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 short-term rentals are legal here, provided the home you're renting out is the one you live in. British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act and Surrey's own bylaws agree on the core rule: your listing has to be your principal residence, plus at most one secondary suite or coach house on the same lot. Buy a second property purely to run it as a nightly rental, though, and there's no path to make that legal in Surrey, since the city sits well above the population threshold that triggers the province's toughest rule.

Assuming your setup clears that bar, there's still real paperwork ahead. Surrey charges $350 a year for a short-term rental business licence, on top of a provincial registration that runs $100 to $450 a year depending on whether you're registering your own home or a secondary suite. Then there's tax: GST, PST and a municipal tax stack onto every booking, and while Airbnb and Vrbo generally collect most of that for you automatically, you're still on the hook if a platform gets bad information from you. None of this is exotic by Canadian standards, mind you, but skipping a step tends to cost more than doing it right the first time.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly in 2026: the licence itself, the province's principal residence rule, every tax layer that stacks onto a booking, how hard Surrey enforces this stuff, and who to call when you get stuck. Everything below comes from Surrey's and British Columbia's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where a figure is still moving I've said so plainly. If you're deciding between a Surrey property and something else across the country, run the numbers through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Surrey

Before you run any numbers, though, you need to know whether your particular home even qualifies, because Surrey's definition of a short-term rental is narrower than a lot of new hosts expect. The city defines it as renting a dwelling unit to the public for temporary accommodation of less than 90 consecutive days per patron, which excludes bed and breakfasts, boarding and lodging, and tourist accommodation (those fall under their own, separate rules). Commonly it's called a vacation rental, and Surrey notes it can just as easily house someone on a temporary work assignment or a medical stay as a tourist.

The bigger constraint sits above the city. British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act requires that an STR operate out of the host's principal residence, and Surrey's own zoning bylaw amendment defines "principal residence" plainly: a dwelling the owner occupies for a minimum of 184 days in a calendar year. Clear that bar and you can also rent out one secondary suite or coach house on the same lot, or one lock-off suite if you're in a multi-unit building. The province's own principal residence requirement page confirms Surrey sits on the list of communities where this applies, since the city's population, about 726,000 as of July 2025, clears the 10,000-person threshold that triggers it many times over.

Hosting is restricted to the owner, too, not a tenant, so renting an apartment on Airbnb without owning it isn't an option here the way it is in a few other Canadian cities. And do keep in mind this isn't a fringe activity Surrey is stamping out reluctantly. The city's own research found roughly 800 active short-term rental listings on a given day in 2022, up 71.5% from the year before, with dedicated STR units growing from 290 to 450 properties over that same year. That's still under 0.4% of Surrey's total housing stock, mind you, and complaints have stayed low: only 366 short-term rental complaints between March 2021 and March 2024, about 0.7% of everything bylaw officers dealt with. But Surrey's rental vacancy rate sat at just 0.6% in 2021, against a healthy range of 3 to 5%, which is exactly the housing math that got the province involved in the first place.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Surrey

That housing math is also why the licence itself isn't cheap or automatic. A short-term rental business licence in Surrey costs $350 per year plus any applicable application fees, well above the $132.50 the city charges for a bed and breakfast licence. Surrey's own corporate report on the policy explains why: a bed and breakfast owner is present for every stay, while a short-term rental host is often not there, so the higher fee reflects the extra enforcement work that gap creates.

You apply through the Online Business Licensing Application Portal, or by mailing a paper application to the city's Business Licences office. Approval isn't just a fee and a form, though. Surrey conducts a building inspection at the property before it issues the licence, to confirm the home complies with the city's Building Bylaw and that any renovation work was properly permitted. Make sure you clear up any unpermitted construction before you apply, since unauthorized work discovered mid-review will delay your licence while you sort it out, and possibly force a retroactive permit application first.

Once you're licensed, four ongoing conditions come with it, straight out of the amended Business Licence By-law:

• Provide proof of principal residence on request (utility bills, government photo ID, vehicle registration or insurance all count).
• Never accept more than one booking, or allow occupancy by more than one person or group, at the same time.
• Keep each patron's name, address, phone number, email, and arrival and departure dates on file for two years.
• Register the rental with the Province of British Columbia and give the city proof once you have it.

