Courtenay Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Courtenay and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and that answer is genuinely new. Until the spring of 2025, the city's zoning bylaw didn't permit short-term rentals at all. The City put it bluntly in its own April 2025 staff report to Council, describing a Courtenay where short-term rentals "are not permitted at all but Bed and Breakfasts are permitted." Council changed that on 7 May 2025, so the town went from a total ban to a narrow, licensed permission in a single evening.

Now the catch, because it's a big one. The permission only reaches owners who live on the property they're renting out, one short-term rental per parcel, capped at three bedrooms and six guests, and it only applies to single homes, secondary suites and accessory dwelling units. Buy a condo down by the Courtenay River as a pure investment and you can't legally list it for a weekend, no matter how many forms you fill in.

Courtenay sits in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, and British Columbia stacks its own registry on top of whatever the city asks for. So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly: which bylaw permits what, the $300 licence and how it breaks down, the three layers of tax that land on a nightly rate, how hard the city pushes on enforcement, and who to call when something doesn't fit. Every figure below comes from Courtenay's or British Columbia's own pages, checked in July 2026. Before any of it matters, run the property through BNBCalc and see whether a three-bedroom cap still clears your mortgage.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Courtenay, Canada?

Three city bylaws and one provincial statute do the work here, and pulling them apart explains most of what confuses people.

The zoning bylaw decides whether the use is allowed on your parcel at all. The city's short-term rentals page names Zoning Bylaw No. 3203, 2026 as the one in force, and it carries forward provisions first written by Zoning Amendment Bylaw No. 3134, 2025, which is the document to read if you want the exact wording. It defines short-term rental accommodation as "the rental of a dwelling unit or any portion of it for a period of less than 90 days," and it excludes bed and breakfast accommodation, which stayed a separate use with separate rules.

Ninety days is a long fence. Anything shorter than that is a short-term rental in Courtenay's eyes, so a six-week furnished stay counts as much as a two-night one.

Part 20 of those zoning provisions then sets the conditions, and between them they decide everything:

• Only three housing forms qualify. A single residential dwelling, an accessory dwelling unit, or a secondary suite that's part of a single residential dwelling. Apartments and multi-residential buildings were deliberately left out, since Council parked the strata questions for a later zoning update.
• One short-term rental per parcel. Not one per building, not one per suite.
• The owner of the parcel has to run it, and the owner's principal residence has to be on that parcel. A "principal residence" is the dwelling unit where you live longer in a calendar year than anywhere else.
• Three bedrooms and six guests, maximum, with only one booking at a time under Section 12 of the Business Licence Bylaw.
• No pairing it with a bed and breakfast or a day care on the same parcel.
• One dedicated parking space for the short-term rental, on top of whatever the parcel already owes for the residence itself.
• No nuisance that's detectable past the property line, which covers noise, smoke, odour, glare and vibration.
• A valid city business licence, without which none of the above is permitted anyway.

The second bylaw is the Business Licence Bylaw No. 2523, consolidated to 24 October 2025, whose Section 12 repeats the occupancy caps and adds the operating duties: display the licence prominently inside the unit with the operator's contact details and a 24-hour phone number, and post a fire and safety plan. The third is the enforcement layer, and I'll come to what that costs later.

Above all three sits British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, better known locally as Bill 35. It gave the province a registry, a principal-residence rule, and the power to make platforms delist. A municipality can be stricter than the Act, but never more permissive, and Courtenay used exactly that room: the province restricts who hosts, while Courtenay also restricts which buildings.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Courtenay

Read that list of conditions with an investor's eye and the business narrows fast. Unfortunately, if your plan was to buy a second place in the Comox Valley, furnish it, and run it whole on Airbnb through the summer, there's no business here. The parcel has to hold your own home, and the city won't licence a short-term rental on a property you don't live on.

Renters are out too, which is stricter than the province. British Columbia's registry treats the host as whoever is legally entitled to possession, so a tenant can register there, whereas Courtenay's zoning says the operator has to be the owner of the parcel.

So what's actually left? Two shapes, and both of them are real.

The first is renting part of the home you live in, up to three bedrooms and six guests, one booking at a time.

The second is the one most people miss. You can live in the main house and put the secondary suite or the detached accessory dwelling unit on Airbnb instead, or live in the suite and rent the house out. The rule is that your principal residence sits on the parcel, not that it's the same four walls the guest sleeps in.

