St. George Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in St. George and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that short-term rentals are legal here, in Washington County, Utah, so you're not looking at an outright ban. Unfortunately for most owners, that permission only reaches a fairly short list of specific properties, because St. George runs one of the more restrictive rental systems in southern Utah rather than a simple zoning map.

The city keeps an actual named whitelist of approved developments, from Green Valley and Las Palmas to Entrada and the resort side of Desert Color. If your address isn't on it, you generally need a two-acre-plus lot with the right road frontage instead, and both paths still require a city business license under St. George City Code § 3-2V-1. Even so, Washington County officials told the Utah Legislature in 2025 that over 1,000 short-term rentals are believed to be operating illegally in St. George. That gap is the whole story here.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly in St. George: who qualifies, what the license involves in 2026, and how the taxes and enforcement stack up. Every figure below comes from St. George's own city code and city website, or from the Utah State Tax Commission, checked in July 2026. Once you know where you stand, run the property through BNBCalc to see if the numbers still work.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in St. George

That gap between legal and illegal is exactly where new owners get into trouble, usually by assuming a house is fair game just because it sits in a nice neighborhood. It isn't. Under St. George's own code, a "short-term residential rental" is a property rented for 29 consecutive calendar days or less, and outside of three narrow paths, that use simply isn't allowed anywhere in the city, regardless of the zone your house sits in.

The first and most direct path is the city's own Approved Short Term Rental Properties List, updated June 4, 2026. It names specific developments rather than zones, and the list currently includes:

• Green Valley, Las Palmas, Point Vista Condos, Sports Village, Estancia and Amira
• The Lofts, The Vue and Worldmark
• Entrada and The Inn @ Entrada, plus Shinava Ridge (units 24 through 39 only)
• The Ledges, along with its Escapes, Fairways and Sand Cove sub-communities
• Bloomington Country Club Vacation Villas, Villas at Sun River (checked plat by plat) and Redhawk
• Approved Historic Landmark Properties, and the resort portion of Desert Color specifically, not the residential side of that community

If your address isn't on that list or its companion map, this path is closed to you no matter how much the listing photos would sing on Airbnb.

The second path is a large-lot exception under § 10-17A-13. A single-family home can qualify on its own if the lot is two acres or larger, it fronts a major collector or arterial street with at least a 66-foot right-of-way, and it sits at least 500 feet from any other short-term rental property. That's a genuinely narrow slice of St. George's housing stock, and it rules out the typical quarter-acre subdivision lot outright.

The third path runs through a Resort Overlay Zone, and it explains why the approved list skews so heavily toward master-planned resort communities. A development qualifies only with at least 100 dwelling units, or 50 units for single-family projects under four units per acre, plus written consent from 100% of the property owners on the recorded plat and a CC&R note that actually permits short-term rental. That's a high bar for any homeowners association to clear, which is exactly why so few communities have.

Assuming none of that fits your property, the honest answer is that a standard single-family home or condo purchase still doesn't support a short-term rental business in St. George, however the numbers pencil out on paper. The realistic pivot is a 30-plus-night furnished rental or an ordinary long-term lease, both of which sit outside this whitelist entirely.

If you're weighing St. George against other Utah markets with more open rules, the Salt Lake City guide and the Ogden guide are worth a look before you commit capital here.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in St. George

Even a property that clears one of those three paths still needs to clear the license, since qualifying for a spot on the list and holding a legal license are two separate steps. Under § 3-2V-1, it's unlawful to operate a short-term residential rental in St. George without a city business license for that specific dwelling unit, applied for and renewed through the CitizenServe portal.

One owner can cover multiple properties under a single license, but only if every property is titled to the exact same person or entity. Different owners or different LLCs each need their own.

I couldn't confirm a specific dollar figure for St. George's own short-term rental license fee. The city's fee schedule page loads its documents dynamically and neither that page nor § 3-1-7 of the code was reachable this session. You'll sometimes see $160 quoted online, but that figure belongs to Washington County's license for the unincorporated county, a separate jurisdiction with its own rules, not the City of St. George. Confirm the actual number with Business Licensing directly before you budget around it.

