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

Do you own a place in Sicamous, British Columbia and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and you don't have to be living in it either. Most of this province now limits short-term rentals to a host's principal residence, yet the Province's list of exempt communities puts Sicamous outside that rule, because the District's population sits under 10,000 and it isn't within 15 kilometres of a larger municipality. So you can still run a legal nightly rental on Mara Lake in 2026 while living somewhere else entirely, which is more than a host in Kamloops, Vernon or Chilliwack can say.

The catch is zoning, and it bites harder than most owners expect. This District on the Shuswap allows short-term rentals in a short list of zones and nowhere else, so a good many ordinary Sicamous houses are simply not eligible, no matter how well they'd rent. On top of the zoning you're looking at a $500 annual business licence from the District, a separate provincial registration number, a fire and building inspection, a named local contact who can be standing at the door inside an hour, and three taxes riding on every night you sell.

So let's walk through what this takes in practice: which zones work, what the licence costs and how long it lasts, the paperwork the District wants first, the taxes stacked on a nightly stay, how British Columbia's rules sit above all of it, and who to phone when your situation doesn't fit the form. Every figure below comes from the District of Sicamous's bylaws or the B.C. government's own pages, checked in July 2026.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Sicamous, British Columbia?

Those bylaws don't live in one place, though, and that's the first thing that catches people out. Three separate instruments govern a Sicamous short-term rental, and each one can shut you down on its own.

The zoning comes first, and Zoning Bylaw No. 1000, 2022 calls a Short Term Rental "the use of a Dwelling Unit as a Sleeping Unit", with a Sleeping Unit being "a unit of accommodation, not subject to a tenancy agreement, for rental on a daily, weekly, or monthly rate". Notice how wide that is, because a monthly rate counts too. So a furnished let with no tenancy agreement behind it is a short-term rental in Sicamous even when the guest stays five weeks, which is not how most provinces draw the line.

Where the use is allowed is much narrower. According to the District's short-term rental page, last updated on 30 January 2026, the permitted zones are CR Country Residential, MUR-2 Seasonal Accommodation, and the C-1 through C-4 and C-6 commercial zones, where the relevant use is "Tourist Accommodation" rather than Short Term Rental. The bylaw defines Tourist Accommodation as land or buildings providing temporary accommodation for travellers in Sleeping Units, so a hotel, a motel or a set of cabins. MUR-2 is the one worth reading closely if you own a condo, since the zone's stated intent is seasonal second homes "and to a lesser extent, short term rentals where supported by the strata".

Section 3.10.9 of the zoning bylaw then attaches four operating conditions wherever the use is permitted:

• You must hold a valid business licence under the Business Licence Bylaw. No licence, no legal operation, however the property is zoned.
• Off-street parking must be provided in accordance with Schedule D, which works out to one space per bedroom.
• Unless the property is your permanent dwelling, you must designate a local responsible person who has access to the premises and authority to make decisions about the rental, whose name and contact details are displayed inside the unit, and who can attend within one hour of being asked.
• Maximum occupancy is two adults per bedroom.

That occupancy cap quietly sets your revenue ceiling, so it deserves a moment. A three-bedroom cabin sleeps six adults in Sicamous, full stop, and those bedrooms oblige you to find three off-street parking spaces. Boats and boat trailers count, which matters in a lake town where half your guests arrive towing something.

A Bed & Breakfast is a different animal in this bylaw and people mix the two up constantly. It's classed as a Home Based Business, the operator has to be the permanent occupant of the principal dwelling on the parcel, and it's capped at four guestrooms. So live in the house and rent rooms and you're a B&B, whereas renting the whole place while you're elsewhere makes you a short-term rental, with everything that follows.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Sicamous

Which means the very first thing to settle is not the money, it's the zone. Before you buy, before you furnish, before you photograph anything, pull the parcel up on the District's mapping hub and confirm what it's zoned. None of what follows helps you if the answer comes back R-1, and the District's planning staff would much rather have that conversation before an offer than after.

Two of the permitted zones are the realistic ones for most buyers. CR Country Residential covers the larger rural parcels, which is where the classic Sicamous lake cabin tends to sit, and it carries Short Term Rental as a principal permitted use rather than an accessory one. MUR-2 covers the seasonal condo and resort-style developments, and there the strata is your gatekeeper. Make sure you get that answer in writing early, because the District requires a signed Strata Consent Form from an executive strata council member confirming that no strata bylaw prohibits the use and that the parking stalls you claimed are genuinely assigned to your unit. A strata that says no ends the project, and no municipal permission overrides it.

