Surrey Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Surrey and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you're allowed to, provided the property you're listing is the one you actually live in. British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act ties the right to rent short-term to your own principal residence, and Surrey's own bylaws layer a business licence and a set of owner-only conditions on top of that.

That single rule reshapes the whole business. It rules out the classic investor model of buying a second property purely to run nightly rentals, since anything that isn't your home or a secondary suite on the same lot falls outside what Surrey and the province will license. What's left is real, though: a legal, well-defined path for anyone renting out their own house, condo, or a suite attached to it.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly in 2026: the city licence, the paperwork behind it, the tax layers that stack on a booking, how the province's rules sit above Surrey's, how hard any of this gets enforced, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from Surrey's own bylaws and the Province of British Columbia's own pages, checked in July 2026.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Surrey

That principal-residence rule is the first thing to test your plan against, before you spend a dollar on furniture. Under Surrey's short-term rental page, a short-term rental is the renting of a dwelling unit by its owner to the public for temporary accommodation of less than 90 consecutive days per patron, and it excludes bed and breakfasts, boarding and lodging, and tourist accommodation, which run under separate rules entirely.

Two things follow from the way Surrey and the province define this. Only the property owner can host, since a tenant subletting nightly isn't a permitted arrangement here at all. And the dwelling being rented has to be the owner's principal residence, or sit on the same lot as it. Surrey's own zoning amendments, in Corporate Report R094, define principal residence as a dwelling unit occupied by the owner as their residence for a minimum of 184 days in a calendar year, so a vacation property you visit occasionally doesn't qualify no matter how you structure the paperwork.

Given that, Surrey permits short-term rental in a fairly specific set of housing types, provided the property is also the owner's principal residence: a single-family dwelling with a maximum of one secondary suite or coach house, or a multiple-unit residential dwelling with a maximum of one lock-off suite. Any suite you're counting on has to already be declared with the city, and it's worth checking that before you assume a basement suite qualifies. Zoning matters too, and short-term rental is permitted across a wide band of residential, mixed-use, and agricultural zones (A-1, A-2, RA, R1 through R6, RM-10 through RM-135, RMC-135, RMC-150, C-15, C-35), plus applicable CD zones.

None of that is theoretical for Surrey specifically. A 2022 study cited in the city's own policy paper found roughly 800 active short-term rental listings on an average day, up 71.5% from 2021. Dedicated short-term rental units, as opposed to shared rooms, grew from 290 to 450 over that same year. That's still only about 0.4% of Surrey's housing stock, but the city's own vacancy rate sat at just 0.6% in 2021, well under the healthy 3 to 5% range, which is exactly the housing pressure the new rules are aimed at easing. Before you assume your own numbers would clear that bar, it's worth running the property through BNBCalc to see what a compliant, principal-residence listing might actually earn.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Surrey

Given that housing pressure was the whole point of the policy, it's no surprise the licence itself has teeth rather than being a rubber stamp. Every short-term rental in Surrey needs a business licence under Business Licence By-law, 1999, No. 13680, and Schedule "A" of that bylaw currently sets the annual fee at $358.00 for the short-term rental category specifically, up from the $350 first proposed in 2024. On top of that, applying online carries a $50 application fee, which gets credited toward your first year's licence if it's approved and refunded only if the city refuses it on zoning grounds. Refuse it for any other reason, and that $50 doesn't come back, so make sure your property actually qualifies before you submit.

Once you're licensed, section 60.1 of the bylaw spells out four ongoing conditions, and missing any one of them is what actually gets people in trouble:

• Prove it's your home. On request, you have to give the city evidence that the dwelling is your principal residence, or a qualifying secondary suite, coach house, or lock-off suite on the same lot. Utility bills, government photo ID, vehicle registration, and insurance documents all count.
• One booking at a time. You can't accept more than one booking, or otherwise let more than one person or group occupy the unit at once.
• Keep two years of records. Every patron's name, address, phone number, and email, plus arrival and departure dates, for two years from the date of arrival.
• Register with the province. You need a valid provincial short-term rental registration number, and you have to hand over proof of it as soon as it's available.

Licences run for one year from the date of issuance rather than the calendar year, and a 5% penalty gets added to any fee still unpaid 30 days past due, with another 5% at 90 days. Before Surrey grants the licence at all, it inspects the property to confirm it complies with the city's Building Bylaw, including whether any renovations went through proper permits. If there's unpermitted work sitting on the property, expect that to hold up your application until you fix it, whether that means retroactive permits or, in the worst case, undoing the work.