Break any of those and Surrey can ticket you $1,000 per violation under the Municipal Ticket Information Utilization By-law, or issue a lower-value Bylaw Notice Enforcement ticket in the $250 to $350 range that keeps accruing as a continuing offence for as long as the violation lasts. And don't forget the provincial layer sits on top of the city's licence, not instead of it. British Columbia's own short-term rental registry charges $100 a year plus a $1.50 service fee to register your own principal residence, or $450 a year plus the same service fee for a secondary suite, accessory dwelling unit or strata hotel unit. That registration renews annually too, and the province starts sending reminder emails 40 days before it expires, then again at 14 and 1 day out, so it's worth putting the date somewhere you'll see it.

Required Documents for Surrey Short Term Rentals

Since that renewal date matters enough to diarize, it's worth getting the paperwork itself right on the first pass, too, because Surrey and the province each want slightly different things. For the city's business licence application, you'll generally need:

• Proof you occupy the home as your principal residence for at least 184 days a year, such as a utility bill, government-issued photo ID, vehicle registration, or an insurance document with your address on it.
• A completed suite declaration form if you're renting out a secondary suite or coach house alongside your own home. Every suite on the property has to be declared this way, not just the one you're listing.
• Evidence that any building permits for past renovation or construction work are in order, since the city's inspection will catch unauthorized work and hold up your licence until it's resolved.
• Your provincial short-term rental registration number, once you have it, since the city requires proof you've registered with the Province.

Beyond the application itself, keep in mind you're also signing up for an ongoing record-keeping duty rather than a one-time submission. Surrey's bylaw requires you to log each patron's name, address, phone number and email, plus their arrival and departure dates, and to hold that file for two years from the date of arrival. Do check that your booking platform's records cover all of that, because a reservation sitting in Airbnb's system isn't the same as keeping your own compliant record, and the city can ask to see it at any point.

Surrey Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that paperwork and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to sort out on every booking. Three separate layers can attach to a short-term stay in Surrey, and because two different governments administer them, it helps to take them one at a time.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST (federal)	5%	The platform, if you haven't provided your own GST number, otherwise you
PST (provincial)	8%	The platform, if it's a registered marketplace facilitator
MRDT (Surrey)	3%	The platform, remitted to the Province and passed to Discover Surrey and the Surrey Hotel and Motel Association

The federal piece is GST at 5%, and under digital economy rules that took effect July 1, 2021, a platform has to register and collect it on your behalf once your revenue through that platform crosses $30,000 CAD in any 12-month period, whether or not you're separately registered. British Columbia layers its own 8% PST on short-term accommodation on top, though a few things fall outside it: stays under $30 a day (or $210 a week), total revenue under $2,500 a year if you're not listed on any online platform, and any stay of 27 consecutive nights or more.

Then there's the Municipal and Regional District Tax, or MRDT, which Surrey collects at 3% on top of PST. That's not a small line item, either. Surrey's own reporting shows the MRDT collected from online platforms alone brought in $441,950.10 in 2022, on top of nearly $1.7 million collected from traditional hotels and motels the same year, with the money flowing to Discover Surrey and the Surrey Hotel and Motel Association for tourism promotion. Going by local reporting on the November 2024 council vote, Surrey renewed that 3% rate through May 2030, so treat it as a number that's locked in for a while rather than one likely to move soon.

One thing does make this lighter, mind you: if you list only through a registered online marketplace facilitator like Airbnb or Vrbo, the platform collects and remits GST, PST and MRDT for you automatically, and you don't need to register for a provincial PST account yourself. You're still on the hook if you give the platform bad information, a wrong address, say, and it under-collects as a result, so it's worth double-checking your listing details match what's on file with the city and the province. And remember, none of this is the same as your income tax. Rental income is taxable the ordinary way, and neither Surrey nor the province has any role in that side of it. If you're weighing a Surrey listing against a nightly rate you might get somewhere else in the country, running both through BNBCalc is the fastest way to see whether the after-tax math still holds up.

Surrey-wide Short Term Rental Rules

That after-tax math only matters if your zoning even allows a short-term rental in the first place, so it's worth stepping back to the rules that apply across the whole city rather than just to the licence or the tax bill. Surrey permits short-term rentals in residential, mixed-use and agricultural zones, covering roughly two dozen zone codes from A-1 through C-35, plus applicable Comprehensive Development zones. The city's own short-term rentals page lists every zone by name, so check yours against it before you get too far into planning.

