New York City Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own an apartment in New York City and you're wondering whether you can put it on Airbnb? Almost certainly not, at least not the way you're picturing it. Renting out an entire apartment or home for fewer than 30 consecutive days is illegal here, and has been since a 2010 state law, whether or not you own the building. The only short-term rental the city permits is a hosted one: you live in the unit, you're physically there for the whole stay, and you have no more than two paying guests.

That rule isn't new. What changed in September 2023 is that it became enforceable, because Local Law 18 moved enforcement out of the inspector's hands and into the checkout flow. Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and the rest must verify a valid city registration number before processing a transaction, so a non-compliant listing doesn't get quietly ignored. It simply can't take a booking. The Office of Special Enforcement estimated roughly 60,000 illegal listings in 2018. In the city's own January 7, 2026 registration dataset, 3,194 registrations are active across all five boroughs. That is the entire legal market.

So this guide covers a narrow legal path rather than a business plan: who qualifies, what registration involves in 2026, the taxes that attach to a stay, how hard the city pushes, and who to call. Every figure below comes from New York City's or New York State's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving I've said so. If you're weighing a New York property against markets where the whole unit can legally go on Airbnb, run both through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in New York City?

Two layers of law stack here, and separating them explains almost everything that confuses people.

The bottom layer is state law, and it's the old one. Under Multiple Dwelling Law § 4(8)(a), a class A multiple dwelling, which is what nearly every apartment building in New York City is, "shall only be used for permanent residence purposes," and permanent residence means occupancy by the same person or family for thirty consecutive days or more. The statute then carves out the exceptions that matter: you may host people for fewer than 30 days if they're "living within the household of the permanent occupant," meaning house guests or lawful boarders, roomers or lodgers, and you may let someone stay while you're away on vacation or medical treatment, but only if no money changes hands. That is the whole permission. Everything New York City does sits on top of it.

The top layer is Local Law 18 of 2022, the Short-Term Rental Registration Law. It defines a short-term rental as a rental for fewer than 30 consecutive days of a dwelling unit in a private dwelling or class A multiple dwelling, requires the host to register with the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement, and bars booking platforms from processing transactions for anything unregistered. Registration doesn't grant new rights, mind you. OSE says so directly: the law "does not change the existing criteria that govern the legality of short-term rentals."

Put the two layers together and three requirements emerge that no amount of paperwork will move:

• You have to be there. Short-term rentals are only permitted if you're staying in the same unit as your guests. Not the same building. The same unit.
• Two paying guests, maximum. That number traces back to Housing Maintenance Code § 27-2004, which defines a "family" as a household with not more than two boarders, roomers or lodgers.
• You have to keep a common household, which OSE defines as guests having access to all parts of the unit. This one catches people out constantly. A lock that lets a guest lock their room behind them as they leave defeats the common household and makes the rental illegal. Privacy locks that only stop someone walking in while you're inside are fine.

Two exemptions exist, although both are narrower than they sound. Stays of 30 consecutive days or more aren't short-term rentals at all, so they need no registration. Just make sure you count the nights properly, because the city treats check-in as day zero: a 29-night booking is a short-term rental, while a 30-night booking is permanent occupancy. The other exemption covers class B multiple dwellings, buildings legally approved for transient occupancy, such as hotels, lodging houses, rooming houses, boarding houses and dormitories. Your apartment is not one. OSE even warns that a Department of Finance tax class beginning with "B" is not a class B occupancy classification.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in New York City

Unfortunately for most people reading this, there is no business here. If you were planning to buy a Brooklyn condo, furnish it, and rent it whole on Airbnb for weekend stays, that plan is illegal in New York City, and the platforms simply will not process the bookings. No permit unlocks it, no LLC structure gets around it, and no fee buys the right.

