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

Do you own a place in Windham, New York and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can list it right now, because Windham, a small Catskills town in Greene County built around its own ski mountain, has no zoning law and no short-term rental permit or license of any kind. Renting a whole house to visitors for a weekend is legal here, the way it's legal across most of small-town upstate New York, and nothing in the town's laws says otherwise.

The town's openness doesn't mean the subject is closed for good, though. The town board tried to pass a short-term rental law back in 2020, backed off after a petition against it drew more than 1,400 signatures, and is now drafting its very first zoning law, one its own supervisor says had short-term rental language stripped out before the public hearing. So the rules in this guide are the rules as they stand today, not a promise about next year, and I've flagged everywhere the ground is still moving.

So let's walk through what applies in 2026: the near-total absence of local licensing, the county registration that quietly does exist, the taxes that attach to a booking regardless, how closely anyone checks, and who to call with a question. Every figure below comes from Windham's, Greene County's or New York State's own pages, checked in July 2026. If you're weighing a Catskills property against a market with a lot more paperwork, run both through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Windham, New York

Comparing Windham against a stricter market only makes sense once you understand why Windham looks the way it does, so it's worth spending a minute on how the town got here. Windham has never adopted zoning of any kind, not for short-term rentals and not for anything else, which puts it in a small and shrinking group of New York towns. The town's own zoning fact sheet, published ahead of an April 2026 public hearing, says so plainly: "While Windham does not currently have a zoning law" (Town of Windham Zoning Fact Sheet). The town has instead relied for years on a patchwork of separate site plan, setback and sign laws to manage what gets built. That absence isn't an oversight. It's a choice the town keeps confirming.

Windham did try to regulate short-term rentals once. In November 2020, the town board scheduled a public hearing on "Proposed Draft Short-Term Rentals Local Law #2 of 2020" for January 14, 2021 (Town Board minutes, Nov. 25, 2020). Supervisor Thomas Hoyt pulled it before the hearing ever happened, telling residents plainly that "while there are calls to address short-term rentals in the Town, the draft local law has not been well received and will be withdrawn" (Town of Windham, "Withdrawal of Draft Short-Term Rentals Law"). Opponents had organized fast: a change.org petition against the draft gathered 1,448 signatures, and it described a law that would've capped permits at 150 total, forever, across Windham, Hensonville and Maplecrest, limited rentals to 100 nights a year, and tied parking and occupancy caps to bedroom count. I haven't found the bill's actual text since it never passed, so treat those specifics as the opposition's account of the draft rather than a quoted statute. Either way, Hoyt's closing line to the board that night set the tone for everything since: "We are pro-business in the Town of Windham and our doors are open."

Fast forward to 2026, and the same instinct shows up again. The town's first-ever zoning law, three years in the drafting, would divide Windham into five districts and finally give it a zoning board of appeals, though short-term rentals aren't part of it (Windham Zoning Fact Sheet). Supervisor Hoyt told The Overlook the town board made three changes before sending the draft to that April 30, 2026 hearing: a smaller minimum rural lot size, a dropped flood-hazard overlay the state already covers, and short-term rental language removed entirely (Hoyt, quoted in The Overlook, "Windham Sets Public Hearing on Zoning Law to Replace Piecemeal Regulations," April 2026). As of my last check in July 2026, I couldn't confirm whether that hearing had closed or been reopened, so don't assume the zoning law is finalized, only that short-term rentals weren't where the fight ended up.

That leaves Windham in unusual company for its own county. The Village of Athens and the Town of Jewett adopted their own short-term rental permit systems years ago, according to a county planning summary from that period (Greene County Economic Development, Tourism and Planning). Both towns sit in the same Greene County. That makes Windham's "no permits, no caps" status the exception rather than the rule locally. None of that means Windham asks nothing of you, though. It just asks somewhere else, at the county level, which is where the paperwork begins.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Windham

Assuming you're listing a property inside the Town of Windham itself, there's still no short-term rental license, permit or registration to apply for. There's no fee to pay, no renewal date to track, and no town office that reviews an application, because none of that infrastructure exists here. What does exist sits one level up, at Greene County.

