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

Do you own a place in Binghamton, New York and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that nobody has banned short-term rentals here, not the city and not Broome County, and there's no permit cap to argue over, because the city has never created a short-term rental permit in the first place. The awkward part is that Binghamton has never written a short-term rental law of any kind, which sounds liberating right up until you read how the zoning ordinance is actually built.

Chapter 410 works from a closed list, you see. Section 410-26B says that "a land use which is not set forth in Schedule I ... is not permitted in residential districts in the City of Binghamton," and short-term rental appears nowhere on that schedule. Two things close to it do appear, though: a bed-and-breakfast home, which you have to live in, and overnight lodging, which is the hotel category and needs a special use permit from the Planning Commission. So the real question in Binghamton isn't what the license costs. It's which of those two boxes your property fits into, and whether the city's Zoning Officer agrees with you about it.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly: which zoning district you're in and what that district allows, the rental registration and inspection the city runs on a separate track, the three layers of tax stacked on a Binghamton stay, where New York State's county registry law has left Broome County, and who to call at City Hall when something doesn't add up. Every figure below comes from the city's, the county's or the state's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where I couldn't confirm something I've said so plainly. Before you spend anything on furniture, run the property through BNBCalc first.

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

That question about which box you fit into gets answered by two definitions in § 410-5 of the zoning ordinance, and they do almost all the work in this city.

The first is overnight lodging, which the code defines as "a facility providing overnight accommodations arranged for short term stays of less than 21 days" where "guest rooms are rented on an overnight basis," giving bed-and-breakfasts, hospitality houses and hotels or motels as its examples. Then the same section adds the line that catches people out, because a dwelling unit, for zoning purposes, "does not include 'Congregate Living,' 'Overnight Lodging,' or 'Residential Vehicles'."

So renting by the night, in other words, isn't a residential use of a house in Binghamton at all. It's a commercial one, and it lives in a different part of the schedule.

The second is the bed-and-breakfast home, which the code calls "an owner-occupied one-or two-family home that provides one to five rooms for paying guests on an overnight basis," and where "guest occupancy periods shall not exceed 21 consecutive days."

That one counts as an accessory use, so § 410-19I lets you run one in the R-1, R-2 and R-3 districts. Five conditions attach, though. The Planning Commission has to review and approve a site plan, the facility must be owner-occupied, no more than five guest rooms may be let, each guest room may hold a family or up to two people, and no guest may stay beyond 21 days.

Put those two definitions side by side, then, and the map of what's possible in this city gets fairly clear.

• You live there and rent rooms. That's the bed-and-breakfast home path, and it's open in all three residential districts once the Planning Commission signs off on your site plan.
• You don't live there. Then you're asking to run overnight lodging, and Schedule I allows that in R-3 only, with a special use permit and a landscape buffer along every side and rear property line under § 410-29A. R-1 and R-2 don't list it at all, which under § 410-26B means it isn't permitted there.
• You're in a commercial or industrial district. Overnight lodging is available with a special use permit in C-1, C-2, C-4, C-6, I-1 and I-2, and it's absent from the Medical, Neighborhood Office and Heavy Industrial districts. Note that it's never permitted by right anywhere in the city, so the Planning Commission is in your future either way.

Then there's one more provision that quietly limits how many people you can put in a house, and it comes at the problem from a different angle.

Under § 410-26D, whoever occupies a home in a residential district has to count as "a family or the equivalent of a family," and the code's definition of family presumes a group is not a functional family unit where four or more college students over 16 live there, or four or more unrelated adults over 18 with no minor children. In a college town that rule was written with student housing in mind, though it sits on the books for anyone filling a house with strangers.

The code never says the words "short-term rental," though, and that's the honest caveat here. Whether your specific listing counts as overnight lodging or as something else is something the Zoning Officer decides, so make sure you get that decision in writing before you commit money to the plan.

Still, courts in New York have generally backed that reading elsewhere, since the state's own short-term rental training deck for local governments cites Cradit v. Town of Southold ZBA (2020), where a zoning board held short-term rentals had never been permitted in a residential district because they resemble the commercial hotel and motel definition, and the Appellate Division agreed.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Binghamton

Assuming that determination goes your way, the shape of the business follows directly from which answer you got, and the three realistic versions look very different from each other.