What's left is genuinely a room-share. You live somewhere, you register that unit, and you host up to two guests at a time while you're home, so the revenue to model is a spare bedroom rather than a unit. And you only get to run it if your specific home clears a list of exclusions that removes most of the city's housing stock:

• Rent-stabilized, rent-controlled and NYCHA apartments are categorically ineligible. OSE is prohibited from granting those registrations, and it rejected more than 550 applications on that basis alone in its most recent annual report year. Check your status with New York State Homes and Community Renewal first, since the fee doesn't come back.
• Your building may be on the Prohibited Buildings List. Local Law 18 lets any owner, co-op board or condo board certify that leases in the building bar short-term rentals, and OSE must then deny registrations there. The list passed 21,000 buildings. It covers whole buildings only, and a building added after you're registered can trigger revocation proceedings.
• Renters can apply, but the landlord finds out. OSE is required to notify the owner of record that an application came in, and owners quite often respond by putting the building on the prohibited list.
• One- and two-family houses get no special treatment. Under the Building Code these are for residence on a long-term basis, so entire-home short-term rentals aren't permitted in them either. Hosted stays with up to two guests are.
• ADUs work only one way. The permanent occupant of an accessory dwelling unit can register it and host. You cannot live in the main house and rent the ADU short-term.

If you already hold New York property and the numbers only worked at nightly rates, the realistic pivot is the 30-plus-night furnished market, which sits outside this regime and under ordinary landlord and tenant law instead. Plenty of former Airbnb inventory went exactly there after 2023. The economics differ a lot by borough, so the Kings County guide and the New York County guide are the useful next reads if you're choosing between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in New York City

So let's say your home clears all of that. Registration itself runs through OSE's Short-Term Rental Registration Portal, and you'll need an NYC.ID account before you can log in. The application fee is $145 plus a small processing charge, payable at submission and explicitly non-refundable. Which is precisely why you want to run that eligibility check first, rather than after.

To be granted a registration you must be a natural person and the permanent occupant of the unit, and you must certify that no lease or other agreement prohibits short-term rentals there. Companies can't register. Neither can an owner who lives elsewhere. A registration attaches to one specific unit, cannot be transferred, and must be terminated if you stop living there. It runs up to four years, or for a tenant, to the end of the lease period demonstrated to OSE. And it can be revoked outright, which follows illegal use of the unit, a material false statement, three or more violations inside 24 months, or the building landing on the prohibited list.

That four-year clock matters right now, because the first cohort is coming up on it. Renewal applications are expected to begin in October 2026, and OSE has said it may refuse a renewal where the applicant has done anything that would justify revocation. Going through the January 2026 dataset, 268 active registrations expire during 2026 and another 1,049 during 2027, so the renewal round is about to become the main event.

Approval is far from automatic. In the twelve months to June 30, 2025, OSE received 3,164 applications and granted about 40% of them, while more than 4,300 applications were found not to comply with the city's decades-old rules and required denial. The most common denial reason wasn't an obscure technicality either. It was applicants who were told what to fix and didn't fix it. OSE gives 90 days to correct a curable problem and 30 days to supply missing information, and now aims to give an initial determination within three business days.

Getting registered is only half of it, since a registered host carries ongoing obligations under the city's rules:

• Post two things inside the unit during every stay: a diagram of all exit routes, including routes out of the building if it holds more than one unit, and a copy of your registration certificate.
• Include your registration number in every advertisement, and keep listing details matching what you told OSE.
• Keep a record of each short-term rental for seven years: listing URL or ID, booking start date, total nights, people accommodated, and total rent received.
• Produce those records within 15 business days when OSE asks, with another 15 business days to cure anything missing or inaccurate.

The penalties are where casual non-compliance stops being cheap. Operating an unregistered short-term rental carries a civil penalty of not more than the lesser of $5,000 or three times the revenue the rental generated, for each violation. Read that second half carefully, because the fine scales with what you earned, which is how the city makes an illegal operation unprofitable rather than merely annoying. A registered host who breaks the rules faces up to $5,000 per violation, and a material false statement draws up to $1,000 plus revocation. Lesser breaches run on a graduated schedule, generally $100, $500 and $1,000 for a first, second and third violation, with defaults as high as $5,000 if you ignore the summons.

