Macomb County, Michigan Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Macomb County, Michigan and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that the county itself won't stand in your way, because Macomb County writes no short-term rental ordinance, issues no permit and charges no lodging tax. The bad news, and it's the part that decides everything else, is that the county was never the government you needed permission from. Macomb County describes itself as 27 local units of government serving more than 865,000 residents, and every one of those 27 writes its own zoning.

An arrangement like that would be fine if most of the 27 said yes. From what I could read on official pages, though, they either say no or they've said nothing at all, and in Michigan those two things land in nearly the same place. Sterling Heights told its own City Council in January 2026 that short-term rentals aren't currently allowed anywhere in the city. Over in St. Clair Shores, a homeowner who listed his cottage on Airbnb picked up a misdemeanor conviction that the Michigan Court of Appeals went on to affirm. Warren, the largest city in the county, has no short-term rental ordinance whatsoever, which sounds like daylight until you notice that its rental licensing system was built for year-long tenants and treats renting without a license as a crime.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in 2026: which government gets to decide, what the municipalities with a readable position have put on the record, what registration costs where registration exists, the one tax layer that applies, and who to phone before you spend money. Everything below comes from Macomb County's own pages, the cities' own ordinances and application forms, Michigan statute and published court opinions, checked in July 2026, and where a document wouldn't open I've said so rather than filled the gap. Before you buy anything here, run the property through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Macomb County, Michigan?

Before any of those numbers mean much, you need to know which government gets to say yes, and the surprise is how little of that sits with the county. Michigan gives counties almost no zoning reach to begin with. Under the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act, a "zoning jurisdiction" is the area inside a city or village, or the area inside a county or township "outside the limits of incorporated cities and villages." Then comes the sentence that settles the whole question: "The zoning jurisdiction of a county does not include the areas subject to a township zoning ordinance." So Macomb County's 13 cities and 3 villages sit outside county zoning by definition, and once you add the 11 townships that zone themselves, there's nothing left for the county to zone, which is presumably why it has never tried to claim otherwise.

Nothing comes down from the state to fill that gap either. Michigan has no short-term rental preemption statute, no state registry and no state permit, and the closest anyone got was House Bill 4722 of 2021, which would've made short-term rentals a residential use permitted in every residential zone and barred outright local bans. It passed the House 55 to 48 in October 2021, then died without ever reaching a Senate vote.

The county's own departments read exactly the way that history suggests. Planning and Economic Development describes its work as growing businesses and implementing smart growth principles across the 27 municipalities rather than regulating any of them, and searching macombgov.org for "short term rental" turns up an MSU Extension policy workshop instead of an ordinance. The Treasurer's Office collects taxes, invests public funds and pays county bills, with no hotel or lodging tax anywhere in the description.

What you're left with, then, is 27 separate answers, and the county's own communities page groups them into three regions that happen to track how differently they behave:

• South (7): Center Line, Eastpointe, Fraser, Grosse Pointe Shores, Roseville, St. Clair Shores and Warren, the dense inner-ring suburbs where enforcement has actually happened.
• Central (9): Chesterfield Township, Clinton Township, Harrison Township, Macomb Township, Mount Clemens, New Baltimore, Shelby Township, Sterling Heights and Utica, which is where most of the county's population and all of its Lake St. Clair frontage sit.
• North (11): Armada Township, Armada Village, Bruce Township, Lenox Township, Memphis, New Haven, Ray Township, Romeo, Richmond City, Richmond Township and Washington Township, rural and mostly silent on the subject.

One Michigan drafting habit decides most of those answers, so it's worth knowing before you call anyone. Zoning ordinances here are usually permissive: a district lists the uses allowed inside it, and a use that isn't listed isn't allowed. Sterling Heights' own city planner put it to Council in a single sentence, saying the city "does not specifically reference short-term rentals; therefore, they are not permitted." Keep that in mind when a township tells you it has no short-term rental ordinance, because silence in a permissive ordinance reads as a no rather than a yes.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Macomb County

Most of Macomb County stays silent, which is exactly why the three municipalities that have spoken up are worth reading closely. None of the three gives you what you're hoping for, mind you, though between them they show you how the argument runs here.

