Winnipeg Short Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Winnipeg and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you're allowed to. The city, which sits in Manitoba, Canada, has run a proper licensing system for short-term rentals since April 1, 2024, and it hasn't banned the whole-unit model the way some larger North American cities have. Rent out your entire house or condo, provided the city has issued you a licence for it.

That said, the catch is real, so don't go list anything before you read it. If you bought your property after February 23, 2023 and you don't plan to live in it, you're out of luck: only a primary residence or a property owned on or before that date qualifies for a non-primary licence. Secondary suites are barred outright, no matter when you bought the building. And 2026 brings a change most 2024-era write-ups never saw coming: Manitoba is reclassifying short-term rental properties for tax purposes, which raises the taxable share of a lot of hosts' assessments starting this year.

So here's what this guide actually walks through: who qualifies, what the licence costs in 2026, the documents you'll need, the three tax layers that stack on a Winnipeg stay, how hard the city actually enforces this, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from the City of Winnipeg's or Manitoba's own pages, checked in July 2026, and I've flagged the couple of things I genuinely could not confirm rather than guessing. If you're weighing a Winnipeg property against a market where the whole-unit model carries fewer restrictions, run both through BNBCalc before you commit to either.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Winnipeg

A short-term rental in Winnipeg is defined plainly: a house, condo, or apartment rented for payment for a continuous period of less than 30 nights, including a bed-and-breakfast run out of the owner's own home. That definition, and the licence that comes with it, is the whole starting point for anyone thinking about hosting here.

Zoning decides whether your specific property even qualifies. An STR has to be a permitted use under the Winnipeg Zoning By-law No. 200/2006 or, downtown, the Downtown Winnipeg Zoning By-law No. 100/2004, and the city's Planning, Property & Development Department signs off on that as part of your application. One rule trips people up more than any other: secondary suites are not permitted to be used as short-term rentals, full stop. If your plan was to rent out a basement suite while living upstairs, that plan doesn't clear zoning no matter how the rest of your application looks.

Ownership is where most of the actual gatekeeping happens, and it splits into two very different paths:

• Primary residence. Any Winnipeg resident can license their own home, and there's no ownership-date restriction attached to it. You can rent the whole property whenever you're away, or rent spare bedrooms while you're there, and the city treats this as the easy path.
• Non-primary residence. This one only works if you owned the property on or before February 23, 2023, the date council set when it approved the regulatory framework. Buy a Winnipeg investment property today, and a short-term rental licence for it simply isn't available to you. That cutoff isn't going anywhere either; it's baked into the bylaw, not a temporary transition rule.

A single applicant can hold up to four licences total: one for a primary residence plus as many as three grandfathered non-primary properties. Owners and principal tenants have to be Winnipeg residents themselves, and while a corporation or partnership can own a grandfathered non-primary rental, it can't own a primary residence, since the bylaw defines that as belonging to an individual. Renting instead of owning doesn't shut you out, either: a tenant can operate a short-term rental with a signed letter of permission from the landlord, and a condo owner needs the same from the condo board before the city will even look at the application.

Put plainly, if you're a Winnipeg resident who wants to host your own home, the path is straightforward. If you're an outside investor eyeing a whole-unit Airbnb business bought fresh in 2026, that door closed back in February 2023, and no amount of paperwork reopens it.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Winnipeg

Since that ownership question is the gate everyone has to clear first, it's worth being clear about what actually happens once you're through it. A City of Winnipeg business licence has been mandatory for every short-term rental since April 1, 2024, and operating without one, or while your application sits expired or unapproved, is itself a violation. Licences run for one year from the date of application and have to be renewed annually. Fees aren't prorated or reduced for a partial year, so applying in November costs the same as applying in January.

Approval isn't a rubber stamp. Once you submit a complete application, the city runs through several checks before it issues a licence number: an on-site inspection by a City of Winnipeg licensing inspector, a zoning sign-off from Planning, Property & Development, and a review by the Winnipeg Police Service Records Review Board covering every operator named on the application. Only once all three clear does the city issue a licence number, and you can't legally advertise or accept a booking before that happens.