Platforms carry their own exposure, which is really the engine of the whole system. A booking service that processes a transaction for an unverified short-term rental is liable for up to $1,500 per transaction, or three times the fee it collected. Multiply that across a listing's booking history and you understand why Airbnb and its competitors chose compliance over litigation.

Required Documents for New York City Short-Term Rentals

Since that $145 doesn't come back, it's worth getting the paperwork right the first time. The form itself is short, though assembling the evidence behind it takes the time, and the documents OSE accepts are specified tightly enough that a reasonable-looking substitute will get your application returned.

• One proof of identity, from OSE's approved list.
• Two proofs of permanent occupancy, from two different approved categories. This is the requirement people most often get wrong. Two utility bills won't do it, since they're the same category. Some categories also carry recency limits, so dig out something current. And on a utility bill OSE considers only the mailing address, not the service address, which trips up anyone whose bills go elsewhere.
• Your lease, if you rent. Specifically the portion showing the start and end dates, the unit address, and the names and signatures of the parties.
• Every listing you have. Booking service names plus the listing ID or URL for each. OSE reviews each one for legality before associating it with your registration, and any listing you add later has to be reported before it takes a booking.
• Your unit number. Unless the building is legally a single-family home, an identifier is required, it has to be the unit you live in, and it must match your occupancy proofs.

Clear any open violations before you apply, too. Uncorrected Department of Buildings, HPD or Fire Department violations can block approval where they involve conditions that endanger occupants, so check DOB's Building Information System, HPD Online and the OATH Summonses Finder and fix what turns up. And if a document carries an account number, a salary figure or a child's name, OSE explicitly permits you to redact it before uploading.

New York City Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with. Three separate taxes and one fee can attach to a short-term stay in New York City, and because two different governments administer them, the thresholds don't line up. So it's worth taking them one at a time.

The city's own charge is the Hotel Room Occupancy Tax, collected by the Department of Finance. It's 5.875% of the rent plus a flat amount per room per day, and that flat piece runs on a sliding scale: 50 cents where the rent is $10 to under $20, $1.00 from $20 to under $30, $1.50 from $30 to under $40, and $2.00 at $40 and above. The 5.875% rate is authorized through November 30, 2027 under Local Law 153 of 2023 and drops back to 5% after that unless the Council extends it, so treat it as a rate that moves.

Most registered hosts won't owe this one, though, and that's the piece people miss. You don't collect the hotel tax if you rent only one bedroom in your own home, or if across a year you rent for 14 days or fewer or on fewer than three occasions, or where the same occupant stays 180 consecutive days or more. Since the legal shape of a New York City short-term rental is a room in your own home, plenty of hosts land inside that first exemption. Over a threshold, you file a Certificate of Registration, display the Certificate of Authority you get back, then file quarterly returns due March 20, June 20, September 20 and December 20. Operators with fewer than ten rooms or furnished apartments can file annually.

Sales tax belongs to the state, and it changed recently. Effective March 1, 2025, New York State and local sales tax applies to sales of short-term rental unit occupancy wherever the rate exceeds $2.00 per unit per day, and a unit fee of $1.50 per unit per day applies to every short-term rental occupancy in New York City. As of July 2026, the combined sales tax rate in the five boroughs is 8.875%: 4% state, 4.5% city and a 0.375% MCTD surcharge.

The practical part of that change is who collects. Booking services now register as New York State sales tax vendors and collect on every occupancy they facilitate, so if a platform handles all your bookings you're relieved of collecting the sales tax and unit fee yourself, provided you hold either Form ST-155, the Booking Service Certificate of Collection, or a publicly available agreement saying the platform will collect. Keep that documentation. Give the platform bad information about a sale and the state can bill you anyway, plus penalties and interest. Guests who stay long enough escape: sales tax stops after 90 consecutive days, and the city portion after 180.