The fullest picture by far comes from Sterling Heights, whose special City Council meeting of January 27, 2026 was given over entirely to this question. Assistant City Manager Dale Dwojakowski told Council that "residential short-term rental properties are not currently allowed in Sterling Heights," since they are "not expressly a permitted use in residentially zoned areas of the City," and that staff's best guess ran to "between seventy and one hundred properties being advertised for some type of rental on a daily basis." He also closed off the argument every owner reaches for first. These aren't grandfathered and they aren't legal nonconforming uses, he said, "because the City's Zoning Ordinances have never allowed short-term rental property to be operated on residentially zoned properties." So much for grandfathering.

The case that forced the meeting even has a name. Staff walked Council through "Grandma's Family Fun House," a colonial home on a small court with a pool built into the back of it, and neighbors had complained about parties, parking, noise and police calls often enough that the city eventually sent the owner a cease-and-desist letter. That fight is now in court. According to Detroit News reporting republished by AOL, 5002 Rockdale LLC sued Sterling Heights in Macomb County Circuit Court on April 22, 2026, after a March 27 notice of violation, arguing the property is a permitted one-family detached dwelling under Section 3.01 of the zoning ordinance. The city's spokesperson, Melanie Davis, restated the city's position on the record: short-term rentals are "homes or rooms rented out for fewer than 30 days" and are "not a permissible commercial use in residentially zoned properties." I wasn't able to open Sterling Heights' codified zoning text myself, so I'm describing Section 3.01 the way the city's minutes and the litigation describe it, not as text I read.

City Planner Dr. Jake Parcell laid out two roads Council could take, and both were still open at my last check. The first is an ordinance expressly precluding short-term rentals in every zoning classification. The second is a zoning amendment allowing them in limited places, such as the Van Dyke Mixed Use District or existing multi-family areas, under conditions staff floated at the meeting: no more than 30 days and no less than one night, one bedroom rather than the whole house, and the owner living on the premises. Staff were to report back within 60 to 90 days, and I couldn't find a published follow-up decision, so treat Sterling Heights as unsettled and call the Office of Planning before you commit money to anything there.

St. Clair Shores has already been through the argument Sterling Heights is having, and it won. In People of the City of St. Clair Shores v Dorr, decided October 29, 2020 on appeal from Macomb Circuit Court, the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed a homeowner's misdemeanor conviction for running an Airbnb out of his house in an R-A One-Family General Residential district. The reasoning travels well beyond that one address, which is why it matters to you. The owner argued his rental was a permitted "home occupation or business," and the court agreed it was a business. Then it killed the argument on the next clause, since a home business has to be "clearly incidental to the principal use of the dwelling unit for dwelling purposes," and as the judges put it, "The purpose of the business is identical, not incidental, to the principal use of the dwelling unit for dwelling purposes." He also argued the ordinance was too vague to give fair notice, though the court rejected that as well. The conviction stood. His lawyers at the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation then took it one step further, and the foundation says the Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on June 2, 2021.

Then there's Warren, the third of them, sitting in a position that's easy to misread as an opening. It has no short-term rental ordinance, and its Rental Inspections Division never mentions nightly stays, yet the division's own rule is that "No person shall rent, lease, offer for rent or lease, or occupy any rental dwelling or rental dwelling unit without a rental license from the rental division." A nightly rental is a rental. So the license requirement catches you either way. Warren has also made its politics plain, passing a resolution opposing House Bill 4722 in 2021 just to keep its power to use special-use and conditional-use permits against short-term rentals.