The fee itself scales with what you're licensing. Here's the schedule the city's fees page lists, as of January 2026:

Licence type	Annual fee (2026)
Primary residence	$280
Non-primary, 1 bedroom	$280
Non-primary, 2 bedrooms	$560
Non-primary, 3 bedrooms	$840
Non-primary, 4 bedrooms	$1,115
Non-primary, 5 bedrooms	$1,400
Non-primary, 6 bedrooms (maximum)	$1,680
Booking platform, 1-100 listings	$1,075
Booking platform, 101-500 listings	$2,700
Booking platform, 501+ listings	$4,310

That non-primary scale isn't arbitrary. Terry Cormier, the city's licensing coordinator, told Global News the city simply took the primary residence fee and multiplied it by the number of rooms, which is why every tier lands on a clean multiple of $280. Worth noting for anyone who read an older guide: the primary residence fee was $260 when licensing launched in 2024, so this has already gone up once, and the fees page says all these amounts are subject to annual inflationary increases going forward. Budget for that drift rather than assuming next year's renewal costs the same.

Required Documents for Winnipeg Short Term Rentals

Given what that fee buys you, it's worth getting the application right on the first pass rather than paying twice. The Operator's Guide lists exactly what has to accompany your application through the blo.winnipeg.ca portal:

• Two pieces of government-issued identification, at least one with a photo.
• A Winnipeg Police Service Vulnerable Sector Check, completed within the last six months. You can apply for this through the Winnipeg Police Service's online record checks system, though only Winnipeg residents over 18 can get a vulnerable sector check specifically; anyone under 18 or outside the city applies through their local agency for the more limited criminal record check instead.
• A completed Winnipeg Police Service Record Review Form, which the Records Review Board uses to approve every operator named on the licence.
• A letter of permission from the property owner, if you're a tenant applying to run a short-term rental rather than the owner.
• A letter of permission from the condo board, if the unit is a condominium.
• A floor plan or safety plan, and which one you need depends on what you're licensing. A primary residence needs a floor plan showing the layout with rented bedrooms and all fire exits clearly labelled. A non-primary residence needs a fuller safety plan: the layout with bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms marked, every emergency exit, and the location of every smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector, and fire extinguisher. Neither has to be professionally drafted or drawn to scale.

Do check your documents against those categories before you submit, since a floor plan missing a labelled fire exit or a permission letter that's unsigned is exactly the kind of thing that stalls an application at the inspection stage rather than the paperwork stage, costing you weeks rather than minutes.

Winnipeg Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your application clears all of that and you're able to start hosting, there's still tax to work through, and Winnipeg stacks three separate layers on top of a single booking. Two are federal and provincial, and one is the city's own, so it's worth taking each in turn rather than lumping them together.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
Federal Goods and Services Tax (GST)	5%	Canada Revenue Agency
Manitoba Retail Sales Tax (RST)	7%	Manitoba Finance
Winnipeg Accommodation Tax	6%	City of Winnipeg

The GST is the federal 5% that applies to most goods and services across Canada, administered by the CRA rather than the province. I couldn't load the CRA's own page on platform-based accommodation from where I did this research. So treat the exact registration mechanics, whether Airbnb or you personally register once your short-term rental revenue crosses $30,000, as something to confirm with the CRA or an accountant, not something this guide has verified firsthand.

Manitoba's RST sits at 7% and applies to lodging booked for under a month. Since December 2021, RST Bulletin 064 has required online accommodation platforms to register as vendors and collect and remit RST on the bookings they process, including any booking or cleaning fee bundled into the sale, so a listing sold entirely through a platform generally has that piece handled automatically. Stay a full month or more in one place, and the RST exemption for long-term lodging kicks in.

The Accommodation Tax is Winnipeg's own, set at 6% of the total booking price plus cleaning fees, raised from 5% when licensing took effect on April 1, 2024. Unlike RST, this one doesn't reliably arrive pre-collected.

The Operator's Guide is specific that tax collected through a platform's booking process is not automatically paid to the city. Vrbo is the exception, remitting directly to Winnipeg on your behalf. If your bookings come through Airbnb, though, you're the one filing and paying, quarterly, within 20 days of quarter end: April 20, July 20, October 20, and January 20. Miss that window and the penalty starts at 2.5% per month from the 21st day onward, and the city can revoke or refuse to renew your licence over unpaid tax on top of the fine.

One more layer belongs here even though it isn't collected per booking: property tax. Starting with the 2026 assessment roll, Manitoba is reclassifying short-term rental properties used for transient accommodation of 90 days or fewer a year. They move out of the Residential class, taxed at 45% of market value assessment, and into the "Other" class, taxed at 65%.