That distinction is worth getting right early, because a self-contained unit with its own door is a different business from a spare room. Model both in BNBCalc before you commit to one, since a one-bedroom suite and a three-bedroom house earn very different money at the same occupancy.

You'd be entering a market that already exists, mind you. The City's 2024 Housing Needs Report work counted 293 short-term rentals operating in Courtenay during 2023, back when the use was flatly prohibited, and the staff report notes that "nearly half were used 'commercially' (all year round for STR)". Some of that inventory can't be licensed under the new rules and has either moved to long-term tenancy or gone quiet. Some of it is now your competition, legally.

One more option sits beside all this. Bed and breakfast accommodation remains its own permitted use with its own $150 licence category, so if your plan involves serving breakfast and hosting in your own home, that route exists. Just remember you can't hold both at once on the same parcel.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Courtenay

Assuming your property fits one of those two shapes, there's still the licence to get, and it's cheap by Canadian standards. The city's short-term rentals page puts the annual fee at $300, and Schedule A of the business licence bylaw shows how that number is built: $150 for the licence itself, plus a separate $150 "Affordable Housing Amenity Reserve Fund offset fee."

That second $150 isn't an administrative charge. Staff proposed it because roughly 293 units had been pulled out of the long-term pool, and the money goes into the city's affordable housing reserve, so you're paying a small housing levy for the privilege. Whether that's fair depends on which side of the housing question you sit on, and Council heard both sides at the public hearing before adoption.

The mechanics are ordinary business-licence mechanics, and they bite if you ignore them:

Item	What applies
Annual fee	$300 ($150 licence + $150 housing reserve offset)
Licence period	1 January to 31 December
Starting mid-year	Fee halved if you become liable after 31 July
Late renewal	25% penalty after 1 March, 50% after 1 June
Refunds	None once issued, except a withdrawn or refused application
Transfer to another property	$20, and only with the licence inspector's approval

Applications go through the city's online form only, and the business licences page asks you to allow a "minimum of two to three weeks" depending on the approvals your file needs. You'll get an invoice once it's approved, and the licence itself arrives in the mail after you pay, so don't forget to build that gap into your launch date rather than your listing calendar.

A licence is tied to one specific dwelling unit, not to you and not to the parcel, which matters if you have both a suite and an accessory dwelling unit and change your mind about which one to rent. The licence inspector can also refuse or suspend a licence where the premises stop complying with a building, land use, health, fire or business bylaw, and you can appeal that decision to Council. Being refused isn't the end of the road; it's a hearing.

Then there's the provincial layer, which is separate money and a separate application. British Columbia's short-term rental registry charges $100 a year plus a $1.50 service fee where the host lives on the property, which is every legal Courtenay host, and $450 where they don't. Each unit needs its own registration, the number has to appear on your listings, and your renewal window opens 40 days before expiry.

One thing in motion as of July 2026: the city advertised a replacement, Business Licence Bylaw No. 3212, 2026, which went to Council for adoption on 24 June 2026. Reading the proposed text, it keeps the $300 short-term rental fee on both new and renewal licences, adds a $50 non-refundable application fee across all licence types, and writes in an explicit bar on advertising without a licence. I couldn't confirm from the city's own bylaw pages whether it has been adopted, since Bylaw 2523 is still the version posted, so check the current fee with staff before you budget.

Required Documents for Courtenay Short-Term Rentals

Since none of that $300 comes back once the licence is issued, it's worth getting your paperwork straight before you apply rather than during. Courtenay doesn't publish a standalone short-term rental checklist, so what follows is assembled from what the two bylaws require you to hold and what the provincial registry asks for at application.

• The city's online business licence application. Nothing else is accepted, not email, not paper.
• Proof you own the parcel and live on it. The zoning conditions turn on both, and the province wants a land title certificate or title search, or a BC Assessment property assessment notice, as one of its supporting documents.
• Government photo ID for the provincial registry, meaning a BC driver's licence, Services Card or BC ID, plus at least two supporting documents from the province's approved list.
• Your parcel identifier (PID), which the registry asks for alongside the property address and the details of the offer.
• A fire and safety plan, posted at the entrances and exits and in every bedroom, meeting the BC Building Code minimums. Section 12 spells out exactly what it must contain: your name, the property address, a local emergency contact reachable 24 hours a day, 911, a designated meeting point, and the location of the fire extinguisher and the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.
• The licence itself, displayed inside the unit, with your contact information and that 24-hour phone number beside it.
• Your parking arrangement, since the zoning bylaw wants one dedicated space per short-term rental operation on top of what the residence already needs. Staff will confirm the count for your specific dwelling type when you apply.
• Both numbers on every listing. The provincial registration number has been mandatory on B.C. listings since 1 May 2025, and the municipal business licence number goes up alongside it.