Your rental income is ordinary taxable income, and OSE says as much while noting it has no role in your tax obligations. The usual deductions apply, though renting a room inside your own home means apportioning almost everything, which is fiddlier than it looks on a spreadsheet. If you're comparing what a New York room-share might clear against markets where an entire unit can legally be listed, BNBCalc Markets shows that gap at the neighborhood level.

New York State-Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

New York City's rules make far more sense once you see how much of the framework is state law rather than city law.

The Multiple Dwelling Law is the foundation, and the operative language arrived with Chapter 225 of the Laws of 2010, twelve years before Local Law 18. That amendment defined "permanent residence purposes" as thirty consecutive days or more by the same natural person or family, which is what made unhosted sub-30-day rentals in class A buildings unlawful across the state. New York City then spent a decade trying to enforce it building by building against a market of tens of thousands of listings. Local Law 18 was the answer to that enforcement problem, not a new prohibition.

The state has since built its own registry, and it's worth knowing why it doesn't reach you here. Real Property Law Article 12-D created a statewide registration and reporting framework that took effect in September 2025, with county-run registries and a local opt-out. Section 447-b grandfathers what already existed: a county, city, town or village with its own short-term rental registry as of the effective date may continue running it and keeps the authority to manage and amend it. New York City had Local Law 18, so New York City hosts keep registering with OSE. Nothing in the state registry loosens a city requirement.

Outside the city, though, New York State is a genuinely different country. Entire-home rentals are legal in much of it, subject to whatever the county, town or village requires, and the rules change from one municipality to the next. Our New York statewide guide maps the overall picture, the Nassau County guide covers the Long Island commuter belt, and the Erie County guide covers the Buffalo market upstate.

Does New York City Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Yes, although the mechanism differs enough from other cities that comparisons tend to mislead. Most municipalities enforce after the fact: a neighbor complains, an inspector visits, a citation follows, and a determined operator absorbs all that as a cost of doing business. New York City enforces at the payment layer instead. If the platform can't verify a registration, it can't process the transaction, so the illegal listing never earns anything.

The numbers show what that did. Against roughly 60,000 estimated illegal listings in 2018 and over 38,000 active listings on a single site at the start of 2023, 3,194 registrations were active in the January 7, 2026 dataset. Going through it borough by borough, Brooklyn holds 1,585, Queens 921, Manhattan 385, the Bronx 194 and Staten Island 109. Manhattan is worth sitting with for a second. Under 400 legal short-term rentals, in the borough most visitors actually want to stay in.

Compliance after approval gets checked too. As of early June 2025 OSE estimated that roughly 20% of registered listings had reverted to offering illegal occupancy, meaning entire homes or more than two guests. It emailed warnings to around 500 hosts, and in late April 2025 sent its first Notices of Intent to Revoke, which go to OATH or State Supreme Court. Three registrations already show as revoked in the January 2026 data.

Litigation has escalated sharply alongside that. OSE brought its first lawsuit using the new Local Law 18 penalties in May 2025, over ten West Village apartments run as an illegal hotel. In February 2026 it sued a landlord over nine units in two rent-stabilized Upper West Side brownstones, seeking penalties that could exceed $4 million plus a court-appointed receiver, after he answered being delisted by Airbnb by building his own booking website. And in April 2026 it sued a Brooklyn and Bronx landlord who allegedly used fraudulent documents to obtain six registrations, then took more than $1.3 million across roughly 1,400 illegal transactions.

Two things follow from that April case. Holding a registration is not a shield, since the fraud is what the city built its complaint around. And the audit trail is unusually good, because platforms report transactions and OSE publishes registration data, so reconstructing 1,400 bookings is a data exercise rather than an investigation. Note too who is bringing these cases. Both 2026 lawsuits came from Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani's administration, framed explicitly around housing supply and affordability. Enforcement here survived a change of administration and got more aggressive, not less.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in New York City

Assuming your situation still fits after all of that, the order below matters more than it might look. The early steps tell you whether the later ones are worth bothering with at all, so working through them out of sequence tends to waste both time and the application fee.

