. And the county clearly knows people do it, because its tax department says so in writing. The Department of Tax and Collections collects transient occupancy tax on "hotels, motels, short-term rentals, and recreational vehicle sites located in unincorporated areas of the County". Temporary lodging, it adds, "can include your home if you rent your space using sites like Airbnb, Home Away, etc." A tax the county levies on your listing is hard to square with the listing being illegal.

Even so, I'd stop short of calling it affirmatively permitted, because no county provision says that either. Where a rural parcel or an unusual zoning district is involved, the county runs a formal zoning interpretation procedure, and that's the only way to get an answer you can rely on later. Do check your jurisdiction first with the county's Property Profile tool, because plenty of addresses with a San José or Los Gatos mailing address are legally inside a city and never see a county rule at all.

The top layer is whichever city you're actually in, and that layer is where the real restrictions live. Here's how the county's fifteen cities sort out on the question every owner asks first, which is whether you can rent the whole place while you're somewhere else:

• You can't, at any price: Sunnyvale, where SMC § 19.76.030 makes short-term rental "a prohibited use in every zoning district in the city, with the exception of approved hosted rentals", and Milpitas, whose zoning ordinance, readopted in October 2025, permits hosted rentals only.
• You can, up to a point: Mountain View caps unhosted stays at 60 days a year, and the City of Santa Clara caps them at 90 days a year under section 18.60.250 of its city code, added by Ordinance 2066 and live since November 2024. Stay in the home and both cities drop the cap entirely.
• You can, under a zoning part rather than a permit scheme: San José, which handles this through Part 2.5 of Chapter 20.80 of its Municipal Code.
• Check before you assume anything: Palo Alto, Cupertino, Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill and Gilroy. I couldn't open a primary ordinance for any of those ten, so I won't tell you what their rules say.

One line runs through all of it, mercifully. Everywhere in this county, "short-term" means a stay of 30 days or less, and a longer stay stops being a short-term rental and stops attracting the hotel tax. San José's code puts it as "thirty consecutive calendar days or less, counting portions of calendar days as full calendar days", so just make sure you count the nights properly before you rely on the exemption.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Santa Clara County

That jurisdiction question isn't a formality you can settle later, then, because it decides whether you're facing a tax registration or a permit application with a fee attached. So step one is the county's Property Profile lookup. Feed it an address or an APN and it returns the parcel's jurisdiction, zoning and general plan designation.

Assuming the answer comes back unincorporated, you then have the lightest regime in the Bay Area and still one real obligation. Register with the Department of Tax and Collections within 30 days of your first rental, collect 8% from guests, and remit monthly. Beyond that there's no land use application, no inspection, no occupancy cap at county level, and no local-contact requirement.

Be aware that light regulation isn't the same as no risk. Unincorporated parcels here skew towards high fire hazard severity zones, septic systems and private roads, and your insurer will care about all three even though the county's planners won't ask.

Assuming instead you're inside a city, then the honest framing is that your business model has to fit the city rather than the other way round. Buying a Sunnyvale or Milpitas condo to run unhosted is not a plan that survives contact with either code, and no permit unlocks it. A spare room in the house you live in, though, works almost everywhere, and a second home you visit often works in Mountain View at 60 nights, in the City of Santa Clara at 90, and in San José on the terms in Table 20-165 of its zoning code.

Three state-law traps catch people in this county specifically, and each one is worth checking before you buy rather than after:

• Accessory dwelling units. Gov. Code § 66323(e) requires that rentals of ADUs approved under that section "be for a term longer than 30 days", and AB 1154 of 2025 extended the same floor to junior ADUs. Silicon Valley added a lot of ADUs lately, and plenty of owners assumed the granny flat was the Airbnb.
• SB 9 lot splits. Gov. Code § 66411.7(h) is blunt: "A local agency shall require that a rental of any unit created pursuant to this section be for a term longer than 30 days." The unincorporated county maps SB 9 eligibility across its R1, R1E, RHS, R1S, RR and A1 parcels, so this bites here.
• Your HOA. Civ. Code § 4741(c) lets a common interest development prohibit "transient or short-term rental ... for a period of 30 days or less" even though it cannot ban longer tenancies. In a county this dense with condos and townhomes, the CC&Rs beat the city code more often than the city code beats you.