The commercial zones are a different proposition again, since C-1 through C-4 and C-6 run along Main Street, the waterfront and the houseboat frontage under the Tourist Accommodation heading that hotels and cabin resorts sit in. Buying commercially to run one Airbnb rarely pencils out, though if you already own something near the water, that's the cleanest path in Sicamous.

Now do the maths on your own building before you go further. Count the bedrooms, multiply by two for your legal maximum head count, then count the parking spaces you can fit on the property at 6 metres by 2.8 metres each with 2.2 metres of clear height. Watch out for a small trap in the paperwork here, because the District's application checklist quotes a minimum stall of 2.75 metres wide while the zoning page quotes 2.8 metres, so build to the larger number and the question never comes up. A recreational vehicle space needs 12 metres by 4 metres, which is worth knowing before you advertise boat parking you can't legally provide.

Ownership matters too, and it's stricter than in most B.C. towns, because the registered owner of the property has to be the short-term rental business owner. So a tenant can't licence a short-term rental in Sicamous at all, and the only exception the application form carves out is a bed and breakfast run by a tenant with an agent authorization form attached. Rental arbitrage, in other words, is off the table.

Assuming your zone and your strata both come back clean, this is a genuinely workable market by British Columbia standards. The comparison that makes the point: Chilliwack's short-term rental rules and Maple Ridge's short-term rental rules both sit inside the principal residence requirement, so an investor-owned whole unit is off the table there. Sicamous, along with smaller exempt communities like Merritt and Hope, kept the door open. Whether the nightly economics justify a lake purchase is a separate question, so run the property through BNBCalc before you commit to anything.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Sicamous

Once the zoning and the ownership both check out, you still can't take a booking until the District licences you. The annual fee for a Short-Term Rental or a Bed & Breakfast is $500, set in Part 5 of the Fees and Charges Bylaw No. 740, 2009 as amended by Bylaw No. 1102, 2025 and effective from January 2025. That's a steep jump from the $95 a general Sicamous business pays, and council's stated reason when it approved the increase on 22 January 2025 was to bring the District into line with neighbouring municipalities and cover the administrative cost of processing these files.

The licence year is the calendar year. Under Business Licensing and Regulations Bylaw No. 830, 2011, licences run 1 January to 31 December, renewal invoices go out in December, and payment is due on or before 31 January. A business that stops operating for six months has its licence deemed expired, which is a live risk for a seasonal lake property, so keep some bookings on the calendar or expect to reapply. Start a new business after 30 September and the fee is pro-rated by half.

The fee is due on application, before anyone reviews the file, and it doesn't come back if you change your mind: the District keeps $25 if you withdraw before the review, $50 after the review but before the fire inspection, and $95 after it. Remember that the review is no formality either, because the Licence Inspector can require inspections by the District's Building Inspector and the Fire Chief plus approvals from public health officials, and the form carries a signature block for all three.

A licence can be refused where building, zoning, health, sanitation or business requirements aren't met, and you can appeal that refusal to Council, which in turn can suspend or revoke a licence for reasonable cause after giving notice. One quirk to file away: when a short-term rental changes hands, the new owner needs a fresh application and a fresh licence, not a $25 name change. The licence does not travel with the property.

Once you hold one, the bylaw puts four pieces of information into every advert you run, on Airbnb, Vrbo, Facebook Marketplace or anywhere else. The listing must show your business licence number, the number of bedrooms, the number of off-street parking spaces, and the maximum guest occupancy with the maximum number of vehicles paying guests may bring. That last one is unusual and hosts miss it, so do check your live listings against it.

Your local responsible person carries a harder standard than the zoning bylaw alone suggests. Bylaw 830 requires them to answer a phone call within 15 minutes and be at the property in person within one hour, and the application form adds that they must be reachable 24 hours a day for the duration of any guest stay and live within a one-hour drive. It can be you, if you meet all of that. If you live in Calgary, it can't be, and you'll be paying somebody local to be on call.

Then there's the guest registry. On a complaint, the District can ask you for a daily register carrying the names, contact information and licence plate numbers of everyone staying overnight, and it can ask any time between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm. Failing to produce it can cost you the licence. Keep the register from your first booking rather than reconstructing it under pressure.