Everywhere else, I mostly found nothing, and finding nothing isn't the same as finding permission. Chesterfield Township's 2026 fee schedule carries no rental registration fee and no short-term rental fee of any kind, while Macomb Township's Planning and Zoning page never mentions the use at all. Beyond those, several Macomb codes live on Municode, eCode360 and American Legal, all of which blocked automated access while I was working, and a few township sites wouldn't load at all, so I can't tell you what Clinton Township, Shelby Township, Harrison Township, Roseville or Mount Clemens require. Neither can anyone else who hasn't opened them, which is worth remembering the next time a listing site's "regulations" page sounds confident.

One more layer sits underneath all of it, and it catches owners who cleared the zoning question cleanly. Macomb County is full of platted subdivisions and lake associations carrying covenants written between the 1950s and the 1970s, and on July 9, 2025 the Michigan Supreme Court left standing a Court of Appeals holding that a covenant limiting lots to "single family residence purposes" bars short-term rentals. The justices split evenly, so the order made no new Supreme Court precedent of its own, though the Court of Appeals decision stands and your neighbors can sue on it without the city lifting a finger. Do pull your deed and your association's declaration before you pull the zoning map.

Assuming none of that clears, there's still a version of this that works here, and it's the one plenty of Michigan owners moved to. A stay of more than one month to the same tenant drops out of the nightly-rental category altogether, out of the state's lodging tax, and generally out of the zoning fight, because what you're operating is a furnished long-term rental. The margins are thinner. The legal exposure is close to zero.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Macomb County

Thinner margins still beat a misdemeanor, though if you're set on the nightly version, the next question is what a license would even look like here. There isn't a county one. Macomb County issues no short-term rental license, keeps no registry and charges no fee, so there is nothing at the county level to apply for, renew or lose.

What does exist is municipal rental registration, and be aware that registering a rental is not the same thing as being allowed to rent it nightly. Registration proves the building is safe, whereas zoning decides whether your use of it is legal, and different people sign off on each one using different forms. Fees below are as of July 2026.

Municipality	What you register	Fee
Warren	Rental dwelling license, any rental	$200 single-family, $300 two-family
St. Clair Shores	Non-owner-occupied property registration	$150 for the first 3,000 sq ft, plus $10 per extra 1,000
Sterling Heights	General business license, "home rental" category	Set annually by appropriations ordinance, not published

Of the three, Warren's license is the most conventional. It runs two years from issuance, terminates when you sell, and has to be renewed 60 days before it expires, with a biennial inspection against the International Property Maintenance Code each cycle. The city's fee schedule effective March 1, 2023 sets the license at $200 for a single-family dwelling and $300 for a two-family, then attaches the fees that actually bite: $75 for a late renewal, $150 for a failed interior and exterior reinspection, $100 if nobody's there when the inspector arrives, and $75 if you cancel with under 24 hours' notice. Approval also depends on clearing your outstanding property taxes, water and sewer bills and any other city charges, so settle those before you file.

St. Clair Shores prices its registration by size instead. The city's non-owner-occupied registration form charges $150 for the first 3,000 square feet of a single-family home plus $10 for every additional 1,000, or $150 for the first unit of a multiple-family building plus $50 for each unit after it. That covers the original inspection and one follow-up; a rescheduled inspection costs $30 and a re-inspection for non-compliance costs half the original fee. Just don't read the receipt as approval, because the form itself says that completing it "does not constitute a certificate of approval," and a certificate of approval is required before anyone occupies the property.

Sterling Heights is the one where the paperwork actively works against you, and it's worth understanding the mechanism because it's the tidiest example in the county. The city's business licensing ordinance, Chapter 29, lists "Home rental, rooming house, and/or bed and breakfast" at § 29-2(B)(30) as a business that needs a general license, and licenses run a year from April 1 to April 1. Then § 29-9 shuts the door: "No license shall be issued if the building(s) or premises to be used for the business do not fully comply with existing city ordinances and policies... or if the business or use of the premises is not in compliance with zoning regulations unless otherwise permitted by law." Call that the zoning gate. Because the city's planner has already said on the record that short-term rentals aren't a permitted use, the business license that looks like a route in is the same document that keeps you out. The fee is set each year in the appropriations ordinance and I couldn't find a current published figure for it, so ask the City Clerk rather than budgeting a guess.