Remember that none of those three depends on the city being strict. They bite everywhere.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Santa Clara County

Once you've worked out which government you answer to and your unit clears those state carve-outs, there's still the question of what you have to hold before the first guest arrives, and the answer splits along the same county-versus-city line.

At county level there is no licence and no permit. What exists is a tax account, and the Department of Tax and Collections asks you to register the property within 30 days of your first rental through its TOT Online portal at santaclaracounty.hdlgov.com, then file and pay every month.

I couldn't find a registration fee stated anywhere on the county's pages, and the ordinance PDF the county links wouldn't load for me, so treat the registration as free until the department tells you otherwise. The county doesn't issue general business licences for unincorporated land either. That's the whole of it.

Inside the cities, a permit is normally two documents rather than one, and the second catches people out. The City of Santa Clara requires an Administrative Permit for Short-Term Rentals and a valid City Business License before you advertise, runs the permit on a calendar-year basis with fees prorated quarterly, ties it personally to the host so it expires automatically on sale, and lets it lapse if you don't file for renewal before December 15. Renewal also wants proof that you've remitted your transient occupancy tax, so a host who under-collected during the year finds out at renewal.

Mountain View wants a business licence and a tax registration first, then an online short-term rental registration, and it treats the unit as a congregate residence with a 10-occupant ceiling, whereas Milpitas charges $555 for its permit as of July 2026, wants $500,000 of liability insurance, and needs a named alternative contact who can be on site within 60 minutes. Sunnyvale, meanwhile, runs approval through the Director of Community Development, caps overnight lodgers at four per unit, and requires the approval number in every ad.

San José works differently again, since its rules sit in the zoning code rather than in a permit scheme. Part 2.5 of Chapter 20.80 defines a host as the owner of record or a lessee under a written lease, defines host present as being on the premises "at all times between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.", and requires a local contact person available "twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week" who responds "within sixty minutes" to complaints and takes remedial action, all of which I read in the ordinance the City Council adopted in September 2020.

The operating limits themselves are another matter. The annual cap on nights when the host is away, and the guest counts by unit size, live in Table 20-165 under section 20.80.170, and I could not open the codified text of that table, because the city's code viewer serves nothing to automated requests and no archived copy exists.

Secondary write-ups all put the cap at 180 days a year when the host isn't present, and unlimited when they are, yet I haven't read that on an official page, so get the current table from San José Planning before you build a calendar around it. What the city does require regardless is a Business Tax Certificate and a tax account with the Finance Department.

Required Documents for Santa Clara County Short-Term Rentals

Given how little the county asks for, an unincorporated registration is a short exercise, and what still takes real time is the city paperwork.

For the county's tax account you'll want the property address and APN, the owner or operator's legal name and mailing address, the date of your first rental, and bank or card details for remittance. The county charges 2.22% with a $1.49 minimum on card payments while eCheck is free, so eCheck is the obvious default on a monthly filing. Keep your booking records too, since the return is a self-report and the department can ask you to back it up.

City applications ask for a good deal more, and the recurring items across the four cities I read in full are these:

• The property owner's signature, if you're a tenant rather than the owner. Santa Clara requires it on the application form itself.
• A letter of authorization from your HOA, which Sunnyvale requires outright where the property sits in a common interest development.
• Proof of liability insurance, $500,000 minimum in Milpitas, naming the city unless the cover comes through the platform.
• Your local contact person's name and 24/7 number, someone who can reach the property inside 60 minutes in Santa Clara, Mountain View and Milpitas alike.
• Your city business licence number, which usually has to exist before the short-term rental application will be accepted rather than alongside it.
• A signed good-neighbour acknowledgement, posted inside the unit in Milpitas, and an occupancy or exit posting in several others.

