Montreal City Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Montreal, Quebec and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that hosting is still legal here, just not in the loose, year-round way an older guide might have described it. The tougher news, and it's worth hearing early rather than after you've bought a property, is that the city rewrote the rules in 2025 and narrowed what most hosts get to do.

What's allowed now splits into two tracks. If you live in the unit yourself, you can host guests in that principal residence, but only between June 10 and September 10 each year, city-wide, under a bylaw Montreal's council passed on March 18, 2025. If you don't live there, a short-term rental only works as a registered commercial tourist home, and that's legal on a short list of streets in a handful of Montreal's 19 boroughs rather than across the city. Council moved fast for a reason: a fire in a heritage building in Old Montreal killed seven people in March 2023, six of them staying in short-term rentals inside a building where that use already broke the borough's zoning. Councillor Benoit Dorais put the new bylaw's logic bluntly: "We're reversing the burden of proof."

So let's walk through what actually holds up in 2026: which boroughs still allow it, what the province and the city both require you to register, what it costs, the tax layers stacked on top, and how hard Montreal is really pushing on people who skip a step. Every figure below comes from Montreal's own site, Quebec's tourist accommodation statute, or the provincial government's own announcements, read directly in July 2026. Run the property through BNBCalc before you commit to either path, since the seasonal listing and the year-round commercial one earn very differently.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Montreal, Quebec?

Those two paths exist because two layers of law stack on top of each other, and once you see how they interact, most of what confuses people about Montreal falls away.

The bottom layer is Quebec's own statute, the Act respecting tourist accommodation, chapter H-1.01. Article 2 defines a tourist accommodation establishment as anywhere you rent a unit to a tourist for 31 days or fewer, and article 4 requires anyone running one to register with the minister first. That registration runs through the Corporation de l'industrie touristique du Québec (CITQ), the body the minister delegates the job to.

Article 23 of the same law protects something worth knowing. It gives you a baseline right to host a guest in your own principal residence, one reservation at a time, with no meals served, and no municipal zoning bylaw can flatly ban that. Mind you, the same article carves out an exception, letting a city amend its zoning through a specific fast-track procedure to restrict even that baseline right. That carve-out is exactly the tool Montreal reached for.

The top layer is the city's own bylaw, tightened dramatically on March 18, 2025. Before that date, hosting a principal residence was a year-round option in most boroughs. After it, principal residence rentals run only from June 10 to September 10 each year, full stop, city-wide.

Put the two layers together and three things fall out that no amount of paperwork changes:

• Provincial CITQ registration is mandatory for every stay of 31 nights or fewer, whether you're a homeowner renting a spare room or a company running a commercial building.
• A Montreal principal residence rental only runs June 10 through September 10, capped at 31 nights per booking, with no meals served.
• A non-principal-residence, year-round commercial tourist home is legal only where a specific borough's zoning says so, and most boroughs don't say so at all.

Two exceptions cut the wrong way for hosts. Lachine, Saint-Laurent and Saint-Léonard ban even principal residence rentals outright, all year, with no summer window. And a stay of 32 nights or longer isn't a short-term rental under the statute's own definition, so it needs no CITQ registration and falls under ordinary landlord-tenant law instead.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Montreal

That 32-night escape hatch aside, the news gets tougher fast when a nightly-rate business was the actual plan. Unfortunately for most people reading this, there isn't a version of that plan that clears Montreal's zoning as it stands today. Buying a second unit and listing it whole on Airbnb, year-round, at nightly rates, requires a commercial tourist home designation, and eleven of Montreal's nineteen boroughs prohibit that outright: Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Lachine, L'Île-Bizard-Sainte-Geneviève, Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Montréal-Nord, Pierrefonds-Roxboro, Rivière-des-Prairies-Pointe-aux-Trembles, Saint-Laurent, Saint-Léonard and Verdun.