The duration rule is more generous than you might expect: a stay can run up to 89 consecutive nights before it stops counting as a short-term rental, and there's no cap on how many bookings you can take across a year. What Surrey won't allow is stacking bookings, since only one booking, or one group's occupancy, is permitted in the dwelling at a time. That rules out renting separate bedrooms to separate parties simultaneously, even inside a home you fully own and occupy.

Two related categories sit just outside the short-term rental definition and carry their own, different limits. A bed and breakfast can house up to six patrons across no more than three bedrooms, provided the owner is present throughout and no cooking facilities sit inside the guest bedrooms. Boarding and lodging tops out at two boarders or lodgers at a time under the same owner-presence and no-cooking conditions. Confusing an STR for either of these, or vice versa, is a common way hosts end up applying for the wrong licence entirely.

Remember, too, that all of this sits on top of British Columbia's own floor, not instead of it. The province's principal residence requirement can only be lifted for a community whose rental vacancy rate has held at 3% or higher for two consecutive years, and Surrey's rate was 0.6% as recently as 2021, nowhere near that bar. So don't plan around Surrey loosening this rule anytime soon. If anything, the trend across Metro Vancouver has run the other way since 2024.

Does Surrey strictly enforce STR rules?

That trend shows up in how seriously Surrey and the province are now willing to enforce these rules, even if the city's own numbers still look fairly mild on paper. Surrey issued only 366 short-term rental complaints between March 2021 and March 2024, a sliver of total bylaw activity, and most of those were the ordinary noise, parking and garbage complaints that come with any rental turnover rather than anything about licensing itself. On the ground, day to day, this still isn't a city crawling with inspectors chasing down every unlicensed listing.

What's changed is the machinery behind enforcement. The city can issue Bylaw Notice Enforcement tickets or Municipal Ticket Informations for breaking licence conditions, and provincial rules let local governments fine up to $3,000 per infraction, per day under the Bylaw Enforcement Ticket Regulations. Layered on top of that, the Province's own Compliance and Enforcement Unit can fine a host $500 to $5,000 per day, per infraction, and a corporation up to $10,000 per day, for breaking the principal residence rule or the registration requirement. Guests themselves face no fines at all, so the pressure lands entirely on the host.

Watch out, too, for the practical bite that shows up when the registry itself has a bad day. A batch of provincial registration renewals in April 2026 got misclassified and briefly lapsed, triggering automatic booking cancellations for the hosts affected, which is a different kind of enforcement than a bylaw officer knocking on a door. Nobody had to catch anyone doing anything wrong. The system just stopped recognizing a registration as valid for a few days, and Airbnb acted on that instantly.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Surrey

Avoiding exactly that kind of exposure starts with doing the steps in the right order, since skipping ahead wastes both time and the $350 licence fee:

1. Confirm your home qualifies as a principal residence. You need to occupy it at least 184 days a year, and it has to be a single-family dwelling, a secondary suite or coach house on that lot, a multi-unit dwelling, or a lock-off suite.
2. Check your zoning. Confirm your address sits inside one of Surrey's permitted residential, mixed-use, agricultural or applicable CD zones before you spend anything.
3. Clear up any unpermitted construction. Surrey inspects the property before granting a licence, and unauthorized work discovered at that stage will delay you.
4. Declare every suite on the property, using Surrey's suite declaration form, not just the one you plan to list.
5. Apply for your $350 business licence through the Online Business Licensing Application Portal.
6. Register with British Columbia's provincial short-term rental registry, at $100 a year for your own home or $450 for a secondary suite, and get your registration number.
7. Add both numbers, city and provincial, to every listing, and make sure the address on each listing matches exactly what you registered.
8. Set up your tax collection. Confirm your platform is collecting GST, PST and MRDT on your behalf, and register yourself if you're taking bookings any other way.
9. Start your two-year patron log on day one, covering names, contact details, and arrival and departure dates for every stay.
10. Diarize both renewal dates. The city's licence and the province's registration renew annually, and the province starts emailing reminders 40 days out.

Follow that order and the paperwork side of this stops being the thing that trips you up.

Who to contact in Surrey about Short Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Something will still trip you up eventually, and when it does, knowing which office owns your question saves a lot of time on hold. Four contacts cover almost everything.

Zoning and permitted uses

For questions about whether your property's zone allows a short-term rental, or about the building permit history on your address, call Surrey's Planning & Development team at 604-591-4448.