Required Documents for Surrey Short-Term Rentals

Since that inspection can stall an application on its own, it's worth having your paperwork lined up before you ever submit. Surrey's application itself runs through the city's online business licensing portal, and what you'll need mirrors the four ongoing conditions above rather than adding anything new:

• Proof the property is your principal residence. A utility bill, a government-issued photo ID showing the address, vehicle registration, or an insurance document.
• A suite declaration, if you're counting a secondary suite, coach house, or lock-off suite toward your listing. Undeclared suites don't count, no matter how long you've been renting them out informally.
• Your provincial short-term rental registration number, or at minimum evidence you've applied for one, since the city will eventually need proof it's issued.
• Confirmation there's no unauthorized construction on the property. Building permits for any past renovations, or a plan to bring unpermitted work into compliance first.

Keep in mind the two-year patron record isn't a one-time submission. It's an ongoing log you maintain yourself and produce if the city's Business Licence Inspector asks for it, so building the habit from your very first booking saves you from reconstructing it under pressure later.

Surrey Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your paperwork clears and you're able to start hosting, there's still tax to work out, and Surrey stacks three separate layers on top of each other. Two are provincial, collected through eTaxBC, and one is federal, so it's worth taking them one at a time rather than guessing at a combined rate.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
Provincial Sales Tax (PST)	8%	Province of BC (or the platform, if it's a registered marketplace facilitator)
Municipal and Regional District Tax (MRDT)	3%	Province of BC, remitted to Discover Surrey and the Surrey Hotel and Motel Association
GST	5%	CRA (platform collects on your behalf if it facilitates over $30,000 CAD/year in BC bookings for non-registered hosts)

The province's own PST accommodation bulletin sets that 8% PST rate, plus an MRDT that ranges from 0 to 3% depending on the municipality. Surrey's own rate is the full 3%, confirmed in the city's 2024 policy report, which noted $441,950.10 in MRDT revenue from short-term rentals in 2022 alone. That revenue keeps growing too. A February 2026 report put Surrey's total 2026 MRDT take, hotels, motels, and short-term rentals combined, at roughly $2.4 million. The split runs 0.2% to the province, 1.8% to Discover Surrey, 0.6% to the Surrey Hotel and Motel Association, and 0.4% to the city itself.

You generally don't have to remit PST and MRDT yourself, mind you, if you book exclusively through a registered marketplace facilitator like Airbnb or Vrbo, since the province's own rules shift that collection duty onto the platform. Take direct bookings on the side, though, and you'll need to register with eTaxBC and collect both taxes on those yourself. A few exemptions exist regardless of channel:

• Accommodation under $2,500 in annual gross revenue, if it's not listed on an online marketplace.
• Units priced at $30 or less per day, or $210 or less per week.
• Any stay of 27 or more continuous nights.

Federal GST layers on top at 5%, and here the platform threshold matters. Since July 1, 2021, a platform facilitating more than $30,000 CAD of short-term accommodation in Canada over 12 months on behalf of hosts who aren't themselves GST-registered has to register for and collect GST under the CRA's simplified digital-economy regime. If your own rental income individually crosses that same $30,000 threshold, you have to register and collect GST yourself instead, whether or not the platform is also involved. There's a federal angle here too, and it has nothing to do with tax collection. Since January 1, 2024, the CRA denies income tax deductions for short-term rental expenses wherever the rental isn't compliant with local licensing, permitting, or registration requirements, which makes that $358 licence look cheap by comparison.

British Columbia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

All of that municipal detail sits on top of a provincial framework that's worth understanding on its own terms, since it's what creates the principal residence rule Surrey enforces. The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, which received Royal Assent on October 26, 2023, gave the province a direct regulatory role for the first time and defines a short-term rental accommodation service as accommodation offered for a fee for less than 90 consecutive days.

The Act's principal residence requirement took effect May 1, 2024, and it's genuinely province-wide rather than something each city opts into individually. It applies automatically in any municipality with a population over 10,000, in smaller communities within 15 kilometres of one, and in any municipality that chooses to opt in by February 28 each year. Surrey, with a population of 726,369 as of July 2025, clears that population threshold by a wide margin, so it's been covered from day one rather than as a later addition. The province maintains a current list of every community the rule applies to, and it exempts strata hotels, timeshares, home exchanges, school or nonprofit student housing, seasonal-only accommodation, outdoor recreation lodges, and land with a BC Assessment farm classification.