Be aware that the province treats a change of legal name, business name or address as a new application rather than an edit, so get the details right the first time.

Courtenay Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you're able to get through the licensing and start taking bookings, there's still tax to sort out, and Courtenay is one of the B.C. communities with an extra layer of it. Three separate charges land on a short stay, and they stack:

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST	5%	The platform, unless you're GST registered yourself
PST on accommodation	8%	The platform as a registered marketplace facilitator, or you
Municipal and Regional District Tax	2%	Same as the PST

That's 15% on top of the nightly rate as of July 2026. Guests pay it, though they see it at checkout, so it shapes how your total stacks up against the hotel down the road.

The B.C. accommodation rules put PST at 8% and allow a Municipal and Regional District Tax of up to 3% in participating areas, with online marketplace facilitators required to register and collect both. Where a platform handles the booking, it handles the tax, though the accommodation provider stays liable if the tax never gets collected. Reading that carefully matters if you take direct bookings, because then you're the one registering.

Courtenay's MRDT currently sits at 2%, which Council confirmed in February 2026 while considering a proposal from Experience Comox Valley to raise it to 3% and extend it across the whole Comox Valley Regional District apart from Denman and Hornby Islands. Council sent a letter of support in April 2026, so the application is with the province. It isn't law yet, and I'd expect the 3% to arrive rather than not, but treat the extra point as a maybe until the province signs it.

All three charges fall away once a guest stays long enough. PST and MRDT don't apply to stays of 27 consecutive days or longer, and the city's own staff report makes the same point from the other direction: short-term rentals of less than 27 continuous days are the ones subject to the MRDT. That 27-day line and the zoning bylaw's 90-day line are different fences for different purposes, which trips people up constantly.

GST works on its own logic. The Canada Revenue Agency's rules for platform-based accommodation apply 5% to stays under one month costing more than $20 a night, with the platform collecting where the host isn't registered. Cross roughly $30,000 in taxable supplies over 12 months and you register and collect it yourself, including on platform bookings.

The federal government also added a compliance stick that's easy to miss. Under section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act, expenses tied to a "non-compliant short-term rental" aren't deductible, and non-compliant means operating somewhere that doesn't permit short-term rentals or without the required registration, licence or permit. Run an unlicensed Courtenay listing and you don't only risk a city ticket, you lose the mortgage interest, the utilities and the cleaning costs against that income. Keep that in mind before deciding the licence isn't worth the paperwork.

Vancouver-Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Those federal rules reach every corner of Canada, yet the layer that shapes Courtenay most is provincial. One geographic knot is worth untangling before we go on, mind you: Courtenay sits on Vancouver Island, roughly two hours north of Victoria, and it's nowhere near the City of Vancouver. What carries across both places is British Columbia law, and the province has more of it than almost anywhere else in the country.

The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act brought in three things in May 2024: a principal residence requirement, the end of legal non-conforming protection for existing operations, and a duty to show a local business licence number on listings. Then came the registry. Since 1 May 2025 hosts have had to display a provincial registration number, and platforms have had to act on it, with the province requiring them to stop advertising unregistered listings from 2 June 2025 and cancel future bookings on them from 23 June 2025.

Courtenay is squarely inside the principal residence requirement, and the province lists it among the communities where the rule applies as of 1 June 2026. Provincially you may rent the home you live in plus one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit on the same property, which is the shape Courtenay's own bylaw mirrors.

Could that ever loosen? A municipality can ask to opt out after two consecutive years of a rental vacancy rate above 3%, and Courtenay's numbers have been jumping around: the staff report records 1.1% in 2023 and 5.1% in 2024, which isn't two consecutive years, so the city couldn't opt out even if Council wanted to. I couldn't find the 2025 figure on a city page, so that one's still open. And even a provincial opt-out wouldn't move Courtenay's owner-occupancy rule, since that lives in the city's own zoning bylaw and would take its own amendment and public hearing.