Where it's allowed at all, it's allowed on named streets rather than across a borough. Ville-Marie permits it only on a stretch of Rue Sainte-Catherine between Saint-Mathieu and Atateken, with buildings kept at least 150 metres apart. Le Plateau-Mont-Royal allows it on part of Boulevard Saint-Laurent and part of Rue Saint-Denis. Anjou and LaSalle each restrict it to a handful of named streets too, and Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie allows only bed and breakfasts, and only on part of Rue Saint-Hubert. Do check your own address against the city's borough-by-borough page before you get attached to a property, because the line between a legal commercial zone and a flatly prohibited one often runs down the middle of a single street.

What's actually available to most people is a room-share, and it's seasonal rather than a business. You live in the unit, you register it, you host during the June 10 to September 10 window, and the revenue to model is a few months of a spare bedroom rather than a year-round listing. Even that gets narrower once you factor in the building itself, since condo declarations and co-ownership syndicates can, and often do, prohibit short-term rentals in their own bylaws, and CITQ registration requires proof the owner or syndicate has authorized it.

Assuming you already own Montreal property and the nightly-rate math only worked outside that summer window, the honest pivot is a stay of 32 nights or more, which sits outside this entire framework and runs under ordinary lease law instead. Before you commit either way, model both scenarios, the three-month seasonal listing and the longer furnished rental, through BNBCalc so you're comparing real numbers rather than guessing which one actually clears.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Montreal

Since a Montreal rental clears zoning at all, it needs two separate registrations, not one, and it's usually skipping one of the two that gets a host fined. Provincially, every establishment registers with CITQ. Fees effective January 1, 2026, and still current as of July 2026, run $54 for a primary-residence establishment, $156 for a general tourist accommodation establishment, and $131 for a youth accommodation establishment, and the identical fee applies to your annual renewal. The certificate is valid for 12 months, has to be displayed where guests can see it, and a digital copy has to go to whichever platform lists the property.

CITQ registration also comes with an insurance floor that catches people off guard. Quebec's Act and Regulation respecting tourist accommodation, in force since September 1, 2022, requires every registered operator to carry civil liability insurance of at least $2 million CAD. Keep in mind that a standard homeowner's or condo policy typically doesn't cover commercial short-term rental activity, so check with your insurer before you apply rather than after.

On top of CITQ, Montreal layers its own permit. For a principal residence rental, the city fee is $350, taxes included, and the process runs in a set order: apply online, visit an Accès Montréal office in person for identity verification with photo ID and a printed provincial Notice of Assessment, register with CITQ, email your CITQ number to the city, then wait for the permit by email. You renew it every year. For a commercial tourist home, the city charges a compliance-review fee plus a certificate-of-occupancy fee that both vary by borough. Ville-Marie charges $338 for the review and $907 for the certificate, while Anjou charges just $63 for its review in the narrow strip where it's even allowed.

The penalties for skipping any of this sit directly in the provincial statute, and they escalate fast:

Violation	Individual	Corporation
Failing to provide required information or documents	$500 - $5,000	$1,000 - $10,000
Missing or incorrect registration number in ads or listings	$1,000 - $10,000	$2,000 - $20,000
Operating unregistered, or a false declaration	$2,500 - $25,000	$5,000 - $50,000
Operating after a refusal, suspension or cancellation	$5,000 - $50,000	$10,000 - $100,000
Platform failing its own verification duties	$5,000 - $50,000	$10,000 - $100,000

Every one of those figures doubles on a first repeat offence and triples on any repeat after that, so a $2,500 fine for an unregistered listing becomes $5,000 the second time. On top of the provincial fines, Montreal's 2025 bylaw adds a separate municipal penalty: $1,000 per day for a listing advertised outside the June 10 to September 10 window, rising to $2,000 per day for a repeat offender, and that clock runs daily rather than resetting.