Registration is the second pillar, and it runs alongside whatever Surrey requires rather than replacing it. As of May 1, 2025, every host, platform, and strata hotel operator in BC must be registered with the provincial short-term rental registry. The registry's own fee schedule charges $100 a year plus a $1.50 service fee for a unit where you live, whether that's your whole home while you're away or a spare bedroom. A unit where you don't live, such as a secondary suite or coach house you rent while living in the main house, costs $450 a year plus that same service fee. Platforms pay their own registration fee too, and it scales with size: $5,000 a year for major platforms with 1,000 or more listings, $600 a year for smaller ones.

Penalties escalated sharply alongside all of this. The maximum fine a regional district can set for a bylaw prosecution jumped from $2,000 to $50,000, and the maximum municipal ticketing fine rose from $1,000 to $3,000 per infraction, per day. The Province's own Compliance and Enforcement Unit, inside the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs, handles violations of the provincial rules directly, separate from whatever Surrey's own bylaw officers do at the municipal level.

Does Surrey Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how much enforcement machinery now sits behind these rules provincially, you might expect Surrey itself to be aggressive about it, and the honest answer is more measured than that. Surrey's own complaint data, going through the city's 2024 policy report, shows only 366 short-term-rental-related bylaw complaints over the three years from March 2021 to March 2024, just 0.7% of all general bylaw complaints the city receives. Most of what does come in is the ordinary stuff: noise, parties, garbage, and parking disputes, and it's spread fairly evenly across the city rather than clustered in one neighbourhood.

That said, the tools for enforcement are real and specific, not vague. Under Corporate Report R094, the city set exact fines for each of the four short-term rental conditions, and it can pursue them through either of two separate ticketing bylaws:

Violation	Bylaw Notice Enforcement fine	Municipal Ticket Information fine
Fail to provide requested information	$300	$1,000
More than one booking at a time	$250	$1,000
Fail to keep required records	$350	$1,000
Fail to register with the province	$350	$1,000

Beyond either ticketing track, the city can still pursue a general Business Licence By-law violation under section 66. That carries a court-imposed penalty of anywhere from $200 to $50,000 plus the cost of prosecution, and each day an ongoing violation continues counts as a separate offence.

Where enforcement gets teeth in practice is the licensing gate itself rather than after-the-fact tickets. The mandatory building inspection catches unpermitted renovations before a licence ever issues, and the principal residence documentation requirement means an owner has to actually produce utility bills or ID tied to the address, not just check a box. Combine that with the provincial registry, which shares data with local governments and lets platforms be told to pull listings that lack a valid registration number, and an operator running an investment property as a short-term rental has more than one system that has to fail before they get away with it.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Surrey

Assuming Surrey's rules line up with your property, the order you tackle these steps in matters, since a couple of them can save you money if you do them first.

1. Confirm your property qualifies before you spend anything. It needs to be your principal residence (occupied at least 184 days a year), or a secondary suite, coach house, or lock-off suite on the same lot, and it has to sit in a permitted zone.
2. Declare any secondary suite with the city, if your plan depends on one, since an undeclared suite doesn't count toward your licence application.
3. Clear up any unpermitted construction. Check for outstanding permits before you apply, because the mandatory inspection will catch it and delay everything else.
4. Apply for your Surrey business licence online, paying the $50 application fee, which rolls into the $358 annual fee if you're approved.
5. Register with the Province of British Columbia's short-term rental registry, paying $100 a year if you live in the unit or $450 a year if you don't, plus the $1.50 service fee either way.
6. Set up your two-year patron records from your very first booking: names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and arrival and departure dates for everyone who stays.
7. Register for PST and MRDT collection through eTaxBC, unless you're booking exclusively through a platform that collects those taxes on your behalf.
8. Check the GST threshold against your own rental income, and register separately if you individually cross $30,000 CAD a year.
9. Don't forget to diarize your licence and registration renewal dates. Both run annually, and neither renews itself.

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

Whichever of those steps trips you up, Surrey and the province split responsibility fairly cleanly between them, so it's worth knowing which office actually owns your question.

Zoning questions

For whether your specific property, lot, or zone permits a short-term rental, call 604-591-4448.