Business licensing and applications

The Business Licence team handles new applications, renewals, inspections and the suite declaration form. Reach them at 604-591-4370, by email at [email protected], or in writing at City of Surrey, Business Licences, 13450 104 Avenue, Surrey, BC V3T 1V8. Business Licensing itself has moved to 6651 148 Street, Surrey Operations Centre, so double-check that address if you're going in person; renewal payments by mail or in person still go to Surrey City Hall's Property and Payment Services counter at the same 13450 104 Avenue address.

Complaints and enforcement

Surrey's bylaw team takes short-term rental complaints at the same 604-591-4370 number, or through the city's online Report a Problem tool. City Hall's general hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30pm.

The Province of British Columbia

For anything about the principal residence requirement, the provincial registry, registration fees or the Compliance and Enforcement Unit, contact ServiceBC at 1-833-828-2240 or [email protected]. They're open Monday to Friday, 7:30am to 5:00pm, with help available in 140 languages.

Keep in mind the city and the province don't share a phone line, so a question about zoning gets you nowhere calling ServiceBC, and a question about a provincial registration number gets you nowhere calling Surrey.

What do Airbnb hosts in Surrey on Reddit and Bigger Pockets think about local regulations?

Calling the right number is one thing; figuring out how hosts actually feel about all this is another, and I'll be upfront about the limits of what I could verify here. Reddit blocks the kind of automated access this research relies on, and I couldn't find a specific, readable BiggerPockets thread with Surrey-specific detail either, so nothing below is a quote pulled from either of those without reading it myself.

What I did find, and read directly, is a Tyee report from April 2026 on the province's registry hitting real problems during its 2026 renewal cycle. A Kelowna Superhost, Taylor Cameron, described watching her business disappear in real time after a renewal glitch. "You're literally just watching your livelihood be stripped away, cancellation by cancellation," she said, adding that provincial customer service told her, "We can do nothing, we don't have access to your account." Housing Minister Christine Boyle acknowledged "some bumps in the renewals this year," and a ministry spokesperson said complaints "have not been high." Linda Hepner, the Conservative MLA for Surrey-Serpentine River, told a different story: she said constituents in her own riding had lost listings to the same glitch, and called the policy "poorly thought-out," pushing for a pause or a full repeal.

That gap, between a ministry calling it a minor bump and an MLA representing part of Surrey calling it poorly thought-out, is probably the most honest read of where sentiment sits right now. Hosts who are fully compliant seem to be the ones getting hurt by system errors, not by deliberate rule-breaking, which is a frustrating way to lose income. My guess is that frustration cools once the renewal system beds in, since most of the complaints trace back to the process rather than the underlying rule. But until it does, don't assume that being compliant on paper protects you from a bad week if the registry itself stumbles. If you're weighing Surrey against other Canadian markets while that beds in, the Canada market data on BNBCalc is worth a look before you commit to one address over another.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Surrey in 2026?

Yes, but only if the property is your genuine principal residence, meaning you occupy it at least 184 days a year. British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act and Surrey's own bylaws both require this, and Surrey sits well above the population threshold that triggers the province's rule. You can also rent out one secondary suite, coach house or lock-off suite on the same lot. Buying a separate property purely to run as a nightly rental isn't legal here, and a business licence alone won't change that.

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

The city charges $350 a year for a short-term rental business licence, plus any applicable application fees, on top of a required building inspection. That's separate from British Columbia's own provincial registration, which costs $100 a year for your principal residence or $450 a year for a secondary suite, plus a small service fee. Both renew annually, and missing either renewal can get your listings pulled from Airbnb or Vrbo.

Do Surrey hosts need to register with the province as well as the city?

Yes, both are required and neither substitutes for the other. Surrey's business licence covers the local zoning and inspection side, while British Columbia's short-term rental registry covers the principal residence requirement and gives you a registration number that has to appear on every listing. Skipping the provincial registration means platforms are required to remove your listing, regardless of whether your Surrey licence is in good standing.

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

Three layers stack onto a typical booking: 5% federal GST, 8% provincial PST, and a 3% Municipal and Regional District Tax that Surrey collects locally. If you list only through a registered platform like Airbnb or Vrbo, that platform generally collects and remits all three for you automatically. Stays of 27 consecutive nights or more are exempt from PST and the MRDT, and your rental income is still taxable separately as ordinary income.

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

No. Surrey's bylaw restricts short-term rental hosting to the property owner, not a tenant, which is different from how some other Canadian cities handle it. If you're renting long-term and want to sublet part of your unit short-term, Surrey's rules don't provide a path to make that legal, regardless of what your landlord might agree to privately.

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