The license carries real ongoing duties, and they don't end once the certificate arrives. Garbage has to be removed from the property within 24 hours of guests checking out, and the unit must be cleaned at least weekly while occupied and between every stay.

You also have to designate a local property manager who's reachable 24 hours a day, and post a sign inside the unit listing that manager's name and phone number, the maximum occupancy, and the day garbage gets picked up. Owner and manager are jointly liable for violations, and a rental found in violation can lose its license outright.

Keep in mind the license is not transferable between people or properties. Sell the property and you're required to notify the city within 30 days, since the sale effectively cancels that license and the new owner starts fresh. And do check whether your rental will draw an inspection before it's issued: renting more than two dwellings, per the city's own guidance, can trigger a Code Enforcement inspection ahead of licensing.

Required Documents for St. George Short-Term Rentals

Since a mismatched name is one of the fastest ways to stall an application, start with ownership. Make sure the name on your license application matches the Washington County Assessor's title record exactly, which means an LLC or corporation needs to submit entity documents naming all its principals, not just the entity itself.

• Proof of title matching the Assessor's record, in the exact name the property is held under.
• Entity documents, if the owner is an LLC, corporation or similar, listing every principal.
• A local agent or property manager designation, required if you live outside Washington County; a friend, relative or your renter can serve in that role, and you don't have to hire a management company.
• Proof your address is on the approved list, or documentation that your lot meets the 2-acre and 500-foot standard, or a copy of the recorded CC&R note if you're relying on a Resort Overlay Zone approval.
• A change-of-ownership notice, filed within 30 days whenever a licensed property sells.

Three or more units under one license may also mean scheduling a Code Enforcement inspection before the license issues, so don't wait until the last minute to request it if your portfolio is that size.

St. George Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you clear the licensing and are able to start hosting, there's still tax on top of all that, and in St. George it stacks higher than a lot of first-time hosts expect. A short-term stay carries the general sales and use tax alongside a separate transient room tax, and together they add up fast. Rates below are as of July 2026, taken directly from the Utah Tax Commission's own rate table for St. George.

Tax layer	Rate	Notes
General sales & use tax	6.75%	State, county and local components combined, per the Utah Tax Commission's current rate table for St. George
State transient room tax	1.07%	0.32% base plus a 0.75% add-on from 2025's H.B. 456
Washington County transient room tax	4.25%	Below the new 4.5% ceiling; Washington County wasn't one of the counties that raised it in 2026
St. George municipal transient room tax	1.00%	The city's own share
Combined rate on a short-term stay	13.07%	Sales tax plus the full transient room tax stack

All of that gets remitted through a single Sales and Use Tax license from the Utah State Tax Commission, applied for on form TC-69 through the Taxpayer Access Point, which covers both the sales tax and the transient room tax together. There's no separate St. George tax office to register with on top of that. Since I last checked, the exact filing frequency (monthly, quarterly or annual) gets assigned by the Commission itself based on your volume, not fixed in advance.

Airbnb's own occupancy tax page for Utah states it collects and remits the combined sales tax and the state and local transient room taxes on Utah reservations under 30 nights, which covers the whole 13.07% stack for most hosts booking through the platform. You'll still need your own Tax Commission registration and still have to file returns, though the return excludes whatever a marketplace already collected on your behalf.

Vrbo's help materials only say they collect "where required by law" without naming Utah specifically, so don't assume parity between the two platforms. Check your own account settings rather than taking it on faith.

Utah Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Zoom out from St. George's own rules and the state framework above them explains why a city this restrictive is still allowed to operate this way. Utah does not preempt local short-term rental regulation broadly. Cities and counties keep full zoning and permitting authority, including the power to confine rentals to specific zones the way St. George does. What the state limits is narrower: the mechanism a city can use to police listings.

Under Utah Code § 10-8-85.4 and its county-level mirror at § 17-50-338, enacted in 2017 and amended by H.B. 82 in 2021, a city or county can't punish someone solely for listing a property on a short-term rental website, and can't ban the act of listing itself.