The cleanest is the owner-occupied bed-and-breakfast home. You live in the house, you let up to five rooms, and each room takes a family or two people. Since the code caps guest occupancy at 21 consecutive days, weekend and week-long stays sit comfortably inside it. The code was built for that. It's the only version of the business a residential district clearly allows for, which is why the Binghamton hosts doing this legally tend to be hosting out of their own home rather than a second property.

The second is the whole-property listing, and that one needs R-3 or a commercial district plus a special use permit. Be aware that a special use permit is a public process rather than a form, so the neighbors within 200 feet get a letter, a notice runs in the Press & Sun Bulletin, a sign goes up on your lawn, and the Planning Commission votes on you at a public meeting.

The trouble is that a great deal of Binghamton's housing stock sits in R-1 or R-2. Where yours does and you don't intend to live in it, there's no route on this path at all, and unfortunately the honest answer is to stop here.

The third is the one plenty of owners quietly land on, which is to stop being a short-term rental. After all, a stay of 30 nights or more isn't nightly lodging under anyone's definition, it drops out of both occupancy taxes, and with Binghamton University, UHS and Lourdes all in the area there's steady demand for furnished mid-term housing.

And the local numbers back that up, too. In a BiggerPockets thread on Binghamton short-term rentals, for instance, a local agent told a would-be investor back in February 2024 that an average apartment on the west side goes for roughly $40 to $60 a night, and she steered them toward travel-nurse housing instead. At those rates, a permit-and-approval process running to several hundred dollars has to be earned back a very long way down the calendar. That's the whole argument, really.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Binghamton

Whichever of those three you're heading toward, the approvals run through the same two counters in City Hall, so it's worth knowing what each one wants before you start.

Zoning approval comes first, and the Planning Commission Review Application sets out both the price and the calendar, so start there. Site plan review costs $150 on a lot under 4,000 square feet and $250 on anything larger, and a special use permit adds $50 on top of that.

Then the public notice fees land on you as well: $50 for the legal notice in the Press & Sun Bulletin, $2 per mailed notice to every landowner within 200 feet, and $50 per public notice sign, of which $40 comes back when you return the sign.

Timing is where the real cost sits, though. Applications are due the first Wednesday of the month to reach the following month's agenda, the Planning Commission meets the first Tuesday at 5:15pm, and the Zoning Board of Appeals meets the second Tuesday at 5:15pm.

And since staff say most Planning Commission applications take two meetings to finish, and a parcel within 500 feet of a municipal boundary, a county or state road, a park or a drainage channel also has to be referred to Broome County Planning for up to 30 days, you should budget two to four months rather than two weeks.

Then there's rental registration, which is a completely separate obligation and catches out owners who assume zoning approval covered it. Under § 265-6 of the housing and property maintenance code, every owner of rental property files a Rental Registration Application with the City Clerk and pays $50 for up to two rental units, plus $25 for each additional unit, non-refundable, with the first inspection included in that fee. The only exemption worth knowing is for a two-unit dwelling where the owner lives in one of the units.

That record runs three years from the last day of the month it's issued, it has to be posted in a common area, and it isn't transferable, so a buyer has to reapply within 30 days of the deed being recorded.

Inspections come with it. Every registered property gets visited at least once every three years, and once the health, safety, building and zoning issues are all resolved, the Office of Building Construction, Zoning and Code Enforcement issues the Certificate of Compliance. Miss the second inspection or fail to show up for one, and each extra visit costs $50.

The third piece is tax registration, which I'll come to in a moment, and the fourth is the state's county registry, which as of July 2026 has nothing for a Broome County host to join. Don't forget that none of these four substitutes for the others, because zoning approval doesn't register you, registration doesn't authorize the use, and neither of them tells the Comptroller you exist. So you'll be visiting all four.

Required Documents for Binghamton Short-Term Rentals

Since the Planning Commission meets once a month and staff won't process an incomplete application, missing a document costs you a full agenda cycle rather than an afternoon. The application checklist is specific about what has to arrive together.