Required Documents for Macomb County Short-Term Rentals

Since the zoning gate decides whether any of the paperwork can be issued, gather the zoning answer first and the documents second. Once you have it, what each city wants is fairly predictable, and none of the Macomb applications I read asks for anything like the occupancy proofs New York City puts its hosts through.

• Warren wants a designated Responsible Local Agent who must be an individual, must live in the city or within a 50-mile radius, and cannot be your tenant. Its rental license application also requires Form B tenant information within seven days of anyone taking possession, and points to § 28-64 for vacant-property registration if a unit sits empty or under renovation for more than 30 days.
• St. Clair Shores wants a driver's license copy and date of birth for the owner and for any agent, the name of an LLC's president or an officer where the owner is a company, full occupant details, and the management agreement itself. Under § 8-303.b.1, an owner who lives or does business outside Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw or St. Clair counties has to designate a local agent inside one of those five, and a PO box won't qualify.
• The state wants a use tax registration, which you complete through Michigan Treasury Online. Michigan Treasury's own page says plainly that "There is no cost for use tax registration," so this one costs you nothing but the time.
• Macomb County Environmental Health enters the picture only if your property sits on a septic system or a private well, which is common enough in the northern townships. The county's environmental health service handles septic permits, well permits and water quality, and a failed system is a problem you want to find before a guest does.

No Macomb ordinance or application I was able to read requires a certificate of liability insurance, which is one of the few places this county asks less of you than most. Don't take that as a reason to skip the cover. Your homeowner's policy almost certainly excludes paying guests, and an uninsured claim is a far bigger number than any license fee on this page.

Macomb County Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through the zoning question and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to sort out, and the good news is that it's the simplest section in this guide. One layer applies. That's it.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Michigan use tax on lodging	6%	Airbnb automatically, otherwise you, through Michigan Treasury Online
Macomb County accommodation tax	None	Not legally available to the county
City or township lodging tax	None found	Not levied in any Macomb municipality I could check

Michigan taxes short-term lodging under the Use Tax Act rather than the Sales Tax Act, which trips people up when they go looking for a "sales tax on rentals" and can't find one. MCL 205.93a puts rooms and lodging furnished on a commercial basis inside the 6% use tax, and Michigan Treasury's use tax page spells out both the charge and the escape hatch: "Use tax (sales & rentals) is due on rooms or lodging furnished by hotelkeepers, motel operators, and other persons furnishing accommodations that are available to the public on the basis of a commercial and business enterprise. No tax is due if the room is rented for a continuous period of more than one month to the same tenant." That last sentence is why the mid-term pivot works so cleanly in this state.

Who hands the money over depends on where the booking came from. Airbnb's Michigan tax page commits to collecting "6% of the listing price including any cleaning fee for reservations 30 nights and shorter in Michigan," so an Airbnb-only host has this handled. Vrbo doesn't, since Michigan is absent from Vrbo's own list of states where it collects stay taxes, and neither does a guest who books you directly, so that part is on you. Remember that a mixed set of booking channels means a mixed obligation, and Treasury assigns your filing frequency once you register.

No county accommodation tax stacks on top, and it isn't a matter of Macomb County choosing not to bother. MCL 141.862 opens the county lodging tax only to "a county that has a population of less than 600,000 and that has a city with a population of not less than 40,000." At more than 865,000 residents by the county's own count, Macomb fails the first half of that test outright, so the tax isn't available to it at any rate. Airbnb's Michigan page corroborates the result from the other direction, listing separate county collections for Genesee County at 5% and Kent County at 8%, and nothing at all for Macomb. There's no county line to add.

The county tax picture could change, although not soon and not without a vote. Michigan's House took up a tie-barred package, HB 5138 with HB 5139 and HB 5140, introduced on October 28, 2025, which would widen local authority to levy an accommodation tax and put it to the electorate. At the last statewide check behind this guide, the package still hadn't cleared the House Economic Competitiveness Committee, and no rate or effective date exists in statute yet. Since I couldn't reach the legislature's own site on the day I wrote this, do check the current status yourself before you treat it as settled either way.