New York's 2024-2025 short-term rental law let each county build its own registry or opt out of the requirement entirely before a deadline that has since passed. Greene County built one. Rather than opt out, the county stood up a free registration portal and asked hosts to sign up "as soon as possible," and its own page is direct about the cost: "there is no fee to register your short-term rental unit" (Greene County, "Register Short-Term Rental Units in Greene County, NY"). You register through the county's own Customer Portal at portal.deckard.com/ny-greene-str-portal, not through the Town of Windham.

Don't read the friendly tone as optional, mind you, because under the state law behind it, a county that hasn't opted out requires either the host or the booking service handling the listing to register the unit, and an unregistered listing can expose both the host and the platform to fines. Greene County's own page doesn't publish what a local fine actually looks like, so I can't give you a number, only the fact that the underlying statute has real teeth even where the county's own messaging stays inviting. Since registering costs nothing but still asks for details about your listing, it's worth knowing what you'll actually need to have ready.

Required Documents for Windham Short-Term Rentals

Because there's no town permit process, there's no town document checklist to go with it: no site plan, no inspection report, no certificate to frame on the wall. What does apply comes from two other places: whatever Greene County's portal asks for, and what New York State asks for on the tax side.

Greene County hasn't published a detailed document checklist for its registration portal, and I couldn't find one on its own site, so treat the usual basics as a starting point rather than a confirmed list: your name and contact information, the rental's address, and the platforms you use to book guests. Erin Dennin in the county's tourism office can confirm the exact list before you register, and her contact details sit in the section below. A phone call clears this up in a few minutes, faster than guessing.

The tax-side paperwork is clearer. Assuming your booking platform isn't handling everything for you, you'll need to register as a New York State sales tax vendor using Form DTF-17 through New York Business Express, and keep the resulting Certificate of Authority on file. Make sure you also keep proof that your platform is collecting sales tax on your behalf, either Form ST-155 or the platform's own public statement to that effect, because the state can still bill you directly if a booking slips through without either one.

Beyond what any government asks for, hold onto whatever your homeowner's or landlord policy requires before you list. A standard homeowner's policy typically excludes commercial-style rental activity, and an insurer can deny a claim over exactly that gap. Windham doesn't mandate a particular coverage level, but a burst pipe during a sold-out ski weekend is the wrong time to discover you weren't covered. Speaking of the state's reach, taxes are where Windham's hands-off approach ends and New York's begins.

Windham Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you clear registration and are able to take a booking, the tax bill still shows up, and it's where the state asserts itself no matter what the town does or doesn't require. Two layers apply to every short-term stay in Windham, and they're simpler here than in a lot of New York, because Greene County runs no separate hotel or occupancy tax of its own.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
New York State sales tax	4%	NYS Dept. of Taxation and Finance
Greene County sales tax	4%	NYS Dept. of Taxation and Finance (county share)
Combined rate	8%	NYS Dept. of Taxation and Finance

As of July 2026, that 8% combined rate applies to every taxable sale in Greene County, and short-term rentals have counted as one since March 1, 2025, when New York extended sales tax to short-term rental unit occupancy wherever the rent exceeds $2 per unit per day. Booking services register as vendors and collect that tax automatically on nearly everything they process, so where Airbnb or Vrbo handles your bookings, you're generally not the one filing the return.

Do check the 90-day exemption before assuming every night is taxable, though: a guest who stays 90 consecutive days or more counts as a permanent resident and owes no short-term rental sales tax at all. That threshold matters more in a ski town than it might elsewhere, since Windham picks up its share of season-long "workation" stays tied to Windham Mountain's operating calendar.

What Windham doesn't have is a local bed tax stacked on top of that 8%. The villages of Catskill and Coxsackie, both also in Greene County, each run their own 4% occupancy tax under state-enabled local laws, but neither is the Town of Windham, and I found no Windham-specific or Greene-County-wide occupancy tax to add here. If that changes, and the county has been actively building short-term rental infrastructure lately, it'll likely show up on the same registration page you'll already have bookmarked.

Your rental income itself is ordinary taxable income at both the state and federal level, the same as any landlord's, and the usual deductions for mortgage interest, depreciation, cleaning and platform fees still apply. Keep in mind that if you also live in the property part of the year, you'll need to apportion costs between personal and rental use, which gets fiddlier once ski season and summer season are both in play. None of this happens in a vacuum, either. Windham sits inside a state framework that shapes what it can and can't require, and it's worth seeing that whole picture before assuming Windham's rules are permanent.