Required Documents for Montreal Short-Term Rentals

Assuming your address clears both the borough zoning check and the provincial rules above, there's still paperwork to assemble before either application goes anywhere. It's fairly standard, though it has to match across two separate applications rather than one. For CITQ and the city permit together, expect to gather:

• A current provincial Notice of Assessment, with personal details redacted
• Valid government photo ID
• Proof of the $2 million liability insurance policy
• A title deed or property tax bill if you own, or a lease plus written authorization from the owner if you rent
• A declaration of co-ownership or syndicate letter confirming short-term rental isn't prohibited, for condo owners

Don't forget that Quebec tightened the residency proof requirement further, effective September 1, 2026: applicants now have to submit two separate proofs of principal residence rather than one, aimed squarely at hosts who were registering an address they didn't actually live in. Owner or syndicate consent, previously a one-time document at registration, now has to be renewed every year on a standardized form too. And starting April 9, 2026, your registration number has to appear on your listing's social media promotion as well, not just the platform listing itself.

Since none of that paperwork is refundable once submitted, it's worth double-checking your borough's zoning status and your building's bylaws before you pay either fee.

Montreal Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax layered on top of every booking, and it comes from two governments that don't coordinate with each other.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
Quebec Lodging Tax (TSH)	3.5% of the nightly rate	Airbnb automatically; hosts remit it themselves on direct bookings or other platforms
GST (federal)	5%	Host, or the platform if the host isn't separately GST-registered
QST (provincial)	9.975%	Host, or the platform if the host isn't separately QST-registered

The lodging tax is the oldest and simplest piece. Quebec struck an agreement with Airbnb back in 2016, and since October 1, 2017, Airbnb has collected the 3.5% lodging tax automatically on every Quebec booking and remitted it to the province quarterly. Tourisme Montréal is the regional body that gets the city's share, and that revenue reportedly makes up more than half of what regional tourism associations spend on promotion. Book through another platform, or take a reservation directly, and that 3.5% becomes your job to collect and remit.

GST and QST are a separate, federal-plus-provincial pair, and this is the one part of the tax picture I couldn't confirm by reading Revenu Québec's or the CRA's own page directly this session, since both blocked automated access outright. From what I can tell going through the compliance guidance that is available, they run on a small-supplier threshold. Once your short-term rental revenue passes $30,000 CAD across four consecutive quarters, registering for both becomes mandatory rather than optional, and below that threshold, registration stays voluntary but lets you recover tax on your own expenses. Where a host hasn't registered separately, the digital platform itself is generally the one required to collect and remit under Canada's platform-economy rules, so do check what your specific platform states before you assume either way. Your rental income is ordinary taxable income on top of all three consumption taxes either way, reportable to both the CRA and Revenu Québec.

Quebec Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Whichever borough you're hosting in, a few rules apply exactly the same way across the province, and they're the ones that don't bend for Montreal's own bylaw. CITQ registration, the $2 million insurance floor, and the three-tax stack above don't vary by municipality, so a Montreal host and a host in Quebec City are on identical hooks provincially even though their local zoning maps look nothing alike.

Every establishment in the province falls under the same statutory definition too: a rental of 31 days or fewer to a tourist, registered with CITQ, with the same penalty schedule for skipping registration or misrepresenting it. The 2026 amendments that tightened the residency-proof and social-media-display rules apply to every Quebec host, not only Montreal ones, since they're changes to the provincial regulation rather than to any single city's bylaw.

What varies is what sits on top of that provincial floor. Montreal added the June 10 to September 10 window and the reversed burden of proof through its own municipal bylaw in 2025, using the fast-track zoning mechanism article 23 allows. Other Quebec municipalities can use that same mechanism to restrict principal-residence hosting in their own way, and several already have, so a rule that applies in Montreal is never a safe assumption for a property elsewhere in the province. Check your specific municipality's own zoning rather than assuming Montreal's calendar travels with you.

Does Montreal Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

That calendar rule is exactly the one Montreal watches most closely, and given everything above, the honest answer is yes: enforcement got noticeably more aggressive in 2025, not less. Montreal isn't the loosely policed market it might have been a few years back, and the shift traces directly to that March 2023 Old Montreal fire. Investigators found that six of the seven people who died were staying in short-term rentals, in a building where that use already broke the borough's zoning before the fire ever started. That single incident reshaped the city's political appetite for enforcement.