Don't forget the ordinary landlord paperwork underneath all of that: your lease or CC&Rs, your fire and carbon monoxide compliance, and in the unincorporated county your septic and well records. A complaint that starts as a noise call has a way of becoming an Environmental Health visit.

Santa Clara County Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get the permitting sorted and are able to start hosting, there's still the tax to deal with, and this is the layer where the county genuinely does apply to everyone, just at fifteen different rates.

California levies no state occupancy tax. Revenue & Taxation Code § 7280 simply authorizes any "city, county, or city and county" to tax occupancy of 30 days or less, with no cap on the rate, and every number below is therefore a local one.

Jurisdiction	Transient occupancy tax	Who collects it from the guest
Unincorporated Santa Clara County	8%	You do. Airbnb has no county entry on its California list
San José	10% now, 12% from October 1, 2026	Airbnb collects
Palo Alto	15.5%	Airbnb collects
Milpitas	14%	Airbnb collects
City of Santa Clara	13.5%	Airbnb collects
Sunnyvale	12.5%	Airbnb collects
Cupertino	12%	Airbnb collects
Los Gatos	12%	Airbnb collects
Morgan Hill	11% plus 1.5% tourism district assessment	Airbnb collects
Mountain View	10%	Airbnb collects
Gilroy	9% plus 2% tourism district assessment	Airbnb collects
Campbell, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Monte Sereno	not verified	No entry on Airbnb's list, so assume you remit

The rates for Cupertino, Los Gatos, Morgan Hill, Gilroy and Palo Alto come from Airbnb's own California collection list, which tells you what the platform charges and remits rather than what a city ordinance says. The others I checked against the jurisdiction's own pages.

Two rows deserve a closer look. The unincorporated county row is the one that costs people money, because Airbnb doesn't collect there. You charge 8% of the rental price, collect it when the guest pays, show it separately from the rent on the receipt, and pay the previous month's tax by the last day of the current month. Miss that and the county adds a 10% penalty plus 1.5% interest, then another 10% once the tax has gone unpaid for more than 30 days. Only federal and state workers on official business and treaty-covered foreign officials are exempt. That's the whole exemption list. Do confirm the 8% before your first return, since the county's site blocks automated checks and the newest copy of that page I could read dates to late 2025.

The San José row is the one that's moving. The city runs two hotel taxes side by side, and its Hotel Taxes page sets them out: Chapter 4.72 of the Municipal Code takes 6% of room rent for the convention centre, cultural grants and the visitors bureau, while Chapter 4.74 takes 4% for general purposes. Measure A raised that second half from 4% to 6%, and the ordinance the voters approved says it "shall go into effect on October 1, 2026".

Keep in mind that San José counts cleaning fees, pet fees, resort fees, extra-person fees and even no-show and cancellation fees as taxable rent, so the 12% lands on more than your nightly rate. Its Convention Center Facilities District tax and Hotel Business Improvement District fee exist too, yet the first attaches to hotel-classified property and the second only to hotels with 80 or more rooms. Neither reaches a house.

Two more layers sit above all of that. The California Tourism Assessment is a self-assessment on travel and tourism revenue under the Tourism Marketing Act, administered by the California Office of Tourism and filed by you rather than by any platform. Rental profit is then ordinary income, taxable by the Franchise Tax Board for residents on everything and for nonresidents on California-source income. And if you want market numbers alongside the tax numbers, our California market data shows how the state's submarkets compare on revenue and occupancy.

California Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Those local rates exist because Sacramento decided, deliberately, to leave nearly all of this to cities and counties. There is no statewide short-term rental permit, no state registry, and no state occupancy tax, and the permits a given address needs can be looked up through CalGold, the state's own permit-lookup tool, while our California statewide guide covers the whole framework in detail.