• A full-size site plan, plus a scaled copy at 11 by 17 inches, plus digital files of every plan and drawing emailed to Planning staff.
• A scaled floor plan. For a bed-and-breakfast home this is where the five-guest-room limit is checked, so draw the rooms you intend to let rather than the ones you hope to.
• An Environmental Assessment Form, short or long, with staff telling you which one your project needs.
• The application fee, and separately the notice fees, since the applicant pays for the legal notice, the mailings and the sign.
• For rental registration: the street address and tax parcel number, full ownership details including every partner, manager, member or officer if you hold the property in an LLC (a post office box won't be accepted), the unit, bedroom and bathroom counts, and a list of the certificates of occupancy, building permits and approvals you already hold.
• A designated Local Authorized Representative who keeps a home or business address in Broome County or a county next to it, and who can accept service of notices on your behalf. Out-of-area owners can't skip this one.

Do check your certificate of occupancy against what you're proposing before any of this, because switching a building from residential to transient occupancy is a change of use under the state's Uniform Code, and that's the kind of thing an inspector catches at exactly the wrong moment. Better to know now.

Binghamton, New York Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to sort out, and Binghamton stacks three separate layers on a single night's stay. Two of them arrive already collected, and the third one, which is new, does not. That third one is yours.

Charge	Rate	Who collects it
City of Binghamton occupancy tax	5%	You file it with the City Comptroller
Broome County occupancy tax	5%	Airbnb collects it for you
New York State and local sales tax	8%	Your booking service collects it

The city tax is the one that changed, and it's the single most important update in this guide. Binghamton had no hotel tax at all until the state legislature passed Senate Bill S9432, which was signed on 27 September 2024 as Chapter 367 of the Laws of 2024 and lets the city charge up to 5% on "any facility providing lodging on an overnight basis," a phrase the statute stretches so it covers "bed and breakfast" and "tourist" facilities by name.

And the city's own occupancy tax page confirms the rate landed at the full five percent, under Local Law 5 of 2024, approved by the Department of State on 18 November 2024, with permanent residents of 30 or more consecutive days exempt.

Whether that tax reaches Airbnb hosts isn't left to interpretation, either, since the city's Occupancy Tax Registration form asks in so many words, "Do you use a rental agency/third party marketer (i.e., Airbnb, HomeAway)?" and wants the listing number if you do.

Once you register, the Comptroller issues a Certificate of Authority, and after that you file quarterly on the city's calendar, with the period ending 28 February due on 20 March and the rest following on 20 June, 20 September and 20 December. The return form warns that a 5% penalty applies to anything paid after the 20th, and it has to be filed whether or not you owe anything that quarter. Do put those four dates in a calendar now.

Broome County's 5% is older and easier, since it dates to Local Law 10 of 1977 and works the same way, with the same quarterly deadlines and the same 30-day permanent resident exemption, per the county occupancy tax page. The county legislature extended it through 31 December 2027 in Local Law Perm 4 of 2024, so it's due for another vote before then.

It's easier because Airbnb already handles it. Airbnb's New York occupancy tax page lists Broome County among the places where it collects the tax on your behalf, at "5% of the listing price including any cleaning fees, up to a maximum of 29 nights."

Sales tax belongs to the state and changed on 1 March 2025, when New York extended sales tax to short-term rental unit occupancy wherever the rate exceeds $2.00 per unit per day. In Broome County the combined state and local rate is 8%, according to Publication 718.

Booking services now register as sales tax vendors and collect it for you, and you're relieved of collecting it yourself as long as a booking service handles all of your sales and 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 somewhere you can find it. Guests who stay 90 consecutive days or more count as permanent residents and drop out of sales tax entirely.

Add the three together and roughly 18% of rent is tax, though only the city's five points land on you directly. Airbnb is not on the city's collection list, and neither is any other platform I could find, so watch out for the assumption that your payout summary has covered everything. It very likely hasn't.

Tax Deductions for Short-Term Rentals

Federal and state income tax sits on top of all of that, and the deductions work the way they do for any rental: mortgage interest, insurance, utilities, cleaning, supplies, platform fees, repairs and depreciation.