What the province didn't do is standardise the municipal layer, which is why neighbouring towns landed in such different places. Council's own comparison put Campbell River and Saanich in the "no short-term rentals at all" column, Victoria at principal residence only, Nelson running a cap, and Comox and Cumberland roughly where Courtenay landed, while Nanaimo and Kelowna meet Bill 35 and little more. Drive twenty minutes and the rules change, so do check the specific municipality before you buy on the strength of a listing's income.

Does Courtenay Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Rules that change every twenty minutes of driving only matter if somebody checks, and Courtenay checks quietly. The city says its bylaw enforcement is complaint-based, driven by concerns from residents and businesses, with the emphasis on education and voluntary compliance. Nobody is patrolling listings.

There's a catch in that for both sides. Courtenay doesn't respond to anonymous complaints, so a neighbour who wants your listing looked at has to put their name to it, which raises the bar considerably on a street where everyone knows everyone. The flip side is that a signed complaint gets a file opened.

The money is modest but it compounds. Operating with no business licence is a $500 penalty under the Municipal Enforcement Bylaw No. 3185, reduced to $375 if you pay early, and failing to display a licence you do hold runs $100. Council added a further $100 ticket offence for short-term rental contraventions through the Municipal Ticket Information amendment adopted alongside the other two bylaws in May 2025. And under Section 13 of the business licence bylaw, each day a contravention continues is a separate offence, with municipal tickets capped at $1,000 under the Community Charter.

Staff were candid with Council about capacity. The April 2025 report says that in the initial months after adoption they'd focus on awareness and voluntary compliance, and that if complaints outran the Bylaw Division's capacity, they'd come back asking for resources in the 2026 budget. So the early enforcement posture was a nudge, not a sweep.

The sharper instrument isn't municipal at all. A platform that can't verify a provincial registration number has to stop advertising the listing and cancel its future bookings, which means the penalty for skipping the provincial step arrives as an empty calendar rather than a fine in the mail. Add section 67.7 wiping out your deductions, and the $500 stops being the number that hurts.

There's a review coming, too. Council directed staff to track the CMHC primary rental market vacancy rate for the Courtenay area for three consecutive years and then report back with an analysis of what the short-term rental rules did to rental supply. That report lands in 2028, and it's the moment these rules could tighten again.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Courtenay

Given that review sitting on the horizon, the order of the steps below matters more than it looks, because the early ones tell you whether the later ones are worth paying for.

1. Check the parcel before anything else. You must own it, your principal residence must be on it, and the unit you want to rent must be a single residential dwelling, a secondary suite, or an accessory dwelling unit. An apartment or a strata unit fails here, and no fee gets you past it.
2. Confirm the zoning with staff. Courtenay's interactive zoning map is at gis.courtenay.ca, though a call to the planning desk at 250-334-4441 is faster for the odd cases.
3. Count your bedrooms and your parking. Three bedrooms and six guests is the ceiling, and you need one dedicated stall for the short-term rental on top of what the home already requires.
4. Register with the province. The provincial registry costs $100 plus a $1.50 service fee for a host who lives on site, and you'll need BC photo ID, two supporting documents and the parcel identifier.
5. Apply for the city business licence through the online form, and allow two to three weeks. You'll be invoiced on approval, and the licence is mailed after payment clears.
6. Write and post the fire and safety plan at the exits and in each bedroom, with the 24-hour local contact on it. Make sure the person you name will actually answer at 2 a.m., because that's the point of the requirement.
7. Display the licence inside the unit with your contact details and that 24-hour number.
8. Put both numbers in the listing, provincial registration and municipal business licence, before the listing goes live rather than after.
9. Set up the tax side. Confirm how your platform handles PST, MRDT and GST, and register for GST yourself if you're over the $30,000 threshold or taking direct bookings.
10. Diarise the renewal. The licence year ends 31 December, and a renewal paid after 1 March carries a 25% penalty.

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

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, four desks cover almost all of it, and knowing which one owns your question saves a lot of transferred calls.

The business licence itself

Business Licencing, Development Services handles applications, renewals, fees and questions about which licence category you fall into.

• Phone: 250-703-4835
• Email: [email protected]
• City Hall: 830 Cliffe Avenue, Courtenay, BC V9N 2J7
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Zoning, parking and whether the use fits your parcel

The City of Courtenay planning and development services team answers the zoning questions, and the general line is the way in.

• Phone: 250-334-4441
• Email: [email protected]
• Interactive zoning map: gis.courtenay.ca

Complaints and enforcement

Bylaw Enforcement takes reports about short-term rentals, noise and parking, and is the desk you'll hear from if a neighbour files.