New York State Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

New York doesn't broadly preempt local short-term rental regulation, and that's really the whole reason Windham can go either way. A state Department of State training presentation for local governments puts it plainly: it's "up to each municipality to define, prohibit and/or regulate short term rentals as they choose." Towns, villages, cities and counties keep full authority to zone, permit or ban rentals outright, which is exactly why a town twenty minutes from Windham can run a strict permit system while Windham runs none at all.

One statewide rule could, in theory, reach Windham anyway: the Multiple Dwelling Law's 30-day rule that makes unhosted short-term rentals illegal inside "Class A" apartment buildings across the state. It doesn't reach here, though, because Multiple Dwelling Law §3 limits that whole chapter to cities of 325,000 people or more. Windham's year-round population runs in the low thousands, so the Class A rule that drives so much of New York City's regulation simply has no jurisdiction here.

What does reach Windham is the newer registration framework. Real Property Law Article 12-D took effect in 2025, created by a 2024 law and restructured a year later. It gave every county a choice: build a registry, or opt out and forfeit the ability to collect occupancy tax on short-term rentals in exchange for keeping its state sales tax share. Greene County built one, which is the registry you read about above. The statewide opt-out deadline has now passed, so every county's decision should be locked in by this point, though very few counties publish that status clearly, and Greene County's page is one of the better ones.

The same two laws also put short-term rentals under New York's sales tax starting March 1, 2025, and a platform handling your bookings will usually collect and pass along that tax for you, so long as you've confirmed it agreed to. The rules differ dramatically once you cross into a big city or a Long Island suburb, and our New York statewide guide walks through that region by region. The Oneida County guide and Onondaga County guide cover two other upstate counties that landed on very different rules than Windham did. Knowing the state won't step in for you also means enforcement, such as it is, comes down to a local question. So how hard does Windham actually push?

Does Windham Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Not very, and the reason is simple: there's barely anything on the books to enforce, whereas New York City built a system where a booking platform literally can't process a reservation without a valid registration number. Windham has no equivalent chokepoint, no inspector assigned to short-term rentals specifically, and no local law a code officer could cite you under just for renting your house out for a weekend.

Having no specific ordinance doesn't mean nothing gets enforced. Windham's building and fire codes still apply to any structure regardless of who's sleeping in it, so a home with no working smoke detectors or an unpermitted addition is a code violation whether it's rented out or not. The town's Building and Code Enforcement office is who'd follow up on that, since its contact details are below, and ordinary nuisance issues like noise, parking and trash get handled the same way they'd be handled for a loud weekend at a full-time resident's house, not through any short-term-rental-specific track.

The politics tell you more than the ordinance does, honestly. A town board that pulled its own short-term rental law in 2020 after 1,448 people signed a petition against it, then stripped short-term rental language back out of its first-ever zoning law in 2026, isn't a board gearing up to crack down. Watch out for one thing, though: no enforcement mechanism isn't the same as no politics at all. Greene County's registry exists precisely because the state gave counties a nudge, and if Windham's tourism economy keeps drawing the kind of scrutiny that pushed Athens and Jewett to regulate years ago, that stance could shift. As of my last check in July 2026, it hadn't. None of that changes what you'd actually do to get started today, so let's put the whole process in order.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Windham

1. Confirm your property is free to rent. Check your deed, any homeowners' association rules and, if you're near Windham Mountain, any resort community covenants, since none of those show up in town or county records.
2. Register free with Greene County's short-term rental portal. It costs nothing and takes a fraction of the time an application in a stricter market would.
3. Decide who's handling New York sales tax. If your platform isn't collecting it for you, register as a vendor with Form DTF-17 before your first guest checks in.
4. Get insurance built for paying guests, not just a standard homeowner's policy, and confirm what it covers before, not after, a claim.
5. Check basic safety equipment. Working smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and a fire extinguisher matter regardless of what your listing says, since the building code applies either way.
6. List the property, keep clean booking records, and set aside the tax you owe on any night you're collecting it yourself.
7. Track two moving pieces: the town's pending first zoning law and Greene County's still-developing registration program, since either one could add requirements you don't have today.