What the state does supply, though, is guardrails at the edges, and four of them matter to a Santa Clara County host:

• Fine ceilings. For short-term rental ordinance infractions, Gov. Code § 25132(e) caps a county's fines at $1,500 for a first violation, $3,000 for a second within a year, and $5,000 for further ones, with the higher tiers reserved for violations that threaten public health or safety and a hardship waiver required. Cities work off the same schedule under § 36900(d).
• Platform pricing and disclosure. Since July 2024, advertised nightly rates have to include every mandatory fee except government taxes, with the full total shown before booking, under Bus. & Prof. Code § 17568.6. Since July 2025, cleaning tasks and any fee for skipping them have to be disclosed and acknowledged before booking, and guests can't be penalized over them.
• The lease and insurance warnings. Under Bus. & Prof. Code § 22592, platforms have to tell you that listing may breach your lease and that your insurance may not cover short-term rental use. Take both literally in a county this full of leaseholds and HOAs.
• SB 346, the Short-Term Rental Facilitator Act. In force since January 1, 2026, Gov. Code § 50990 makes platforms report each rental's physical address to the local agency and carry licence numbers and tax certification in listings. The important word is opt-in, since it binds platforms only where the local agency has adopted an ordinance turning it on, and I couldn't confirm that any Santa Clara County jurisdiction has. My guess is the larger cities will, because it hands them a listing-level address feed they've never had.

California's coastal rules dominate short-term rental politics in a lot of the state, yet they don't reach here at all, since Santa Clara County is entirely inland. That's worth comparing against the Bay Area counties that do sit on the coast, where the Coastal Commission's view of local bans changes the analysis. Our San Mateo County guide covers the peninsula immediately west of here, the San Francisco County guide covers the city many of your guests are flying into, and the Sonoma County guide covers the wine-country market most Bay Area hosts end up benchmarking against.

Does Santa Clara County Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given there's no county short-term rental ordinance, the county has nothing of that kind to enforce, and the question then splits into a tax answer and a city answer.

On the tax side, enforcement is arithmetic rather than inspection. Unincorporated hosts self-report monthly, the penalties compound, and the county contracts its transient occupancy tax administration out to a firm running the TOT Online portal, which is the kind of arrangement that produces desk audits and reconciliation letters rather than site visits.

Since Airbnb doesn't remit for the unincorporated area, though, the county holds no third-party record of your bookings. That cuts both ways. Nobody is filing a return for you, and nobody is quietly paying your tax either.

City enforcement, by contrast, turns on revocation and monitoring, and the City of Santa Clara can revoke a registration for fraud, misrepresentation or a false statement in the application, or for any violation of the section, the City Code, or state or federal law. It will also deny an application outright where the property sits under an active compliance order or citation, or where an application was denied or revoked in the previous 12 months.

Mountain View contracts complaint intake out and runs a dedicated 24-hour hotline on 650-282-1998. That's the model most peer cities have adopted, where neighbours call a number, the call generates a record, and the record then follows your permit into renewal. Sunnyvale takes the hardest line on paper, declaring any non-compliant short-term rental a public nuisance the city attorney may abate or enjoin.

Watch out for the renewal choke point, then, because that's where enforcement actually bites here. In the City of Santa Clara, renewing means proving you remitted your transient occupancy tax, and the tax collector gets to verify it. That beats a fine as a compliance tool, since it turns a year of quiet under-collection into a lost permit. I couldn't open the county's own code-enforcement pages on this pass, so I can't tell you what an administrative citation costs in the unincorporated area. The state ceilings above are the outer bound.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Santa Clara County

Taking all of that together, the order below matters more than it looks, because the early steps decide whether the later ones are worth paying for.