A more recent bill, H.B. 256 (2025), signed March 19, 2025 and effective that May, layered on top of that. It lets a municipality require an STR business license, and it bars a citywide or countywide ban across every zone, though zone-by-zone restriction, which is exactly St. George's model, remains fine. It also lets a city treat an online listing as evidence of an unpermitted rental, but only alongside other supporting information like a complaint or a missing license, never the listing alone.

There's no statewide STR license. Utah instead treats you as a seller for tax purposes, which is why registration runs through the Tax Commission rather than a licensing board, the same TC-69 process covered above. For the fuller picture across zoning, taxes, and where the state's preemption stops and local control starts, the Utah statewide guide walks through it market by market.

Does St. George Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how tightly the legal paths are drawn, it would be reasonable to assume enforcement is loose in practice. It genuinely isn't, or at least the city has been trying hard not to let it be.

Operating without a required license, or in violation of one, exposes you to St. George's general municipal penalty framework: a Class B misdemeanor carries a fine up to $1,000 for an individual, up to $5,000 for a corporation, plus the possibility of jail time. Civil penalties are the more common route for a code violation like this one, though.

Civil enforcement follows the city's administrative code enforcement procedures. A notice of violation goes out first, and if you don't correct it by the deadline it sets, the penalty starts accruing daily until the property is reinspected and brought into compliance. Failing to comply with the notice is itself a separate Class B misdemeanor, so ignoring the paperwork makes things worse, not better.

On top of that, your business license can be revoked. That's often the faster and more painful outcome for anyone trying to run a rental.

None of that has been enough to close the gap between legal supply and actual demand. Washington County officials told the Utah Legislature in early 2025 that more than 1,000 short-term rentals are believed to be operating illegally in St. George alone, against a backdrop the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute put at roughly 3,700 short-term rentals across Washington County as a whole in 2023.

That mismatch is part of what pushed H.B. 256 through the legislature, since it gives cities a workable way to treat an online listing as evidence, precisely because so many owners have been betting the city won't find them. Do check whether your specific address is genuinely covered before you list, rather than assuming enforcement has better things to do.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in St. George

With enforcement clearly a real risk and not a theoretical one, the order you tackle these steps in matters, because the early ones tell you whether the later ones are worth attempting at all.

1. Check the approved list and map first, before anything else. If your address isn't on it, confirm instead whether your lot clears the 2-acre, frontage and 500-foot standard, or whether your development has an actual Resort Overlay Zone approval on file.
2. Read your HOA's CC&Rs and recorded plat, since a resort-zone approval only reaches units where that consent is actually recorded, not just where it seems like it should apply.
3. Gather your ownership documents, matching the exact name on the Washington County Assessor's title record, plus entity paperwork if you're buying through an LLC.
4. Apply for the business license through the CitizenServe portal, and budget extra time if you're bringing three or more units into the same application, since that can trigger a Code Enforcement inspection first.
5. Register with the Utah State Tax Commission using form TC-69 through the Taxpayer Access Point, covering both sales tax and transient room tax in one registration.
6. Set up the operational side on day one: the required in-unit sign, a 24-hour local property manager, weekly cleaning, and 24-hour garbage removal after checkout.
7. Confirm how your booking platform handles tax collection, and don't assume Vrbo mirrors Airbnb's Utah coverage without checking your own account settings.
8. Keep your license current, and notify the city within 30 days of any change in ownership, since a stale license is a fast way to end up in the enforcement pipeline described above.

Who to Contact in St. George about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning

Whichever step trips you up, a handful of city and state offices cover nearly everything above between them.

Business Licensing handles the license application itself, renewals, and questions about the approved-properties list.

• Address: 61 S Main St, St. George, UT 84770
• Phone: 435-627-4740
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Online: CitizenServe portal

Code Enforcement takes complaints about a specific address and answers zoning questions like the difference between "less than 28 days" and a legitimate long-term lease.

• Address: 61 S Main St, St. George, UT 84770
• General phone: 435-627-4000
• Officers: Dean Almodova, 435-627-4428; Makayla Zufelt, 435-627-4645
• Online: File a Code Enforcement Complaint through the CitizenServe portal

Planning and Zoning is the right call for questions specific to the 2-acre standard or a Resort Overlay Zone application.