Michigan Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Given how little the county and the state ask of you on tax, it's fair to ask what Michigan does regulate, and the honest answer is that it does two things and then gets out of the way. It taxes the stay. The zoning it leaves entirely to your municipality.

There's no statewide short-term rental registry, no state license and no state permit, so the use tax registration above is the only piece of state paperwork a host in Macomb County touches. There's also no preemption in either direction, which means the state neither protects your right to host nor requires your city to allow it. Our Michigan statewide guide walks through the whole framework, and it's worth reading alongside this one if you're weighing more than one county.

That vacuum is deliberate, and Macomb's own municipalities have worked to keep it. Warren's 2021 resolution against HB 4722 was explicitly about preserving special-use and conditional-use permits as tools against short-term rentals, and the instinct hasn't faded. On March 3, 2026 the Sterling Heights City Council adopted a resolution opposing HB 5529-5532, a set of statewide zoning mandates on minimum lot sizes, on the ground that "local zoning is a core feature of democratic local governance." Those particular bills have nothing to do with short-term rentals, and that's rather the point. Councils here defend local zoning control by reflex, so a state bill handing hosts a by-right use would meet organized resistance from the same rooms.

The practical effect for you is that Michigan counties end up looking nothing like each other, and the ones next door look nothing like Macomb. Our Wayne County guide covers a metro neighbor where Dearborn issues its own short-term rental certificate, our Oakland County guide covers one where Birmingham suspended licensing in 2026 after a shooting at a rental, and Livingston County is different again. So don't carry a rule you learned in one Michigan county across a county line, and be aware that even a single county's answer can flip at a city boundary you'd never notice from a listing map.

Does Macomb County Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Since the county has no rule to enforce, the question really becomes how hard its cities push, and the answer is that a handful push hard while most haven't had to. What's unusual here isn't how often a city acts. It's what a city reaches for when it does.

Most cities that regulate short-term rentals write a licensing ordinance with a civil fine schedule attached, so an operator can price the risk and keep going. City attorneys here reach for criminal and quasi-criminal tools instead, because that's all a permissive zoning ordinance hands them. Michael Dorr wasn't fined out of business in St. Clair Shores; he was convicted of a misdemeanor, lost in district court, lost again in circuit court, lost a third time in the Court of Appeals, and was then refused by the Supreme Court. Warren says much the same thing in the signature block of its rental license application, warning that violators can be personally charged with "a misdemeanor or a municipal civil infraction" and that "a misdemeanor is punishable by imprisonment, fines, and costs." That word is imprisonment.

Sterling Heights shows what the day-to-day looks like before it gets that far. Dr. Parcell told Council that inspectors fall back on the nuisance ordinance instead, which covers garbage, refuse, litter, noise, fire code violations and offensive odors, since nothing in the code ties to the use itself. Enforcement starts when a neighbor calls, and parking complaints are the hardest to make stick because the cars are gone before Code Enforcement arrives. That's a complaint-driven system, so a quiet listing with off-street parking can run for years, right up until one bad weekend produces a cease-and-desist letter and a notice of violation.

Two things follow that I'd weigh heavily. There's no amnesty in the grandfathering argument, because Sterling Heights has already put on the record that a use its ordinance never permitted can't ripen into a legal nonconforming one no matter how long it ran. And unlike New York City, no Michigan platform check stands between you and a booking, so nothing stops you from operating illegally for a long time. You're only building up more to lose while you do it.

I should be straight about the limits of that read. No Macomb County municipality publishes enforcement statistics, there's no county complaint hotline for short-term rentals, and I found no data on citations issued or listings removed. That's a real limit. What I have is court records, council minutes and one active lawsuit, which tells you how the system behaves when it's provoked rather than how often it gets provoked.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Macomb County

Given that the enforcement risk lands on you personally rather than on a platform, the order of these steps still matters more than it looks. The early ones tell you whether the later ones are worth doing at all.