Sitting above the municipal licence is the provincial one, and you need both. B.C.'s short-term rental registry charges $100 a year where the rental is host-occupied and $450 where it isn't, so a Sicamous investment cabin falls in the $450 band, plus a $1.50 service fee. Registration then expires annually, with a renewal window that opens 40 days out. Bookings longer than 90 days sit outside the registry altogether, as do hotels, motels, hostels, RV and tent sites, strata guest suites and seasonal accommodation genuinely unsuitable for year-round living.

Required Documents for Sicamous Short-Term Rentals

Getting that licence issued is mostly a paperwork exercise, and the District is explicit that incomplete applications may not be accepted and will take longer. Section 71 of Bylaw 830, added by Business Licensing Regulations Amending Bylaw No. 1027, lists what has to travel with the form:

• A completed pre-inspection self-evaluation safety audit checklist. This is your own walkthrough before the Fire Department's.
• A floor plan to scale showing the location of smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, fire exits and each bedroom, with all opening windows of at least 60 cm by 60 cm marked.
• An off-street parking plan to scale, in metric, with one space per bedroom.
• Contact details for the local responsible person, which the District then publishes on its public short-term rental map.
• Proof of PST and MRDT registration with the provincial Ministry of Finance, or a sworn affidavit that an online platform will remit those taxes directly to the Province.
• A list of every booking platform or other means of advertising you intend to use.
• Evidence, to the Licence Inspector's satisfaction, that no strata bylaw made under the Strata Property Act prohibits the use. In practice that's the Strata Consent Form.

Two more items come from the application package itself. You need a copy of title pulled from the Land Title Office within 30 days of applying, so leave that one until late in the process, and an Appointment of Agent form wherever the applicant isn't the sole registered owner.

The pre-inspection checklist is worth reading properly rather than ticking through, because it's the part that turns into physical work. Smoke alarms are expected on every floor and in every bedroom, ideally hardwired and interconnected, while carbon monoxide detectors go on every level where there's a gas appliance or an attached garage. Every bedroom window then has to meet egress, meaning a clear opening of at least 3.77 square feet with no dimension under 15 inches, releasable without special knowledge. Extinguishers rated 2A-10BC or better must be visibly mounted on each floor and inspected and tagged annually, and portable heaters are out entirely. Beyond that, the furnace needs an inspection and a filter change inside the past year, so does the chimney, every circuit breaker has to be labelled in English and left accessible to guests, and the rest runs to handrails, guards at the required heights, visible address numbers, exterior lighting at each entrance and a clean dryer vent.

None of that is exotic for a well-kept house, though it does take a few weekends and a chimney sweep, so start it before you file rather than after the Fire Chief has been round.

Sicamous Short-Term Rental Taxes

One of those documents, the PST and MRDT registration proof, points straight at the next thing to sort out. Three taxes attach to a nightly stay in Sicamous, and they're administered by two different governments, so it's easiest to take them one row at a time.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
PST on accommodation	8%	B.C. Ministry of Finance, or your platform
Municipal and Regional District Tax	2%	B.C. Ministry of Finance, returned to the District of Sicamous
GST	5%	Canada Revenue Agency, or your platform

The 8% provincial sales tax on accommodation applies across British Columbia, and the B.C. accommodation tax page sets it out along with the Municipal and Regional District Tax, which runs up to 3% in participating areas. Sicamous participates at 2%, a rate fixed by item 26.1 of the Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation, which names the District as both the designated accommodation area and the recipient and runs the designation to 1 September 2030. That money comes home too: the District joined the MRDT programme in September 2020 and reports more than $83,000 coming back in 2021, its first full year of collection, all spent on destination marketing.

Who actually hands the money over depends on how you sell. Where every booking comes through an online marketplace facilitator such as Airbnb, and that platform is registered in B.C., you don't have to register for PST and MRDT yourself. List the same property anywhere else as well, whether that's your own website, a local periodical or a Facebook post, and you must register and collect on those sales yourself. There's a sting in the tail even for platform-only hosts, mind you, since you stay on the hook for any PST and MRDT the platform fails to collect and pay over on your accommodation. You don't need a second number, at least, because your PST number doubles as your MRDT number.