• Phone: 250-334-4441, extension 5
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.
• Note: anonymous complaints aren't actioned

The provincial registry

Registration, renewals and the number you display on your listing belong to the Province of British Columbia, not to the city.

• Phone: 1-833-828-2240 (Service BC)
• Email: [email protected]
• Apply: through the host registration portal

For PST and MRDT questions, the B.C. Ministry of Finance's accommodation guidance is the primary source, and your platform's tax documentation should tell you which of the two of you is remitting.

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

Being upfront about method here: I haven't surveyed Reddit or BiggerPockets threads for Courtenay, and Reddit blocks the kind of automated reading that would let me quote it fairly. What I can read is the documented public record, which for a town this size is unusually rich, because the whole argument played out through a staff report and a public hearing in April 2025 rather than in comment sections.

The split in that record is the familiar one, and Council's own staff report framed it honestly rather than picking a side. Renters in Courtenay have a median household income of $50,400 against $82,000 for owners, and 26% of renter households sit in core housing need against 5% of owners, which is the case for restricting short-term rentals. Set against that, staff wrote that short-term rentals "can offer homeowners a source of revenue generation that may be increasingly necessary for many households to preserve homeownership." Council landed between the two, and that $150 housing offset fee is the compromise made physical.

Three things I'd expect to hear from hosts operating here in 2026, based on how the rules are written rather than on anything anyone told me:

• Owner-occupancy is the whole conversation. It's the line that decides whether you have a business, and no permit negotiates around it.
• The 90-day definition is broader than people assume. In a lot of markets a 30-night booking puts you outside the short-term rules. In Courtenay you'd need a 90-night stay, which is a different product entirely.
• Enforcement feels light until a neighbour files. A complaint-based system rewards good neighbours and catches the one house with a party problem, which is roughly what the parking and nuisance conditions were written for.

Assuming you want to know whether a three-bedroom cap and an extra parking stall still pencil out, then it's the Courtenay market numbers you want, for nightly rates and occupancy against what a licensed, owner-occupied listing can offer. It's worth doing that arithmetic before you go looking at property, not after.

The broader lesson from Courtenay's 2025 turn is one that applies well beyond the Comox Valley. A town that bans short-term rentals outright still has 293 of them, and a town that legalises them narrowly at least knows where they are. Regulation rarely decides whether a market exists. It decides who's allowed to be in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Courtenay in 2026?

Yes, within narrow limits. Courtenay permitted short-term rentals from 7 May 2025, having previously banned them outright. You have to own the parcel, keep your principal residence on it, and rent a single residential dwelling, a secondary suite or an accessory dwelling unit, one per parcel, with a maximum of three bedrooms and six guests and only one booking at a time. A city business licence and a provincial registration are both mandatory.

How much does a Courtenay short-term rental licence cost?

The city business licence is $300 a year, made up of a $150 licence fee and a $150 Affordable Housing Amenity Reserve Fund offset. The provincial registration adds $100 a year plus a $1.50 service fee for a host living on the property. A replacement business licence bylaw proposed in 2026 would add a $50 non-refundable application fee, and it keeps the $300 annual rate. The city fee isn't refunded once the licence is issued.

Do you need to live in the property to run a short-term rental in Courtenay?

You need to live on the parcel, which isn't quite the same thing. The owner's principal residence has to be on the property, but the rented unit can be a secondary suite or a detached accessory dwelling unit rather than the room next to yours. Only the owner can operate it, so tenants cannot run a short-term rental in Courtenay even where provincial rules would allow it.

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

Three, and they stack to 15% of the nightly rate: 5% GST, 8% provincial sales tax on accommodation, and a 2% Municipal and Regional District Tax for the Courtenay area. Booking platforms registered as marketplace facilitators collect the PST and MRDT, and collect GST where the host isn't GST registered. All three stop applying to stays of 27 consecutive days or longer. A proposal to raise the regional tax to 3% was with the province as of July 2026.

What are the penalties for an unlicensed short-term rental in Courtenay?

Operating without a business licence carries a $500 penalty under Municipal Enforcement Bylaw No. 3185, reduced to $375 for early payment, and short-term rental contraventions carry a $100 ticket. Each day a contravention continues is a separate offence, and municipal tickets are capped at $1,000. Skipping the provincial registration bites harder: platforms must stop advertising unregistered B.C. listings and cancel their future bookings, and federal law denies income tax deductions on a non-compliant short-term rental.

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