1. Find out which government you're under. Run the address or APN through the county's Property Profile tool. A San José or Los Gatos mailing address doesn't mean you're in that city, and the rest of this list turns on the answer.
2. Read your CC&Rs and your lease before anything else. Civ. Code § 4741(c) lets an HOA ban stays of 30 days or less outright, and no permit overrides it. It's free. And it kills more plans than the cities do.
3. Confirm the unit is eligible. If it's an ADU, a junior ADU, or a unit created by an SB 9 lot split, state law already requires rentals longer than 30 days, so stop here and price it as a mid-term rental instead.
4. Match the model to the city. Hosted only in Sunnyvale and Milpitas. Sixty unhosted nights in Mountain View, ninety in the City of Santa Clara, and San José's Table 20-165 limits in San José. Nothing at county level if you're unincorporated.
5. Get the business licence first, then the short-term rental approval. Most of these cities won't process the second without the first, and the sequencing is where applications stall.
6. Line up the local contact. Santa Clara, Mountain View and Milpitas all require someone reachable 24/7 who can be at the property inside 60 minutes. If that person is you and you live an hour away in traffic, it isn't a real answer.
7. Open the tax account before your first booking, not after. Unincorporated hosts register with the Department of Tax and Collections within 30 days of the first rental. City hosts register with the city's finance department even where Airbnb remits, because direct bookings and Vrbo stays may not be covered.
8. Check what your platform is collecting, per city. Airbnb collects in ten Santa Clara County jurisdictions and not in the unincorporated area. Anything it doesn't collect, you owe.
9. Diarize the renewal. The City of Santa Clara's registration lapses if you don't file before December 15, and its renewal needs proof of tax remitted. Put both dates in a calendar the day you're approved.

Who to Contact in Santa Clara County about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever step you get stuck on, three county offices and one city finance department handle most of what a host needs, and knowing which one owns your question saves an afternoon.

Transient occupancy tax, unincorporated area

The County of Santa Clara Department of Tax and Collections runs registration, monthly returns and payment for the unincorporated area.

• TOT unit address: 8839 N. Cedar Avenue #212, Fresno, CA 93720
• Phone: (408) 550-8678
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, closed weekends
• Register, file and pay: TOT Online, linked from the department's transient occupancy tax page

The department's main office sits at 110 West Tasman Drive, San Jose, CA 95134, open 8:00 am to 5:00 pm Monday to Friday, with phone hours from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. That office handles property tax rather than lodging tax, though, so use the Fresno number above for anything short-term rental related.

Zoning, permits and code questions in the unincorporated area

The County of Santa Clara Department of Planning and Development answers zoning questions, issues zoning interpretations, and handles code enforcement outside the cities.

• Address: 70 W. Hedding St., East Wing, 7th Floor, San José, CA 95110
• Phone: (408) 299-5700
• Hours: Monday to Thursday, 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Fridays are building services only, for active permits, at the same hours
• Other departments on site: Environmental Health, Roads and Airports, and the Fire Marshal's Office attend Tuesdays and Thursdays

One practical note from the department's own alert: scammers have emailed fake invoices to applicants with matters before the Planning Commission. Verify anything that looks like a bill by calling the number above.

San José taxes

The City of San José Finance Department administers the transient occupancy tax, the exemption forms and the remittance forms.

• In person: Cashiering, 200 E. Santa Clara St., 1st Floor, San José, CA 95113
• By mail: City of San José Finance Department, Attention: Payment Processing, 200 E. Santa Clara St., 13th Floor, San José, CA 95113
• Main line: 408 535-3500, TTY 800 735-2922
• Forms and current rates: the city's Hotel Taxes page

The other cities

Sunnyvale routes approvals through the Director of Community Development, the City of Santa Clara through its planning division and business licence desk, Mountain View through Finance and Administrative Services at 500 Castro Street, and Milpitas through its Planning Division. For Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill, Palo Alto and Saratoga, call the planning counter directly, since I couldn't open a current ordinance for any of those ten and I'd rather send you to the source than repeat a number I haven't verified.

