West Jordan Short Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in West Jordan and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and it's a fairly recent yes: this Salt Lake County suburb only opened the door to short-term rentals in 2025, after years of the practice existing in a gray zone. If you already have a listing running, or you're eyeing one now, you're operating under rules that are barely a year old.

The catch is that "allowed" comes with real conditions attached. The city requires its own short-term rental license on top of a general business license, caps parking to what you can fit on your own lot, and makes you notify every property owner within 100 feet before the license even gets issued. None of that is unusual for Utah, mind you, since the state has spent the last few years forcing cities to pick a lane rather than leave hosts guessing.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in 2026: what West Jordan's ordinance requires, what the license costs, the documents you'll need to gather, the tax layers stacked on top from the city, county and state, how seriously the city enforces any of it, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from West Jordan's own ordinances or Utah's own tax pages, checked in July 2026. Once you've got a sense of the numbers, run the property through BNBCalc to see what it actually pencils out to.

What are short term rental (Airbnb, VRBO) regulations in West Jordan, Utah?

West Jordan's short-term rental rules are genuinely new, and that timing explains a lot of what follows. The city council adopted Ordinance No. 25-16 on April 22, 2025, rewriting City Code Title 4, Chapter 2, Article R to define short-term rentals for the first time and create a dedicated license for them, effective immediately on posting. A few months later the council followed up with Ordinance No. 25-23, adopted July 8, 2025, which added "Short Term Rental" to the permitted-and-conditional-use tables across eight separate zoning articles, from residential and agricultural zones through planned developments and the City Center subdistricts. Between the two, West Jordan built a working licensing system where none existed before.

The definition itself is simple. Under the amended Title 13, a "short-term rental" is a residential unit, or any portion of one, that the owner or lessee offers for occupancy for fewer than 30 consecutive days. Once you clear that line into 30-plus-night stays, you're outside this whole framework and into ordinary landlord-tenant law instead.

What the ordinance actually asks of you, from the operative section (4-2R-4), comes down to a handful of concrete requirements:

• You need a short-term rental license, signed by the residential landlord, with the license fee paid before it issues.
• Parking has to live on your property. The code is direct about this: parking areas must be "maintained and available for use at all times," it has to be "contained on the site," and it "shall not be allowed on the public rights-of-way." No street parking for guests, ever.
• Your license number has to appear in every online listing for that unit.
• Neighbors within 100 feet get written notice before you're licensed, referencing the code section, your phone and email, and West Jordan Code Enforcement's number.
• All taxes owed to the city have to be current before the license renews.

Notice what's absent from that list, because it matters. West Jordan doesn't require you to live in the unit, and it doesn't cap the number of guests. That's a lighter touch than plenty of Utah cities take, and it's worth keeping in mind as you weigh West Jordan against a neighboring market.

All of this sits on top of Utah's own statewide rules, which is the layer that made this possible in the first place. Utah bars a city from enacting or enforcing an ordinance that bans someone from listing a rental on a short-term rental website, or from punishing them solely for the listing itself, under H.B. 82 (2021). A 2025 update, H.B. 256, went further and reportedly bars a city from banning short-term rentals across every zoning area citywide, while still letting it require a license and restrict specific zones. West Jordan choosing to add short-term rentals as a permitted or conditional use across eight zoning articles, rather than walling the whole city off, reads as the city working within that framework rather than testing its limits.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in West Jordan

That statewide backdrop is exactly why West Jordan had room to build this program instead of banning the practice outright, and the city didn't build it from a blank slate. Roughly 120 short-term rentals were already operating in West Jordan before the ordinance passed, according to KUTV's reporting on the new rules, and city spokesperson Marie Majors framed the licensing push partly around the 2034 Winter Olympics: "We know that the Olympics are coming," she told the station, and the city wanted "checks and balances before it gets to that point." So this isn't a market starting from zero. It's an existing one getting a rulebook.

Starting one now means clearing three things West Jordan lays out on its own Short Term Rental Program page: get a business license, register through the city's self-service portal, and send the neighbor notice. Before any of that, though, confirm your parcel's zoning actually allows the use. Ordinance 25-23 added "Short Term Rental" as a listed use in the residential (R-1 through R-M), agricultural (A-1, A-5, A-20), planned development, and City Center zone tables, generally as either a permitted or conditional use depending on the specific zone and sub-district. Since that designation varies by zone rather than applying uniformly, call the Planning Division at 801-569-5060 and confirm your exact parcel before you spend anything on licensing.

Compare that to next-door Sandy, which limits short-term rental licenses by area and population and requires the owner to occupy the property at least 183 days a year, per the same KUTV report. West Jordan asks for none of that. You don't have to live there, and there's no numeric cap on how many licenses the city issues. That's a meaningfully more open starting position than some of its neighbors, though it also means the rules could tighten as the program matures and the city gets a real enforcement track record.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in West Jordan

Since zoning is squared away, the license itself is the next gate, and it runs through West Jordan's Business Licensing division rather than a separate short-term rental office. Apply through the city's Cityworks portal, where the STR license sits alongside the city's other rental-dwelling license types.