Two exemptions are worth knowing. Accommodation escapes PST and MRDT where you don't list on an online marketplace platform, your gross accommodation revenue was under $2,500 in the previous 12 months, and you reasonably expect it to stay under $2,500 in the next 12, and a charge of $30 or less per unit per day or $210 or less per week is exempt as well. Neither is likely to cover a genuine Shuswap rental, though a spare room rented a handful of nights a year to friends of friends might land inside the first one.

GST sits on top at 5%, and the Canada Revenue Agency's guidance for platform-based accommodation explains the split: a GST-registered host charges and collects it themselves, including on platform bookings, while an unregistered host has the platform collect and remit instead. You're generally required to register once taxable supplies pass $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters. For a guest, then, the all-in provincial and federal load on a Sicamous night is 15% of the room rate.

Then there's a federal rule that ties all of this back to your licence, and it's the one that turns a paperwork lapse into a tax bill. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions for a "non-compliant short-term rental", meaning one operating where short-term rentals aren't permitted or one that doesn't meet every registration, licensing and permit requirement that applies, and the denial is proportional, calculated as expenses multiplied by non-compliant days over total short-term rental days. So an unlicensed Sicamous cabin doesn't only risk a municipal ticket, it also loses the mortgage interest, the utilities and the depreciation against that income.

British Columbia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That federal test asks whether you meet the provincial requirements, which makes British Columbia's framework the layer to understand properly. It arrived with the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, passed in 2023, and it changed the province more than any municipal bylaw did.

Four pieces of it reach a Sicamous host:

• The provincial registry. Every host must register and display a valid provincial registration number on their listing, and platforms must validate those numbers against the Province's data. The requirement went live for listings on 1 May 2025.
• Business licence display. Where a local government requires a business licence, and Sicamous does, the number has to appear on the listing.
• The end of non-conforming use protection. Legal non-conforming use no longer shields a short-term rental. An operation grandfathered under an older zoning regime lost that protection, which is exactly why the zone your parcel sits in decides everything.
• Platform data sharing. Platforms now hand listing information to local governments every month, which is how a District this size keeps track of listings it would otherwise have to find one at a time.

The principal residence requirement is the piece Sicamous escapes, and it's the single most valuable fact for anyone buying here. Where it applies, a host may only rent their principal residence plus one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit on the same property, which removes the investor-owned second home from the market entirely. The Province's exempt categories include municipalities under 10,000 people that aren't within 15 kilometres of a larger municipality, mountain resort areas, Resort Municipality Initiative communities, regional district electoral areas and farm class land. Sicamous is named on the exempt municipalities list.

Do keep an eye on that, though, because it isn't permanent. An exempt local government can opt in by a 28 February deadline, with the requirement taking effect the following 1 November. I haven't found any sign that Sicamous council is heading that way, and the District's own material treats non-resident-owned rentals as normal, but it's a council decision rather than a provincial one, so it's worth checking the Province's list again before a purchase.

The Act also handed local governments much sharper teeth, since the Province raised the maximum municipal ticketing fine from $1,000 to $3,000 per infraction per day and lifted the maximum fine for a regional district bylaw prosecution from $2,000 to $50,000. On the provincial side, enforcement runs through a Compliance and Enforcement Unit that investigates, issues compliance orders, levies administrative penalties, seeks injunctions in the Supreme Court and publishes its decisions. Platforms have had to stop advertising unregistered listings since 2 June 2025 and cancel their future bookings since 23 June 2025.

Does Sicamous Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given that platforms now feed the District a monthly listing file and the Province delists anything unregistered, the honest answer is that hiding is no longer an option, whatever the District itself chooses to do about you.

Sicamous describes its own approach as seeking voluntary compliance through education and communication, with tickets reserved for ongoing or serious violations, which is a softer posture than a big-city enforcement unit runs. It also names five example offences on its short-term rental page, and they read like a record of what it has already seen. There's operating without a valid business licence, operating contrary to zoning restrictions, advertising without a valid licence number displayed, advertising beyond the approved occupancy limit, and operating an unsafe or nuisance property.

Notice how many of those are visible from a listing page. Your licence number, bedroom count, parking count and maximum occupancy are all supposed to be published on the platform, so an officer comparing the advert against the licence record doesn't need to visit the property to open a case. The two-adults-per-bedroom cap is the one that catches hosts, because a three-bedroom cabin advertised as sleeping ten is a self-reported violation.