1. Find out which of the 27 municipalities you're actually in, then call its planning or zoning office and ask one question: is a rental of fewer than 30 days a permitted use at my address, in writing? A verbal yes from a counter clerk is worth nothing in district court.
2. Read your deed and your subdivision or association declaration before anything else. A "single family residence purposes" covenant can end this on its own, and your neighbors don't need the city's help to enforce it.
3. Assume silence means no. Michigan zoning is permissive, so a code that never mentions short-term rentals is a code that doesn't allow them. Ask the city to confirm that reading rather than hoping for the other one.
4. If the answer is no, price the mid-term version before you walk away. Stays of more than one month to the same tenant sit outside the nightly-rental fight and outside the 6% use tax, and my guess is that the furnished 30-plus-night market is where most Macomb owners end up.
5. Where nightly rentals are allowed, register the rental with the city and budget the inspection. Warren runs $200 or $300 with a biennial inspection, St. Clair Shores $150 and up by square footage, and both make you clear outstanding city debts first.
6. Name your local agent early. Warren wants an individual within 50 miles, St. Clair Shores wants one inside Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw or St. Clair counties, and neither accepts a PO box or your tenant.
7. Register for the 6% use tax through Michigan Treasury Online. It's free, and if you take a single direct or Vrbo booking, you owe it whether or not Airbnb covers the rest of your calendar.
8. Sort out septic, well and pool inspections if they apply. Macomb County Environmental Health handles all three, and the northern townships are full of properties on their own systems.
9. Buy the right insurance and tell your carrier the truth about the use. No local ordinance forces this, which means nobody will catch the gap for you.
10. Diarize a check on Sterling Heights and on the Lansing bills. A city ordinance and a state tax package are both moving, and a decision either way changes the arithmetic for every address in the county.

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

Most of those steps end with a phone call, so here's who picks up. Start with your municipality every time, because the county offices below can help with tax, records and septic while none of them can tell you whether your address may host.

Your own city or township, first and always

The two Macomb municipalities with the most public record on short-term rentals are the two you're most likely to be calling.

• Sterling Heights Office of Planning: 40555 Utica Road, Sterling Heights, MI 48313; 586-446-2360; [email protected]; Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
• St. Clair Shores Community Development & Inspections: City Hall, 27600 Jefferson Ave., St. Clair Shores, MI 48081; 586-447-3340; Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Warren Planning Department: One City Square, Suite 315, Warren, MI 48093; 586-574-4687; [email protected]
• Warren Rental Inspections Division: One City Square, Third Floor, Warren, MI 48093; 586-574-4633; Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Macomb Township Planning and Zoning: 54111 Broughton Road, 1st Floor, Macomb, MI 48042; 586-992-0710 x1; Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Chesterfield Township: 47275 Sugarbush Road, Chesterfield, MI 48047; 586-949-0400; Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Macomb County departments

• Planning and Economic Development: 1 South Main St., 7th Floor, Mount Clemens, MI 48043; 586-469-5285; [email protected]; Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Useful for regional context, not for permission.
• Treasurer's Office: 1 South Main St., 2nd Floor, Mount Clemens, MI 48043; 586-469-5190; [email protected]; Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.
• Health Department, Environmental Health Services: County Administration Building, 1 South Main St., Mount Clemens, MI 48043; 586-469-5236; [email protected]. Walk-in services are by appointment only. This is your septic, well, pool and food-service contact.
• Clerk / Register of Deeds: Anthony G. Forlini, 586-469-5120, [email protected]. The Register of Deeds counter sits at 120 N Main Street, Mount Clemens, MI 48043, Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., and it's where you go to pull the recorded covenants on your subdivision.

State of Michigan

• Treasury, Sales, Use and Withholding Taxes: 517-636-4730; [email protected]; live phone support Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Business tax registration: 517-636-6925, or register directly through Michigan Treasury Online.