The fee structure is set out plainly in the ordinance's Consolidated Fee Schedule attachment, and it's worth laying out because West Jordan actually runs three separate rental-license tiers side by side:

License type	Fee	Who it's for
Application	$55 one-time	Everyone, paid once at first application
Good Landlord Program	$50 per unit, annual	Standard rentals enrolled in the city's landlord-quality program
Standard rental license	$325 per unit, annual	Standard rentals not in the Good Landlord Program
Short-term rental license	$325 per unit, annual	Any unit rented for fewer than 30 consecutive days

So a first-year short-term rental license runs $380: the one-time $55 application plus the $325 annual license fee, then $325 a year after that on renewal. Short-term rentals aren't eligible for the discounted Good Landlord rate, since that program and the STR track are treated as separate paths under the code.

To get the license itself, the application has to be signed by the residential landlord. West Jordan will then deny, revoke or suspend it on any of several grounds under section 4-2R-6: failing to meet a condition set by the city, violating a site plan or conditional-use approval, noncompliance with other city, county, health department, state or federal rules tied to the property, refusing a lawful inspection, breaking an agreement with the city, or racking up two or more law enforcement or code enforcement cases at the property inside 12 months.

If you get denied, revoked or suspended, you can appeal under Title 4, Chapter 1, Article C of the code. And if you do end up out of compliance, the city's tools are a notice of violation under Title 16 and, if that goes unresolved, a criminal citation, both confirmed directly in the ordinance text. I couldn't confirm the exact dollar civil penalty attached to a Title 16 notice, since the code library page blocked automated readers, so don't take a specific number as settled until you've asked the city directly.

Required Documents for West Jordan Short Term Rentals

Getting the license approved means having the paperwork ready before you apply, not after, since the ordinance gives West Jordan real grounds to deny an incomplete or noncompliant application. Working from the city's own three-step process and the ordinance itself, here's what to have on hand:

• A general business license or special landlord license application, filed through the Cityworks portal, along with your Utah Department of Commerce business registration, sales tax number if applicable, and a valid ID.
• The short-term rental license application itself, signed by you as the residential landlord, with the $55 application fee and $325 annual fee ready to pay.
• Proof you can meet the on-site parking requirement. The city doesn't publish a formal checklist item for this, but since the ordinance ties parking directly to license eligibility, be ready to describe or show where guest vehicles will park.
• The 100-foot neighbor notice, sent to every property owner within that radius before your license issues, referencing the code section, your contact information, and Code Enforcement's number.
• Registration with the city's self-service portal, the second of the three steps West Jordan lists on its program page.
• A Utah Sales and Use Tax license (form TC-69) from the State Tax Commission, which you'll need before you start collecting and remitting tax, covered in more detail below.

Once your license number is issued, keep in mind it has to go into every listing on every platform, and it has to stay accurate: an outdated address or guest count is exactly the kind of thing that triggers a code enforcement look.

West Jordan Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you're able to clear licensing, there's still tax to sort out, and Utah stacks more layers on a short-term stay than most states bother with. West Jordan's combined sales and use tax rate is 7.45% as of the Tax Commission's current rate chart, made up of the 4.85% state rate plus local, county-option, transit and highway components specific to Salt Lake County. That applies to the listing price plus cleaning and guest fees, per the Commission's own lodging-provider guidance.

Transient room tax is the second stack, and it runs separately from sales tax:

Layer	Rate	Collected by
Combined sales and use tax	7.45%	Utah State Tax Commission
Statewide transient room tax	1.07%	Utah State Tax Commission
Salt Lake County additional state TRT	0.25%	Utah State Tax Commission
Salt Lake County transient room tax	4.75%	Utah State Tax Commission (county-imposed)

I couldn't confirm whether West Jordan itself, as opposed to Salt Lake County, has added its own municipal transient room tax on top of that stack. Utah law lets a city add up to 1%, and a qualifying city an additional 0.5%, but West Jordan doesn't appear in the Tax Commission's most recent bulletin of rate changes, and I wasn't able to pull the city-level breakdown from the Commission's rate lookup tool this session. Check the Tax Commission's rate lookup directly, or call the number below, before you finalize your pricing.

Registration for all of it runs through one place: the Tax Commission's Taxpayer Access Point, using form TC-69, for a Sales and Use Tax license that covers both sales tax and transient room tax. There's no listed state fee for registering, and the Commission assigns you a filing frequency, monthly, quarterly or annual, for your ongoing TC-62 sales returns and TC-62T transient room tax returns.