The complaint route runs both ways here. The District publishes licensed short-term rentals, with the local responsible person's contact details, on a public short-term rental map, and it asks neighbours to phone that person before escalating. That's a real courtesy to hosts who answer their phone. Be aware that it cuts the other way too, since a neighbour can check whether your address appears on the map at all. One practical snag as of August 2026: the "Launch the Short Term Rental Map" link on the District's own page is broken, its href holding a stray sentence instead of a URL, so phone 250-836-2477 rather than assuming the map is gone.

Where matters do escalate, a ticket gives you 14 days from service to file a notice of dispute. A screening officer reviews it, and a rejected dispute can go on to the Provincial Court of British Columbia. Prosecution under the business licence bylaw carries a fine of not less than $100 and not more than $2,000 including the cost of prosecution, plus the licence fee you avoided, and each day a violation continues counts as a separate offence. Bylaw 830 also allows a penalty of up to $2,000 or 60 days' imprisonment on summary conviction, which nobody expects to see used against a cabin owner but which sits in the text.

Stack the layers and the exposure is real without being punitive. A municipal ticket now reaching $3,000 a day, a daily-recurring bylaw prosecution, a provincial administrative penalty, delisting by the platform, and a federal deduction denial under section 67.7, all attaching to the same unlicensed cabin. Compared with the $500 licence, compliance is the cheap option by a wide margin.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Sicamous

Since compliance is the cheap route, the sequence below spends your money in the order that answers questions, free checks first and the non-refundable fee last.

1. Confirm the zoning before anything else. Check the parcel on the District's mapping hub and against the permitted list of CR, MUR-2 and the C-1 to C-4 and C-6 commercial zones. Speak to planning staff at 250-836-2477 if the zone is ambiguous. A wrong answer here invalidates everything after it.
2. Clear the strata, if there is one. MUR-2 condos need a signed Strata Consent Form from an executive council member confirming no strata bylaw prohibits the use and that your parking stalls are assigned. Get it before you spend anything.
3. Confirm the ownership shape. The registered owner must be the business owner. Tenants can't licence a short-term rental, and only a bed and breakfast has a tenant route.
4. Do the bedroom, occupancy and parking maths. Two adults per bedroom, one off-street space per bedroom at 6 m by 2.8 m, 12 m by 4 m for a recreational vehicle. Boat trailers park off-street.
5. Work through the pre-inspection checklist and fix what fails. Alarms, carbon monoxide detectors, egress windows, tagged extinguishers, furnace and chimney servicing, labelled breakers, handrails and guards.
6. Register with the Province. Registration runs $450 a year for a non-host-occupied rental, $100 where you live on site, plus the $1.50 fee, and the number has to appear on your listing.
7. Sort the tax registration. Platform-only sellers can rely on the facilitator, otherwise register for PST, which covers MRDT on the same number. Watch the $30,000 GST threshold.
8. Assemble the application. Form, safety checklist, scaled floor plan, scaled parking plan, local responsible person details, tax proof or affidavit, platform list, strata consent, and title pulled within the previous 30 days.
9. Pay the $500 and book the inspections. Expect the Fire Department, the Chief Building Official and the Licence Inspector to each sign the file. Withdraw late and you'll forfeit part of the fee.
10. Set the listing up correctly on day one. Licence number, provincial registration number, bedroom count, parking count, maximum occupancy and maximum vehicles, all published. Post the local responsible person's details inside the unit and start the guest register with your first booking.
11. Diarise 31 January. Renewal invoices arrive in December and payment is due by the end of January, while your provincial registration renews on its own annual clock.

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

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, four offices cover almost all of it between them, and knowing which one owns your question saves a lot of transferred calls.

Zoning, licensing and the application itself

Development Services, District of Sicamous handles zoning confirmations, the short-term rental and bed and breakfast application package, and the licence itself.

• Address: 446 Main Street, PO Box 219, Sicamous, BC V0E 2V0
• Phone: 250-836-2477
• Fax: 250-836-4314
• Email: [email protected]
• General enquiries: [email protected]
• In person: Municipal Hall, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm on business days
• After hours emergency: 855-248-6985

The District's business licensing page carries the online application, the PDF package and the payment options, and applications also go in by email.