What complicates it in Binghamton is that the legal shape of the business here is often a bed-and-breakfast home, meaning you're renting rooms inside a house you also live in. Every shared expense then has to be apportioned between the guest side and your side, which is fiddlier on a real tax return than it looks in a spreadsheet. A local accountant is cheap next to the cost of getting it wrong.

New York State-Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Since the state now sits in the middle of your sales tax collection, it's fair to ask what else Albany has taken over, and the short answer is: less than the headlines suggested.

New York doesn't preempt local rules, and the Department of State tells municipalities so directly. In the training deck it gives local governments, the state says there's "no requirement for local government to acknowledge short term rentals as a use." The same deck adds that it's "up to each municipality to define, prohibit and/or regulate short term rentals as they choose." So Binghamton's closed-list zoning is what that permission looks like when a city takes it up by not acting at all.

What the state did build is a registry, and it's a county registry rather than a state one. Real Property Law § 447-b puts the registry in each county's hands, with a window for counties to opt out by local law, and it grandfathers registries a municipality was already running.

Its subdivision 5 matters most to you right now, because it suspends the registration, record-keeping and verification duties, along with the safety and insurance items, until your county actually establishes a registry. When one exists, hosts owe a posted evacuation diagram, a list of emergency phone numbers, a working fire extinguisher, and at least $300,000 of third party liability cover for property damage or bodily injury. That insurance floor is worth pricing in now, since it's coming whenever Broome moves.

I have to be straight with you about a gap here, though. I couldn't confirm that Broome County has established a registry, and I couldn't confirm that it opted out either. The county's own local laws page lists every law adopted and filed with the state, and neither the six laws from 2025 nor the five from 2026 touch short-term rentals in any way, nor does the county publish a registry page.

The opt-out window has closed on every reading of the deadline, so this should be settled somewhere, and yet nothing about it is published. Do call the county before you assume you're registered or exempt.

Outside Binghamton the picture changes fast from one municipality to the next, which is the point the state keeps making. Our New York statewide guide maps the overall framework, the Onondaga County guide covers the Syracuse market an hour north, and the Erie County guide covers Buffalo, where the city took the opposite approach and wrote an actual short-term rental ordinance with registration, certificates and annual inspections.

Does Binghamton, New York Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Since the state layer isn't the thing that will bite you here, the question becomes how hard the city pushes, and the honest answer is that enforcement is complaint-driven rather than systematic, which cuts both ways.

Nobody here is scraping listings. What Binghamton does have is a rental inspection program that visits every registered property at least once every three years, a code enforcement office that investigates written complaints, and a set of penalties that get expensive on repetition rather than on the first offense.

Under § 410-89B of the zoning ordinance, any violation carries a fine of not less than $50 and not more than $1,000, or up to 15 days' imprisonment, or both, and each day's failure to comply is a separate violation. That last clause is what turns a nuisance into a real number. Ignore a notice for two months and you're not looking at a thousand dollars, you're looking at sixty of them.

Breaching a condition the Planning Commission attached to your approval runs on its own scale of $250 for a first offense and $500 for each one after, again per day.

Failing to register a rental property has its own ladder under § 265-6J: $250 for a first offense, $500 for a second within a year and $1,000 for each one after that, plus the registration and inspection fees you avoided, with every property counted as a separate offense.

The quietest risk, though, is the one aimed at parties. Binghamton runs a nuisance point system in Chapter 315, under which a property becomes a public nuisance once it accumulates 12 points in six months or 18 in twelve. A noise violation is worth two points, littering another two, disorderly conduct four, and the remedies at the far end include a temporary closing order and a court-appointed receiver to run the building.

So six loud weekends inside half a year is all it takes. And in a rental you don't live in, six loud weekends is hardly a hypothetical.

And I should say what I couldn't find, as well, because it cuts the other way. Binghamton publishes no register of short-term rentals, no enforcement statistics, and no record of a prosecution under any of these sections, so I can't tell you how often the city reaches for them. What I can tell you is that the tools are unusually blunt for a city this size, and that using them doesn't require anyone to write a short-term rental ordinance first.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Binghamton

Given how much of that turns on a single zoning answer, the order of these steps matters more than it looks, because the first two tell you whether the rest are worth paying for.