Here's the part that actually saves you the paperwork: Airbnb states it collects and remits Utah's combined sales tax and the state and local transient room taxes on reservations under 30 nights, so a booking through Airbnb has most of this handled automatically. Vrbo says it collects "where required by law" without naming Utah specifically, so don't assume parity between the two platforms; verify per platform before you rely on it. And don't forget the city's own requirement sitting on top of all this: West Jordan's ordinance says a short-term rental license won't renew until all taxes owed to the city are current, so keep your own records even when a platform is collecting on your behalf.

Utah wide Short Term Rental Rules

All of West Jordan's specifics sit on a statewide floor that's worth understanding on its own, because it's the reason a city couldn't have just banned this outright. Utah doesn't preempt local zoning or permitting broadly. Cities and counties keep that authority under Utah Code § 10-8-85.4, including the power to restrict short-term rentals to certain zones. What the state does limit is narrower: the mechanism a city can use to police listings.

H.B. 82, passed in 2021, is the older of the two protections, and it bars a city from banning someone from listing a rental on a short-term rental website, or fining and prosecuting them solely for the listing itself. H.B. 256, signed March 19, 2025 and effective May 7, 2025, layered more on top. It lets a city require a business license or permit for short-term rentals, and it reportedly bars a total ban across every zoning area in the jurisdiction, so a citywide ban is out even though zone-by-zone restriction still stands. It also lets a city treat a listing as evidence of an unpermitted rental, though only alongside other supporting information such as a complaint or the absence of a license on file. I want to flag that last set of provisions plainly: the exact codified language wasn't something I could load directly from the legislature's site this session, so it rests on secondary reporting and bill-tracking rather than the statute text itself, consistent with how our statewide Utah brief flags the same gap.

There's no statewide short-term rental license. What every host needs, regardless of city, is the TC-69 Sales and Use Tax registration described above, which is a tax registration rather than an operating permit. For the fuller picture across the state, our Utah statewide guide covers the preemption framework in more depth, and since Salt Lake County sets several of the tax and land-use rules layered under West Jordan, the Salt Lake County guide is worth reading alongside this one.

Does West Jordan strictly enforce STR rules? Is West Jordan Airbnb friendly?

Given how new this program is, the honest answer is that West Jordan hasn't had time to build much of an enforcement track record yet, but the pieces it has put in place suggest it's taking compliance seriously rather than treating the ordinance as symbolic. The city runs its complaint intake through HostCompliance, a dedicated short-term rental monitoring platform, with a 24/7 phone line at 801-383-0315 and an online portal for reporting a specific address. That's the kind of infrastructure cities usually adopt once they expect real complaint volume, not before.

On paper, the enforcement mechanism is fairly standard: a notice of violation under Title 16, a possible criminal citation if that goes unresolved, and license revocation on the grounds covered above. What's genuinely uncertain is how aggressively the city will use those tools once the roughly 120 pre-existing operators, plus whoever's joined since, are actually supposed to be licensed. A city that just spent a year building the licensing system, with the 2034 Olympics on the horizon as an explicit motivator, has every reason to start enforcing more once the initial registration window passes.

Put those pieces together and West Jordan reads as Airbnb-friendly relative to its neighbors right now: no owner-occupancy requirement, no guest cap, and a fee structure that's middling rather than punitive. Just make sure you don't mistake "friendly today" for "will stay this way," since a city building enforcement infrastructure this deliberately, ahead of a global event that will draw scrutiny to exactly this kind of housing, is one to watch rather than one to assume stays static.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in West Jordan

Given all of that, the order you tackle these steps in matters more than it looks, since the early ones determine whether the later ones are worth doing at all.

1. Confirm your zoning first. Call West Jordan Planning at 801-569-5060 and verify your parcel is in a zone where "Short Term Rental" is a permitted or conditional use before you spend anything.
2. Register for state tax. File form TC-69 through the Tax Commission's Taxpayer Access Point for your Sales and Use Tax license, which covers both sales tax and transient room tax.
3. Get your general or special landlord business license through the Cityworks portal, with your business registration, ID and sales tax number ready.
4. Apply for the short-term rental license itself, signed as the residential landlord, and pay the $55 one-time application fee plus the $325 annual license fee.
5. Send the 100-foot neighbor notice before the license issues, referencing the code section, your contact details, and Code Enforcement's phone number.
6. Set up on-site parking for guests and make sure none of it depends on street parking, which the ordinance explicitly bars.
7. Add your license number to every listing on every platform you use, and keep it current if anything about the listing changes.
8. Confirm your platform's tax collection. Check whether Airbnb or Vrbo is collecting Utah sales tax and transient room tax on your behalf, and keep documentation either way.
9. Diarize your renewal. The license is annual, and it won't renew until every tax owed to the city is current, so don't let that slide until the deadline is on top of you.