Complaints, tickets and disputes

Bylaw Enforcement takes nuisance and non-compliance complaints, issues tickets and runs the dispute process.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 250-836-2477
• Online: the District's Bylaw Complaint Form, with a downloadable version for post or counter delivery
• Disputes: 14 days from the date a ticket is served

Provincial registration and provincial taxes

Registration questions belong to the Province, not the District. The B.C. short-term rental registry is reachable through Service BC on 1-833-828-2240, Monday to Friday from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm, or at [email protected].

PST and MRDT belong to the Ministry of Finance's Consumer Taxation Branch.

• Toll free: 1-877-388-4440
• Phone: 1-250-410-0373
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
• Post: Ministry of Finance, PO Box 9442 Stn Prov Govt, Victoria BC V8W 9V4

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

Those phone numbers get used more than you'd guess, because Sicamous is small enough that there isn't much of a public host conversation to lean on instead. I went looking for Sicamous-specific host threads on Reddit and BiggerPockets in July 2026 and came back with almost nothing I'd quote, so what follows is my read of the District's own record rather than a survey of hosts. Weigh it accordingly.

The clearest signal is what the District says about itself. Its short-term rental page opens by acknowledging that nightly rentals "can have a negative impact on local hotel businesses, the availability of housing, and the residential character of neighborhoods", which is not neutral drafting. Council then priced the licence at five times what any other Sicamous business pays. Read those two together and you get a council that has decided to permit short-term rentals, price them properly and watch them, rather than one that wants more of them.

The second signal is who the rules are aimed at. The local responsible person standard, the published contact map, the vehicle count in the advert and the guest register with licence plate numbers all point at the same complaint: parties, parking and boat trailers in a residential street. None of that targets the owner who rents quietly and answers the phone, while most of it makes life expensive for the owner who doesn't.

The third is where the tension lands, and it's the stratas rather than the District. MUR-2 exists because seasonal condo buildings on the Shuswap split between owners who want nightly income and owners who want quiet weekends, and the zoning bylaw defers to whichever way the strata voted. Buyers keep discovering that a permitted zone and a permissive strata are two different things, in that order.

None of which is unique to Sicamous. Small resort towns everywhere are running the same experiment: allow the rentals, charge properly for the licence, publish who to call, and let the neighbours do the monitoring. Before you commit on Mara Lake, though, it's worth seeing how that plays out at national scale, and our rundown of the Canada market gives you that wider view.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Sicamous in 2026?

Yes, provided the property sits in a zone that permits it. Sicamous allows short-term rentals in the CR Country Residential zone, the MUR-2 Seasonal Accommodation zone and the C-1 to C-4 and C-6 commercial zones, and nowhere else. You'll need a District business licence costing $500 a year plus a provincial registration number displayed on your listing. Unlike most of British Columbia, Sicamous is exempt from the principal residence requirement, so the property doesn't have to be your home.

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

The District of Sicamous charges $500 a year for a Short-Term Rental or Bed & Breakfast business licence, set by Fees and Charges Bylaw No. 740, 2009 as amended in 2025. A general business licence, by comparison, is $95. The fee is payable on application and is largely non-refundable if you withdraw, and licences run on the calendar year with renewal due by 31 January. Provincial registration is separate, at $100 or $450 a year plus a $1.50 service fee.

Does British Columbia's principal residence rule apply in Sicamous?

No. The Province exempts municipalities under 10,000 people that aren't within 15 kilometres of a larger municipality, and Sicamous appears on the published exempt list. A non-resident owner can legally run a whole-home short-term rental there, which is the main reason Sicamous still works as an investment market when Kamloops, Vernon and Chilliwack don't. An exempt council can opt in later by a 28 February deadline, so check the current list before buying.

How many guests can a Sicamous short-term rental take?

Two adults per bedroom, under section 3.10.9 of Zoning Bylaw No. 1000, 2022. A three-bedroom property is therefore capped at six adults, and you must also provide one off-street parking space per bedroom, each at least 6 metres by 2.8 metres. Your advert has to state the bedroom count, the parking count, the maximum occupancy and the maximum number of vehicles guests may bring, so an over-stated listing is evidence against you.

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

Three. B.C.'s 8% provincial sales tax on accommodation, a 2% Municipal and Regional District Tax that the Province collects and returns to the District of Sicamous, and 5% federal GST. That's 15% on the room rate. Where you sell only through a registered platform such as Airbnb, it collects and pays over both provincial taxes, though you stay liable if it doesn't. Advertise anywhere else as well and you must register for PST yourself.

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