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

Four offices between them handle almost every question you're likely to have. Here's who owns which one.

Building, code enforcement and zoning status

The Town of Windham Building and Code Enforcement office handles building permits, code compliance and questions about the pending zoning law's status.

• Contact: Dominick Caropreso, Building and Code Enforcement Officer
• Phone: (518) 734-3015
• Hours: By appointment only
• Address: 371 NY-296, Hensonville, NY 12439

General town business and public records

The Town Clerk's office, at the same Town Hall, handles laws and forms, meeting minutes, and general records requests.

• Phone: (518) 734-4170
• Address: 371 NY-296, Hensonville, NY 12439
• Web: townofwindhamny.com

County short-term rental registration

The Greene County Economic Development, Tourism and Planning office runs the county's free short-term rental registry.

• Contact: Erin Dennin, Senior Tourism Marketing Manager
• Phone: (518) 943-3223
• Email: [email protected]
• Address: Greene County, 411 Main Street, Catskill, NY 12414
• Register at: portal.deckard.com/ny-greene-str-portal

State sales tax

The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance handles sales tax vendor registration and the Certificate of Authority.

• 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

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

That last office fields tax questions all day, but the sentiment among actual hosts runs closer to relief than confusion. What follows is my read of the recurring themes rather than a formal survey, since I didn't scrape Reddit for this guide, so weigh it accordingly.

• Investors treat Windham as one of the easier Catskills towns to underwrite, precisely because there's no permit cap, no application fee and no waiting period to model into a purchase. That's a real point of contrast with the more regulated Hudson Valley towns that show up in the same investor conversations.
• Long-time owners remember 2020 clearly. The 1,448-signature petition against the withdrawn short-term rental law wasn't a fringe reaction, and hosts who lived through it tend to describe the town board as genuinely responsive to pushback rather than merely slow.
• The 2026 zoning process is being watched, not feared, so far. Since the draft explicitly dropped short-term rental language before its public hearing, the read among people following it is that Windham isn't trying to sneak restrictions in through the zoning door.
• The open question is Greene County, not the town. Hosts seem less worried about Windham changing course than about the county's registry eventually growing teeth, given that the state law behind it already allows fines for going unregistered.

Take that last point seriously even without a survey behind it. A registry that costs nothing to join today is also the easiest lever a county could tighten tomorrow, and Windham's own history shows the town would rather let the county carry that fight than pick it up itself. Assuming you're weighing Windham against a market with an established occupancy history rather than a policy story, the Oneonta market data on BNBCalc is a reasonable nearby comparison for what a similar Catskills-adjacent property can actually earn.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Windham, New York in 2026?

Yes. Windham has no zoning law, so it has no zoning-based restriction on renting a whole home short-term, and it has no separate short-term rental permit or license requirement either. The only formal step is registering, free of charge, with Greene County's short-term rental portal. New York State sales tax still applies to the booking regardless of what the town requires.

Do you need a permit to run a short-term rental in Windham?

No town permit exists. A 2020 attempt to create one was withdrawn after strong local opposition, and the town's first-ever zoning law, still pending as of mid-2026, had short-term rental language removed before its public hearing. The only registration that applies comes from Greene County, not the Town of Windham, and it's free.

Do you have to register your short-term rental with Greene County?

New York's 2024-2025 short-term rental law requires either the host or the booking service to register with the county unless that county opted out of the registry system, and Greene County didn't opt out. Registration is free through the county's online portal. The county doesn't publish a specific penalty for skipping it, but the underlying state law allows fines for unregistered listings.

What taxes apply to a short-term rental in Windham, New York?

Every stay carries New York's combined 8% sales tax, split between a 4% state rate and a 4% Greene County rate, and that's applied automatically to short-term rentals under a law effective March 1, 2025. Most booking platforms collect and remit it for you. Greene County has no separate hotel or occupancy tax, so 8% is generally the full sales tax picture, on top of ordinary income tax on your rental earnings.

Is Windham's zoning law going to restrict short-term rentals?

Not based on the draft as it stood through mid-2026. Supervisor Tom Hoyt told local reporters the town board removed short-term rental language from the zoning commission's draft before sending it to a public hearing on April 30, 2026. That could still change before final adoption, so don't treat it as settled, only as the direction the town has taken so far.

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