1. Confirm you're eligible before you spend anything. Check your rent-regulation status with New York State Homes and Community Renewal, and search the Prohibited Buildings List for your address. Rent-regulated, rent-controlled, NYCHA and prohibited-building units are dead ends, and the $145 is not refundable.
2. Read your lease, bylaws or house rules. You'll be certifying that nothing in them prohibits short-term rentals, and if you're a tenant, expect your landlord to be notified that you applied.
3. Design the stay so it's actually legal. One unit, you in it, two guests maximum, no lock that lets a guest secure a room behind them. If your plan involves an entire unit, an absent host, or a third guest, stop here.
4. Clear open violations and gather documents. Check DOB's Building Information System, HPD Online and the OATH Summonses Finder, then assemble the NYC.ID account, identity and occupancy proofs, lease pages and listing IDs.
5. Apply and pay the $145. Expect an initial determination within about three business days, and if OSE returns the application, treat the correction window seriously. Failing to correct is the leading cause of denial.
6. Add your registration number to every listing, match each listing to your application exactly including address and guest count, and report new listings to OSE before they take a booking.
7. Set up the postings and records on day one: exit-route diagram and registration certificate inside the unit during every stay, plus a seven-year booking log.
8. Sort out tax before your first guest. Check the Department of Finance de minimis rules, and get Form ST-155 or the equivalent public agreement from your platform.
9. Diarize your expiration date. Registrations run up to four years, and renewals open in October 2026. A revocable violation in the meantime can cost you the renewal, not just a fine.

Who to Contact in New York City about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning

Whichever step you get stuck on, four offices handle almost everything between them. Knowing which one owns your particular question will save you an irritating amount of time on hold.

Registration, eligibility and the application itself

The Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement administers Local Law 18 and is the first contact for applying, correcting an application, adding a listing, or terminating a registration.

• Address: 22 Reade Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007
• General inquiries: 646-576-3533
• Registration inquiries: [email protected]
• Apply and check status: the Short-Term Rental Registration Portal

One practical note from OSE's own guidance: don't call or email to ask where your application stands. Log in to the portal and click "My Short-Term Rental Application," where the status is displayed.

Complaints, and what a neighbor would dial about you

NYC311 takes illegal short-term rental complaints and routes them to OSE, so this line is worth knowing in both directions.

• Phone: dial 311, or 212-NEW-YORK (212-639-9675) from outside the five boroughs, over VoIP, or with TTY, 711 or a video relay service
• Hours: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with interpretation in more than 175 languages
• Text: 311-692
• Online: complaints can be filed at nyc.gov/311 at any time

Because the registration dataset is public, a neighbor can check whether your address is registered before complaining, and OSE encourages exactly that. It cuts both ways, of course. A registered listing visibly offering an entire unit is easy for anyone to spot and report.

City taxes

The New York City Department of Finance administers the Hotel Room Occupancy Tax, including registration, the Certificate of Authority and quarterly returns.

• Phone: 311, or 212-639-9675 from outside the city, available 24 hours
• TTY: 212-504-4115
• Hotel tax mailing address: NYC Department of Finance, Hotel Room Occupancy Tax, PO Box 5160, Kingston, NY 12402-5160
• Online: the hotel room occupancy tax page carries the current forms and the de minimis rules

State sales tax and building occupancy

Sales tax, the New York City unit fee and vendor registration belong to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, not to the city.

• Sales Tax Information Center: 518-485-2889, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on business days
• Register as a vendor: through New York Business Express, using Form DTF-17
• Mailing address: NYS Tax Department, Sales Tax Registration Unit, W A Harriman Campus, Albany, NY 12227

Whether a building is legally approved for residential or transient occupancy is a Department of Buildings question rather than an OSE one. OSE says as much about its own class B list: legal occupancy is ultimately determined by DOB, and appearing on an OSE list changes nothing about a building's occupancy classification or zoning use group.

What Airbnb Hosts in New York City Report About Local Regulations

Those lawsuits shape how hosts talk about this city, and sentiment splits along a line you don't really see in other markets. What follows is my read of the recurring themes rather than any kind of survey, so do weigh it accordingly.