The numbers since then tell the story. In 2023, the city stood up a task force of a coordinator and three inspectors covering just Ville-Marie, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal and Le Sud-Ouest, the boroughs that carried the bulk of Montreal's listings, with fines running $1,000 to $4,000 per violation. By March 2025, that had grown into a citywide bylaw with a ten-inspector squad, automatic fines for out-of-season listings, and Mayor Valérie Plante publicly framing the goal in housing terms: returning roughly 2,000 units to the long-term rental market. Airbnb pushed back hard, warning the bylaw could jeopardize more than $400 million in tourism-linked economic activity and 4,400 jobs, which tells you how seriously the industry took a rule most cities would treat as a minor zoning tweak.

Provincially, Revenu Québec runs the inspection and investigation side under the tourist accommodation statute, and the ministry's own numbers back up that the pressure is working: compliance among properties listed simultaneously on Airbnb and Vrbo climbed from 34.5% in 2022 to 87.6% in 2025. The fine structure scales with how brazen the violation is too: a first missing-document slip tops out around $10,000, while operating after your registration's already been cancelled tops out at $100,000 for a corporation, doubling again on any repeat.

Put the city and the province together and Montreal is enforcing on two fronts at once, one built around zoning and the calendar, the other built around registration and disclosure. Watch out for the assumption that a CITQ number alone makes you safe. It only covers the provincial half of the equation.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Montreal

Assuming your situation still fits after all of that, the order below is the one that actually saves time, since the early steps decide whether the later ones are worth bothering with at all.

1. Check your exact address against your borough's zoning page first. Confirm whether your borough bans commercial tourist homes outright, and if not, whether your specific street falls inside the narrow authorized zone.
2. Read your lease, condo declaration or syndicate rules. You'll need written authorization if you're a tenant, and confirmation from the syndicate if you're in a co-owned building, and both now get renewed annually.
3. Get a $2 million civil liability policy quoted before you apply anywhere. A standard homeowner's or condo policy generally won't cover this, and neither fee below comes back if you fail on insurance later.
4. Register with CITQ. Pay the applicable fee ($54 primary residence, $156 general, $131 youth), and keep the certificate and registration number on hand.
5. Apply for your city permit. For a principal residence, that's the $350 host permit through the online process, including the in-person ID check at Accès Montréal. For a commercial tourist home, it's your borough's compliance review plus its certificate of occupancy.
6. Match your listing to your registration exactly, and display your registration number everywhere you advertise, including social media, not only the platform listing.
7. Set the calendar before you set the price. A principal residence listing only runs June 10 to September 10, so build your model around three months of revenue, not twelve.
8. Register for GST and QST once you're near the $30,000 threshold, or sooner if you'd rather recover tax on your own setup costs.
9. Diarize your renewal dates. CITQ, the city permit and the annual syndicate consent all run on a one-year clock, and letting any one lapse mid-season is the fastest way to lose the whole summer.

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

Whichever step trips you up, three organizations own almost the entire process between them, and knowing which one to call first saves a genuinely frustrating amount of back-and-forth.

City permits, zoning and enforcement

The City of Montreal, through 311 and your own borough's permit counter, handles the host permit, the commercial certificate of occupancy, and reports of illegal listings.

• Phone (311): 311, or 514-872-0311 from outside Montreal
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Online: the short-term tourist accommodation hub links every borough's own permit page and the report-suspicious-accommodation form

Provincial registration

CITQ (Corporation de l'industrie touristique du Québec) handles the registration certificate every host needs before applying for anything municipal.

• Phone: 450-679-3737, or toll-free 1-866-499-0550
• Fax: 450-679-1489
• Email: [email protected]
• Address: 1010, De Sérigny, bureau 810, Longueuil, Quebec J4K 5G7
• Online: citq.qc.ca

Taxes

Revenu Québec administers the lodging tax, GST and QST for anyone taking bookings outside a platform that already collects automatically. I wasn't able to confirm a direct phone line by reading Revenu Québec's own site this session, since it blocked automated access outright, so the safest route is the department's own site, revenuquebec.ca, for current guidance. In practice, most hosts booking exclusively through Airbnb won't need to call at all, since the lodging tax is collected for them automatically.