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Santa Clara County on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Since so much of this guide has been about which rules I could and couldn't verify, it's only fair to be equally clear here. Reddit blocks automated access and its terms don't permit the commercial use a survey would need, and I couldn't open a Santa Clara County thread on BiggerPockets either. So what follows is my read of the recurring themes rather than a survey, and do weigh it accordingly.

• The complaint is fragmentation, not severity. Owners here rarely describe a single hostile rulebook. They describe fifteen of them, plus a county layer, and the frustration is that a strategy which works in one city is illegal three miles away. Milpitas and Mountain View share a border and take opposite positions on unhosted stays.
• Hosted-only cities push inventory into the 30-plus-night market. Where the whole-unit model is closed, the pivot most owners describe is furnished mid-term rentals aimed at contract workers and relocating engineers, which sits outside the short-term rental rules and outside the hotel tax entirely. In a corporate-relocation market this deep, that's a credible fallback.
• The tax rate rarely decides anything. Guests pay it, platforms mostly collect it, and the spread between 8% and 15.5% moves a booking decision far less than the nightly rate does. What hosts get burned by instead is the jurisdiction where nobody collects for them, which here is the unincorporated area.
• Nobody seriously argues the rules aren't real anymore. The debate has moved on from whether cities enforce to how renewal and permit conditions constrain a business, which is a more practical conversation than the one this county was having in 2019.

Take that fragmentation point seriously if you're still shopping. In most counties, regulatory research is one document, whereas here it's a per-address question whose answer can change on the other side of a street.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Santa Clara County, California in 2026?

In most of the county, yes. The County of Santa Clara has never adopted a short-term rental ordinance, so in the unincorporated area there's no permit, no day cap and no registration beyond a transient occupancy tax account, which must be opened within 30 days of the first rental. Inside the fifteen cities, city law governs instead. Sunnyvale and Milpitas allow hosted stays only, meaning you must be present, while Mountain View, the City of Santa Clara and San José allow unhosted stays subject to annual limits.

How much is the hotel tax on a short-term rental in Santa Clara County?

It depends on the jurisdiction. Unincorporated Santa Clara County charges 8% of the rental price, collected and remitted by the host monthly, because Airbnb does not collect for the county. San José charges 10%, rising to 12% on October 1, 2026 after voters approved Measure A. Elsewhere the rate runs from 9% plus a 2% tourism assessment in Gilroy to 15.5% in Palo Alto. California itself levies no state occupancy tax on lodging.

Does Santa Clara County require a short-term rental permit?

No. The county's Zoning Ordinance contains no short-term rental use classification, no permit and no registration requirement for the unincorporated area, and the only county obligation is registering for transient occupancy tax with the Department of Tax and Collections. Permits in this county are a city matter. The City of Santa Clara requires an Administrative Permit plus a business licence, Milpitas charges $555 for its permit, and Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San José each run their own approval or registration process.

Can you short-term rent an ADU in Santa Clara County?

Generally not. California Government Code § 66323(e) requires that rentals of accessory dwelling units approved under that section run longer than 30 days, and AB 1154 of 2025 applied the same floor to junior ADUs. Units created through an SB 9 urban lot split carry an equivalent restriction under Government Code § 66411.7(h). Several cities go further and exclude ADUs from short-term rental eligibility in their own codes, so check the local rule as well as the state one.

What happens if you don't pay transient occupancy tax in unincorporated Santa Clara County?

The county adds a 10% penalty plus 1.5% interest, then another 10% once the tax has gone unpaid for more than 30 days. Returns are monthly, due by the last day of the following month. No platform remits here, so the obligation sits entirely with the host.

Regulation research here is a property-level question wearing a county-level name, and that's the habit worth carrying into whatever market you look at next. Read the government's own words, never a summary of them. Rules change at the street corner more often than at the county line.

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