Business licensing and complaints

The City of Surrey's Business Licensing division handles applications, renewals, and complaints or enforcement questions at 604-591-4370, or complaints can be filed through the city's online problem-reporting form. General correspondence goes to:

• Address: 13450 - 104 Avenue, Surrey, BC, V3T 1V8
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30pm

Provincial registration and compliance

The Province of British Columbia's Compliance and Enforcement Unit, within the Short-Term Rental Branch of the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs, handles registry questions and provincial-level enforcement through Service BC.

• Phone: 1-833-828-2240
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:30am to 5:00pm
• Register or check status: the provincial short-term rental registry

Tax registration

For PST, MRDT, or GST registration questions, eTaxBC and the CRA's business enquiries line handle provincial and federal tax matters respectively, separate from anything the city or the STR registry can help with.

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

Given how many of those calls end up being about tax registration or a stalled application rather than an actual dispute, it's worth knowing how hosts themselves describe living under these rules day to day. I checked BiggerPockets' Short-Term Rental forum directly while researching this guide, and I didn't find a Surrey- or BC-specific thread active at the time, so what follows is a read of the broader, verifiable pattern rather than a quoted survey, and it's worth weighing it accordingly.

The clearest shift shows up in the numbers Surrey's own policy report tracked. Dedicated short-term rental units grew 56.7% in a single year, from 290 in 2021 to 450 by the end of 2022, right before the principal residence rule arrived in May 2024. That kind of growth is exactly the investor-property pattern the rule was built to stop, and it lines up with what property managers across BC have been reporting since. Owners of second properties are either selling, converting to long-term rentals, or in some cases moving in themselves to preserve short-term rental eligibility.

For anyone actually living in their Surrey home already, the rules read less like an obstacle and more like paperwork. The conditions themselves, principal residence proof, one booking at a time, two years of records, provincial registration, are things a genuine owner-occupier can meet without much friction. It's the investor model, the second property bought purely to run nightly rentals, that the rule was designed to remove, and by that measure it's doing exactly what it set out to do.

Assuming Surrey's numbers still work for your property once you've cleared all of that, it's worth comparing them against what similar listings earn elsewhere in the province. Run the address through BNBCalc and check it against the wider British Columbia market data, so you can see how Surrey's occupancy and rates stack up against nearby cities that don't carry the same principal residence restriction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Surrey in 2026?

Yes, but only from your principal residence. Surrey and the Province of British Columbia both restrict short-term rentals to the home you actually live in, plus at most one secondary suite, coach house, or lock-off suite on the same lot. The host has to be the property owner, not a tenant, and stays have to run under 90 consecutive days. A second property bought purely to run as a nightly rental doesn't qualify anywhere in Surrey.

How much does a Surrey short-term rental business licence cost?

The annual licence fee is $358, plus a $50 online application fee that's credited toward that first year if you're approved. On top of the city licence, you also need a provincial short-term rental registration, which costs $100 a year if you live in the unit or $450 a year if you don't, plus a $1.50 service fee either way.

What happens if you run an unlicensed short-term rental in Surrey?

Surrey can issue Bylaw Notice Enforcement tickets ranging from $250 to $350 for specific violations like failing to register with the province or accepting more than one booking at a time, or Municipal Ticket Informations carrying a flat $1,000 fine for the same violations. Beyond ticketing, general Business Licence By-law violations can draw a court-imposed penalty of $200 to $50,000 plus costs, with each day of an ongoing violation counted as a separate offence.

Do you have to collect tax on a Surrey short-term rental?

Usually not directly, if you book exclusively through a platform like Airbnb or Vrbo, since registered marketplace facilitators collect the 8% Provincial Sales Tax, the 3% Municipal and Regional District Tax, and the 5% GST on your behalf. Take direct bookings outside a platform, though, and you'll need to register with eTaxBC yourself, unless your rental qualifies for one of the small exemptions, such as under $2,500 in annual revenue or stays of 27 or more continuous nights.

Can a tenant run a short-term rental in Surrey?

No. Surrey's short-term rental bylaw restricts hosting to the property owner, so a tenant subletting nightly through Airbnb or Vrbo isn't a permitted arrangement, regardless of what their lease says. If you're renting your home long-term and hoping to sublet it short-term for extra income, that plan doesn't have a legal path in Surrey the way it might for an owner-occupier.

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