1. Look up your zoning district and get a determination in writing. Call the Planning Department on (607) 772-7028 and ask the Zoning Officer how they classify your specific plan. R-1 and R-2 don't allow overnight lodging, so if that's your district and you don't intend to live there, this step is the whole answer.
2. Decide which use you're actually applying for. Owner-occupied bed-and-breakfast home in a residential district, or overnight lodging with a special use permit in R-3 or a commercial district. They carry different applications and different limits.
3. Book a pre-development meeting. Planning staff hold them on Tuesday afternoons, and an hour there will save you a wasted agenda cycle.
4. Prepare the site plan, the floor plan and the environmental assessment form, then file by the first Wednesday of the month for the following month's Planning Commission meeting.
5. Pay the fees and post the sign. $150 or $250 for site plan review, $50 for a special use permit, $50 for the legal notice, $2 per mailing and $50 per sign, with $40 refunded when the sign comes back.
6. Register the rental with the City Clerk and pay $50 for up to two units, then schedule the inspection and get your Certificate of Compliance before you take a booking.
7. Register for the city occupancy tax with the Comptroller's office, get your Certificate of Authority back, and put the four quarterly returns in your calendar.
8. Confirm what your platform collects. Airbnb handles Broome County's 5% and the state sales tax. It doesn't handle Binghamton's 5%, so budget to pay that one yourself.
9. Check whether Broome County has stood up a registry before your first stay, and if it has, add the evacuation diagram, the emergency phone list, the fire extinguisher and the $300,000 liability cover.
10. Write your house rules around the nuisance points, especially quiet hours and trash, since noise and litter are exactly what accumulates them.

Who to Contact in Binghamton, New York about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Most of those steps land on one of four desks, and knowing which one owns your question saves an afternoon of being transferred.

Zoning, site plans and special use permits

The Planning, Zoning & Historic Preservation Department runs site plan review, zoning administration and enforcement, and it's where a written zoning determination comes from.

• Address: Binghamton City Hall, 38 Hawley Street, Binghamton, NY 13901
• Phone: (607) 772-7028
• Director: Juliet Berling
• Hours: 9:00am to 5:00pm
• Meetings: Planning Commission, first Tuesday of the month at 5:15pm; Zoning Board of Appeals, second Tuesday at 5:15pm

Building permits, inspections and code complaints

The Office of Building Construction & Code Enforcement issues building permits and certificates of compliance, and it's also who a neighbor calls about you.

• Address: Binghamton City Hall, 38 Hawley Street, Binghamton, NY 13901
• Phone: (607) 772-7010 for service requests, complaints and appointments
• Supervisor: Christopher Schleider, (607) 772-7004
• Hours: 9:00am to 5:00pm, with appointments recommended rather than required

Rental registration applications themselves go to the City Clerk at the same address, since § 265-6C puts the Clerk rather than code enforcement in charge of the filing.

City occupancy tax

The Office of the Comptroller, inside the Finance Department, issues the Certificate of Authority and takes the quarterly returns.

• Address: City of Binghamton Comptroller, 38 Hawley Street, Binghamton, NY 13901
• Phone: (607) 772-7011
• Comptroller: Charles Robinson
• Email: [email protected]

County occupancy tax and the county registry question

The Broome County Office of Management and Budget administers the county's 5% and is the office to ask about the state registry law.

• Address: Broome County Office Building, Second Floor, 60 Hawley Street, Binghamton, NY 13902
• Phone: 607.778.2162, fax 607.778.2044
• Director: Jennifer L. Lindsay
• Email: [email protected]
• Payment window: 8:30am to 4:00pm

One more number is worth having if you own an older building. The Broome County Health Department runs a lead rental registry covering properties built before 1980 with two or more units in Binghamton ZIP codes 13901 and 13905, and every eligible property had to be registered by 1 May 2026, with inspections every three years after that. Free inspections and free certification training are available on 607-778-2847 and 607-778-2863.