• Phone: 435-627-4206

Building Department handles the inspections that can be triggered by a three-or-more-unit license.

• Phone: 435-627-4100

Utah State Tax Commission, Washington County office covers Sales and Use Tax and Transient Room Tax registration and filing.

• Address: 100 South 5300 West, Hurricane, UT 84737
• Phone: 435-251-9520 (general statewide line: 1-800-662-4335)
• Online: Register through TAP

What Do Airbnb Hosts in St. George on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Given how public that enforcement gap is, it's no surprise hosts talk about it openly wherever short-term rental investors gather online. I wasn't able to pull a specific, verified thread this round, so what follows is a read of the recurring themes rather than a survey, and you should weigh it accordingly.

The most consistent complaint is confusion about the whitelist itself. Plenty of hosts assume "short-term rentals are allowed in planned developments" is the whole rule, then find out the hard way that their specific community isn't on the approved list even though a similar one nearby is. That confusion tracks exactly with how narrow and address-specific the actual code turns out to be once you read it directly.

The second theme is frustration with the gap between what's enforced and what obviously isn't. Owners who went through the trouble of qualifying for a license, keeping up the 24-hour manager requirement and the weekly cleaning schedule, tend to be irritated that an estimated 1,000-plus illegal operators haven't faced the same consequences. That's a fair complaint, and it's exactly the dynamic H.B. 256 was written to address, though it's still too early to say how much it changes enforcement in practice.

The third theme, more practical than either of those, is that investors increasingly treat St. George as a market you research property-by-property rather than city-wide. Two houses on the same street can have completely different legal outcomes under the approved-list model, so the zoning question has to be answered before the revenue question even gets asked. Checking the St. George market data on BNBCalc is a reasonable next step once you know an address qualifies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in St. George in 2026?

Only if your property qualifies under one of three paths: it appears on the city's Approved Short Term Rental Properties List (updated June 2026), it's a single-family home on a lot of 2 or more acres meeting frontage and 500-foot separation standards, or it sits in a Resort Overlay Zone development with 100% recorded owner consent. Every qualifying property still needs a city business license. A standard single-family home or condo purchase outside those three categories cannot legally operate as a short-term rental in St. George, regardless of the zoning district it's in.

How much does a short-term rental license cost in St. George?

The exact fee could not be confirmed from the city's own published fee schedule during this research. A commonly cited $160 figure applies to Washington County's license for the unincorporated county, which is a separate jurisdiction, not the City of St. George. Confirm the current fee directly with St. George's Business Licensing division at 435-627-4740 before budgeting for it, since city fee schedules change periodically and this one wasn't reachable online at the time of writing.

What happens if you operate an unlicensed short-term rental in St. George?

You're exposed to a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a fine up to $1,000 for an individual or $5,000 for a corporation. More commonly, the city issues a civil notice of violation, and if it isn't corrected by the stated deadline, penalties accrue daily until the property is reinspected and brought into compliance. Ignoring the notice itself is a separate misdemeanor. A licensed rental found in violation can also simply lose its business license outright, which ends the operation regardless of any fine.

How much tax do you pay on a short-term rental stay in St. George?

Combined, taxes run about 13.07% of the rental charge: a 6.75% general sales and use tax plus a 6.32% transient room tax stack made up of state, Washington County and St. George municipal shares. All of it gets remitted through a single Sales and Use Tax registration with the Utah State Tax Commission rather than separate city and county filings. Airbnb states it collects and remits this full combined rate automatically on Utah bookings under 30 nights; confirm your own settings if you book primarily through Vrbo.

Can you get a new property added to St. George's approved short-term rental list?

The list is tied to specific named developments and lot configurations defined in city code, not an open application anyone can submit for an arbitrary address. A property outside those categories would need to independently meet the 2-acre and 500-foot single-family standard, or belong to a development that pursues a formal Resort Overlay Zone designation, which requires 100% owner consent on the recorded plat. Contact St. George's Planning and Zoning division at 435-627-4206 to ask about a specific address before assuming either path is realistic.

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