• Investors have largely written the city off. On BiggerPockets, the consistent advice for anyone asking about New York City short-term rentals is to look elsewhere, because the model most investors want, an entire furnished unit at nightly rates, isn't available at any price. Threads that stay in New York move quickly to 30-plus-day furnished rentals, or to the New Jersey and Hudson Valley markets.
• Resident hosts describe a bureaucratic but survivable process. Complaints from people who actually qualify cluster around documentation rather than the rules: occupancy proofs rejected for being from the same category, applications returned over listing wording, confusion about which lease pages to upload. The city's denial data supports that read, since failing to make requested corrections is the leading denial reason by a wide margin.
• The unlocked-door requirement generates the most genuine anger. Hosts point out that they're being asked to give a paying stranger access to their entire home, including the rooms they sleep in, as the price of compliance. That's exactly what the pending City Council bill tries to change.
• Nobody I've read still argues that the rules go unenforced. That debate ended in 2023 when the platforms started blocking transactions. What people argue about now is whether the rules are fair, which is a different conversation.

Take that last point seriously. Enforcement isn't a risk you can price into a spreadsheet here, because it doesn't arrive as a fine after the fact. It arrives as a booking that never happens.

One live development is worth tracking if you own a small house here. Int 0879-2026, introduced by Council Member Mercedes Narcisse on April 30, 2026, would ease three things for owner-occupied one- and two-family dwellings: raising the guest cap to four excluding children under 18, dropping the host-presence requirement, and allowing locks on private bedrooms, bathrooms, closets and storage areas as long as egress stays clear. It sits in the Committee on Housing and Buildings as of my last check in July 2026, and it's the second attempt. Its predecessor, Int 1107-2024, got a hearing in November 2025 and then died when the session ended on December 31, 2025. So don't plan around it. A bill in committee is not a rule.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in New York City in 2026?

Only as a hosted room share. Renting an entire apartment or home for fewer than 30 consecutive days is illegal here regardless of who owns it, and platforms are barred from processing those transactions. What is legal: registering with the Office of Special Enforcement as the permanent occupant of your unit, staying there throughout the booking, and hosting no more than two paying guests who have access to the whole home. Everything else needs a stay of 30 nights or longer.

How much does a New York City short-term rental registration cost?

The application fee is $145 plus a small processing charge, non-refundable whether or not you're approved. A granted registration lasts up to four years, or for a tenant, to the end of the lease period demonstrated to OSE, and renewals cost the same and open in October 2026. Because the fee doesn't come back, check your rent-regulation status and the Prohibited Buildings List before applying.

What happens if you rent your New York City apartment on Airbnb without registering?

Operating an unregistered short-term rental carries a civil penalty of up to the lesser of $5,000 or three times the revenue generated, per violation. The more immediate consequence is commercial, though. Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com must verify a valid registration before processing a transaction, so an unregistered listing generally cannot take bookings at all. Operators who route around that by building their own booking sites are exactly who the city has been suing in 2025 and 2026.

Do you have to pay hotel tax on a New York City short-term rental?

Often not, thanks to the Department of Finance's de minimis rules. You don't collect the hotel room occupancy tax if you rent only one bedroom in your own home, or if in a year you rent for 14 days or fewer or on fewer than three occasions, or where the same occupant stays 180 consecutive days or more. Above those thresholds the tax is 5.875% of rent plus 50 cents to $2.00 per room per day. State and local sales tax of 8.875% and the $1.50 daily unit fee are separate, and your booking platform generally collects those.

Can you rent an entire apartment in New York City for 30 days or more?

Yes, and that's the main legal route for anyone with a whole unit to let. A stay of 30 consecutive days or longer isn't a short-term rental under the law, so it needs no OSE registration and falls under ordinary landlord and tenant rules instead. Count carefully, since the city treats check-in as day zero: 29 nights is a short-term rental, 30 nights is permanent occupancy. Much of the inventory that left Airbnb after 2023 moved into this furnished mid-term market.

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