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Binghamton, New York Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Those contact numbers matter more here than they would elsewhere, because there's no host community to ask instead. What I could actually read is thin, so take the following as my read of it rather than a survey.

The most useful thing I found is a BiggerPockets thread from February 2024, where an out-of-state investor asked about starting short-term rentals in Binghamton and a local agent answered in one line that has aged well: "Technically STRs aren't allowed within the city limits ... though, I know many people who do them."

She went on to say that nightly rates for an average west-side apartment run about $40 to $60, that "the most profitable landlords in Bing are in student housing," with per-bed rents that had climbed from around $450 to $600 in two years, and that mid-term and travel-nurse rentals were the better play. Two years later, none of the underlying rules have changed in a way that would alter her advice.

That gap between "not allowed" and "people do it anyway" is the real character of this market, and it's worth sitting with. The city has never had to argue about a short-term rental ordinance, because it never wrote one, so there's been no public fight, no permit cap, no registry and no visible enforcement campaign.

Hosts read that quiet as permission. What it actually is, though, is a closed-list zoning code that's never been tested against Airbnb here, sitting under a brand-new city occupancy tax whose registration form asks for your listing number.

There's one thing I couldn't do here, though, and it's worth flagging. Reddit blocks automated access, so I haven't read what Binghamton hosts say there and I'm not going to characterize it. For a genuine local read, the Planning Department will tell you what they've approved, and the Comptroller's office will tell you who's registered for the tax, which is more reliable than a forum in any case.

Keep in mind that this is a small, low-ADR market where the compliance overhead costs about what it would in a market charging three times the nightly rate, so you need a great many $60 nights to pay for the same paperwork. Assuming you're weighing Binghamton against elsewhere in the state, our New York market rankings are the fastest way to see where the numbers actually justify that paperwork.

And the broader lesson travels well past Broome County: a town with no short-term rental law isn't a town with no rules. It's a town where the rules were written before anyone imagined your business, which is usually a harder place to operate than one that regulated you on purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

It depends on your zoning district and whether you live in the property. Binghamton has no short-term rental ordinance, and its zoning code only permits uses that appear on its list. An owner-occupied bed-and-breakfast home of up to five guest rooms is allowed in the R-1, R-2 and R-3 districts once the Planning Commission approves a site plan. A whole-property nightly rental falls under overnight lodging, which needs a special use permit and is only available in R-3 and several commercial and industrial districts.

How much does it cost to get short-term rental approval in Binghamton?

Site plan review costs $150 on a lot under 4,000 square feet or $250 on a larger one, and a special use permit adds $50. On top of that the applicant pays a $50 legal notice, $2 for every mailed notice to landowners within 200 feet, and $50 per public notice sign with $40 refunded on its return. Rental registration with the City Clerk is a separate $50 for up to two units, plus $25 per additional unit, valid for three years.

What taxes do Binghamton short-term rentals pay?

Three layers apply. The City of Binghamton charges a 5% occupancy tax under Local Law 5 of 2024, Broome County charges its own 5%, and New York State and local sales tax adds 8% in Broome County. Airbnb collects the county tax and the state sales tax for you, but not the city tax, so hosts register with the City Comptroller and file quarterly returns themselves. Stays of 30 consecutive days or longer are exempt from both occupancy taxes.

Does Broome County have a short-term rental registry?

Not one that I could confirm as of July 2026. New York's Real Property Law Article 12-D put short-term rental registries in county hands with an opt-out by local law, but Broome County's published list of adopted local laws shows no registry law and no opt-out law for either 2025 or 2026, and the county publishes no registry page. Until a county registry exists, Real Property Law 447-b suspends the state registration, safety and insurance requirements for hosts there.

What are the penalties for an unpermitted short-term rental in Binghamton?

A zoning violation carries a fine of $50 to $1,000 or up to 15 days in jail, and each day the violation continues counts as a separate offense, so the total climbs fast. Failing to register a rental property costs $250 for a first offense, $500 for a second within a year and $1,000 after that, plus the fees avoided. Repeated noise or litter complaints also accumulate nuisance points, and 12 points in six months can trigger a closing order.

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