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

Whichever step trips you up, four offices between the city and the state handle almost everything.

Business licensing and the STR license itself

West Jordan Business Licensing, part of Community Development, administers the general rental license, the STR license, and the Cityworks application portal.

• Address: West Jordan City Hall, 8000 S. Redwood Rd., 2nd Floor, West Jordan, UT 84088
• Phone: 801-569-5010
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., excluding state and federal holidays

Zoning and land use

West Jordan Planning Division confirms whether short-term rentals are a permitted or conditional use on your specific parcel.

• Address: West Jordan City Hall, 8000 S. Redwood Rd., West Jordan, UT 84088
• Phone: 801-569-5060
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Code enforcement and complaints

West Jordan Code Enforcement handles ongoing compliance, inspections, and neighbor complaints once you're licensed.

• Address: 8000 S. Redwood Road, West Jordan, UT 84088
• Phone: 801-256-2107
• Email: [email protected]
• Complaint reporting: the HostCompliance portal, or 801-383-0315, available 24/7
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

State tax registration and returns

The Utah State Tax Commission administers your TC-69 registration and your ongoing sales, use and transient room tax returns.

• Address: 210 North 1950 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84134
• Phone: 801-297-2200, or 800-662-4335 outside the Salt Lake area
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Register or file online: the Taxpayer Access Point

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

There isn't much of a public record to go on yet, and that's worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise. West Jordan's license has existed for barely a year as of this writing, so there's no deep well of host threads specifically about it the way there is for cities that have run licensing programs for a decade. What follows is my read of the surrounding discourse rather than a survey of any specific forum, so weigh it accordingly.

Utah's Wasatch Front generally has a reputation among BiggerPockets-style investors as a friendlier short-term rental environment than coastal markets, precisely because the state has spent years actively limiting how far a city can go in restricting listings. West Jordan fits that pattern: a light license fee, no owner-occupancy mandate, and zoning that permits the use broadly rather than confining it to a couple of overlay districts. Investors comparing Salt Lake County suburbs tend to weigh West Jordan against Sandy, South Jordan and similar cities, and the absence of an occupancy requirement here is the kind of detail that shows up in those comparisons once hosts start sharing notes.

The other side of that coin is the newness itself. A program this young hasn't been stress-tested by a renewal cycle, a wave of complaints, or a council under pressure to tighten things ahead of 2034. Hosts weighing West Jordan now are, in a real sense, part of the first cohort figuring out how strict enforcement actually gets in practice, rather than following a well-worn path other investors have already mapped. If that uncertainty bothers you, it's worth keeping an eye on West Jordan's council agendas over the next year or two rather than assuming today's light-touch rules are permanent. If you're weighing West Jordan against other Utah markets before committing, the Utah market data on BNBCalc is a reasonable place to sanity-check the numbers against nearby cities.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run a short-term rental in West Jordan in 2026?

Yes. West Jordan legalized and licensed short-term rentals through Ordinance No. 25-16, adopted April 22, 2025, and a zoning update, Ordinance No. 25-23, adopted July 8, 2025. You'll need a city short-term rental license, on-site parking for guests, a 100-foot neighbor notice before the license issues, and your license number displayed in every online listing. There's no requirement that you live in the unit, and no cap on the number of guests.

How much does a West Jordan short-term rental license cost?

A first-year license costs $380 total: a one-time $55 application fee plus a $325 annual short-term rental license fee. After the first year, renewal is $325 annually, and the city won't approve a renewal until all taxes you owe the city are current. The license is per rental unit, so multiple properties each need their own.

Do you have to live in your West Jordan short-term rental?

No. Unlike some neighboring Utah cities, West Jordan's ordinance doesn't require the owner or licensee to occupy the unit for any portion of the year. You do have to sign the license application yourself as the residential landlord, keep your parking on-site, and notify neighbors within 100 feet before the license is issued, but living there isn't part of the requirement.

What taxes do you owe on a West Jordan short-term rental?

At minimum, expect Utah's combined sales and use tax at 7.45% in West Jordan, plus transient room tax layers: a 1.07% statewide rate, an additional 0.25% Salt Lake County state-administered rate, and a 4.75% Salt Lake County transient room tax. Airbnb collects and remits most of this automatically on reservations under 30 nights; Vrbo's collection isn't confirmed for Utah specifically, so check per platform. Register with the Utah Tax Commission using form TC-69 regardless of platform collection.

Can West Jordan revoke your short-term rental license?

Yes. The city can deny, suspend or revoke a license for reasons including noncompliance with license conditions, violating a site plan or conditional-use approval, refusing a lawful inspection, breaking an agreement with the city, or accumulating two or more law enforcement or code enforcement cases at the property within 12 months. A revoked or denied applicant can appeal under Title 4, Chapter 1, Article C of the city code.

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