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

Most hosts may not need to call anyone about the lodging tax, but plenty need to talk to somebody about the rules themselves, and that shows up clearly in how people actually discuss this market online. What follows is my read of the recurring public themes rather than a survey of specific threads, since Reddit blocks automated access outright and I couldn't pull a Bigger Pockets thread cleanly either this session. Weigh it accordingly.

• Investors describe Montreal the way New York investors describe their own city now, mostly in the past tense. The nightly-rate, entire-unit business model that used to draw investment here doesn't really exist anymore outside a handful of named streets, and the recurring advice is to either chase one of those narrow zoning windows or look elsewhere in the province.
• Existing hosts describe the seasonal cap as the single biggest shift. Going from a year-round listing to a three-month one doesn't just cut revenue. It also changes the math on furnishing, cleaning turnover, and whether a property manager is even worth paying for.
• The 2023 fire comes up constantly as the reason nobody expects a rollback. Even hosts who think the bylaw overreaches tend to concede that the political story behind it, seven deaths in an illegal listing, makes a future council unlikely to loosen things again soon.
• The longer-stay pivot is the most common workaround discussed. Since a stay of 32 nights or more sits outside this entire framework, plenty of former nightly-rate operators describe shifting toward furnished mid-term rentals instead.

Enforcement, in other words, isn't something Montreal hosts describe as a background risk anymore. It's the headline. Before you commit to either the seasonal or the longer-stay path, it's worth running the actual numbers rather than guessing at them, and the Montreal market page breaks down what comparable listings are pulling in, which matters more here than in a city where you can list year-round.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Montreal in 2026?

Yes, but only within tight limits. If it's your principal residence, you can host from June 10 to September 10 each year, with a CITQ registration, a $350 city permit, and $2 million in liability insurance. A property you don't live in can only be rented short-term as a registered commercial tourist home, and that's legal in a handful of boroughs, on specific named streets. Outside those paths, and outside three boroughs that ban it entirely, short-term rental isn't available at any price.

How much does it cost to register a short-term rental in Montreal?

Expect two separate fees. CITQ, the provincial registry, charges $54 for a primary-residence establishment or $156 for a general tourist accommodation establishment, renewed annually at the same rate. Montreal's own host permit costs $350, taxes included, also renewed every year. A commercial tourist home certificate of occupancy costs more and varies by borough, running from around $63 for a review in some boroughs to $338 plus $907 in Ville-Marie. None of these fees come back once submitted.

Can you rent out a Montreal apartment you don't live in on Airbnb?

Only as a registered commercial tourist home, and only where your specific borough's zoning allows it, which in most of Montreal it doesn't. Eleven of the city's nineteen boroughs, including Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Lachine and Saint-Laurent, prohibit commercial tourist homes outright. Where it is allowed, it's typically restricted to a few named commercial streets rather than the whole borough, so check your exact address against the city's zoning page before assuming you qualify.

What happens if you operate an unregistered short-term rental in Montreal?

Provincial fines run from $2,500 to $25,000 for an individual and $5,000 to $50,000 for a corporation, and those figures double on a first repeat offence and triple after that. Montreal's own bylaw adds a separate municipal fine of $1,000 per day for a listing advertised outside the permitted window, rising to $2,000 per day for repeat offenders. Between the province and the city, an unregistered listing is exposed on two fronts at once, not one.

Is there a way around Montreal's June to September rental window?

Not for a short-term stay of 31 nights or fewer, no. The window applies city-wide to principal residence rentals under the March 2025 bylaw, and it's enforced with a reversed burden of proof, so an ad posted outside the window is treated as a violation on its face. The real alternative is switching to a stay of 32 consecutive nights or more, which falls outside the short-term rental framework entirely and runs under ordinary lease law instead, available year-round regardless of the calendar.

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