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

Those phone numbers get you the official answer, though what hosts say to each other is a different picture, and I want to be upfront about how I've built this one. I didn't scrape Reddit, and no BiggerPockets thread specific to Macomb County loaded for me, so what follows is my read of public discourse and the documented record rather than a survey. Weigh it accordingly.

• Most investors treat metro Detroit's inner suburbs as a mid-term market, not a nightly one. The conversation among Michigan hosts pushes anyone asking about Macomb toward 30-plus-night furnished stays for traveling nurses and contract engineers, which is the segment I'd expect the county's hospitals, defense contractors and automotive suppliers to keep feeding. The nightly-rate discussion tends to migrate north, to the lake towns.
• The grandfathering question comes up constantly, and the answer disappoints people every time. Owners who've hosted quietly for years assume that history protects them. Sterling Heights' own minutes say otherwise in as many words, and the Court of Appeals in the St. Clair Shores case never treated prior operation as relevant at all.
• The property-rights argument is alive and organized here. The Mackinac Center litigated the St. Clair Shores case to the Supreme Court's door, and a Sterling Heights owner is currently in Macomb County Circuit Court making a version of the same argument. Hosts follow those cases closely, which is reasonable, so long as nobody mistakes a pending lawsuit for a change in the law.
• Nobody I've read argues that the rules here are unclear. They argue the rules are unfair, and those are different complaints. A city that has already won a misdemeanor conviction has clarity on its side, whatever you think of the outcome.

That gap between what a market could earn and what a city will permit is the whole story in Macomb County, and it's worth quantifying rather than guessing at. The Michigan market data shows where the state's nightly-rental demand actually concentrates, and comparing that against the position your own city has taken is a faster route to a decision than another month of forum reading. Wherever you end up buying, remember that the government writing the rules for your property is almost never the one whose name sits on the county line, and finding out which office it really is takes an afternoon that can save you a year.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Macomb County, Michigan in 2026?

It depends entirely on the city or township, because Macomb County itself has no short-term rental ordinance, license or registry, and Michigan gives counties almost no zoning authority. In practice that means 27 separate answers. Sterling Heights states that short-term rentals aren't a permitted use anywhere in the city, and St. Clair Shores obtained a misdemeanor conviction against a host that the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed in 2020. Confirm your own municipality's position in writing before you list.

Does Macomb County charge a hotel or lodging tax on short-term rentals?

No, and it can't. Michigan's county accommodations excise tax under MCL 141.862 is available only to a county with a population under 600,000 that also contains a city of at least 40,000 people. Macomb County reports more than 865,000 residents, so it fails that test outright. Airbnb's Michigan tax page lists separate county collections for Genesee and Kent counties and nothing for Macomb, which confirms it from the other side.

What tax do you owe on a short-term rental in Macomb County?

Michigan's 6% use tax on lodging, and nothing else. It applies to stays of 30 nights or shorter under MCL 205.93a, and no tax is due where a room is rented for a continuous period of more than one month to the same tenant. Airbnb collects and remits the 6% automatically for Michigan listings. Vrbo does not, and neither does a direct booking, so those hosts register free through Michigan Treasury Online and remit it themselves.

Is a rental license enough to run a short-term rental in Warren or St. Clair Shores?

No. A rental license or registration confirms that the building meets property maintenance, fire and safety codes; it doesn't decide whether nightly rental is a permitted use of the land. Sterling Heights makes the split explicit, since § 29-9 of its business licensing ordinance bars issuing any license where the use doesn't comply with zoning. Get the zoning answer first, in writing, and treat the registration as the second step rather than the first.

Can a homeowners association or deed restriction stop a short-term rental in Macomb County?

Yes, and it happens independently of anything the city does. On July 9, 2025 the Michigan Supreme Court affirmed by equal division a Court of Appeals holding that a covenant limiting lots to "single family residence purposes" prohibits short-term rentals. The evenly split order created no new Supreme Court precedent, but the appellate decision stands. Given how many Macomb County subdivisions and lake associations carry mid-century covenants, pull your recorded documents from the Register of Deeds before you plan around zoning alone.

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