That's roughly a 44% jump in the taxable base for an affected property, before the mill rate even enters the math. It exempts only owner-occupied bed-and-breakfasts with four rooms or fewer. Inspections for this began in spring 2025, and it's showing up on rolls this year. Make sure you factor it into your numbers rather than budgeting off an old property tax bill.

Winnipeg-wide Short Term Rental Rules

That tax bill assumes you're actually running a compliant listing day to day, and Winnipeg attaches a fairly detailed operating rulebook to every licence. Bookings can't run past 29 consecutive nights; go to 30 or more and it's no longer a short-term rental under the bylaw at all. Occupancy caps at two adults per bedroom, with no separate limit on minors. If you're licensing a primary residence and you'll be off-site during the stay, the whole property can go for up to 150 nights a year; stay in residence yourself, and there's no annual cap at all, though you can only rent one fewer bedroom than the home actually has.

A handful of other obligations run across every licence type, and none of them are optional:

• Book only through a licensed platform. Private bookings, or bookings through any other advertising channel, are prohibited outright, and your licence number has to appear on every listing.
• Post your licence number and a 24/7 contact number near the exterior door if you're not in residence, and be genuinely reachable during every stay.
• Keep the fire safety kit current: working smoke alarms under Fire Prevention By-law No. 35/2017, carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers in the main living area, tested after every stay with a log kept, and replaced at least every 10 years.
• Post the required signage: an emergency exit plan inside the unit, and the city's human trafficking awareness poster.
• Keep records for three years: nights rented, whether the whole property or specific bedrooms went out, guest names, and the price charged, produced to the city on request.
• Tell the city within 10 days of any change to your application details, name, phone, email, or mailing address.

Inspectors can show up on weekdays, evenings, or weekends with reasonable notice, so it's worth keeping the place genuinely ready rather than treating the safety plan as a document you filed once and forgot.

Does Winnipeg strictly enforce STR rules?

Given how detailed that rulebook is, the obvious next question is whether the city actually checks it, and the honest answer is yes, at multiple points rather than just one. Enforcement starts before you're even licensed, since the Police Records Review Board and the on-site inspection both happen at the application stage, not after the fact. It continues afterward through the same unannounced-inspection power, and the city backs all of it with a specific, published penalty schedule rather than case-by-case discretion.

The Operator's Guide lays out fixed dollar penalties by offence, and they're not trivial:

• Operating without a licence: $1,000
• Failing to report an information change within 10 days: $500
• Exceeding 150 nights on an unattended primary residence: $1,000
• Failing to post name, licence number, and a monitored phone number: $500
• Renting to more than one party for the same period: $1,000
• No emergency exit plan posted: $1,000
• Continuing to operate after a licence expires, is suspended, or is revoked: $1,000
• Missing fire safety equipment, or missing carbon monoxide detectors and extinguishers: $1,000 each
• Listing outside a licensed platform, or advertising without a licence number: $1,000 each

Unpaid accommodation tax carries its own consequence on top of any fine: the city can revoke your licence or refuse to renew it, which is a heavier hit than a one-time penalty since it ends your ability to operate at all.

The city has also put real money behind checking up on all of this. Winnipeg accepted a $767,499 grant from the federal government's Short-Term Rental Enforcement Fund, running from June 2025 through March 2027, specifically to boost enforcement of the rules the city began licensing in 2024. That's federal money layered on top of city bylaw officers. It points toward enforcement getting more resourced through 2026 and 2027, not less.

I'll be straightforward about what I couldn't confirm here. Some outlets have reported specific compliance-rate figures and listing counts for Winnipeg, but I wasn't able to load those particular pages during this research pass, so I'm not repeating a number I couldn't verify myself. What's solidly documented is the direction: more inspection capacity, a real penalty schedule, and a licence that can be pulled outright.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Winnipeg

Assuming all of that still leaves you wanting to host, working through the steps in order matters, since the early ones determine whether the later ones are worth doing at all.

1. Confirm your ownership path first. Check whether you're licensing a primary residence or a non-primary one, and if it's non-primary, confirm you owned it on or before February 23, 2023. There's no route around that date.
2. Check zoning and rule out a secondary suite. An STR has to be a permitted use where your property sits, and a secondary suite doesn't qualify no matter what else checks out.
3. Line up permissions. Get a signed letter from your landlord if you're a tenant, or from the condo board if the unit is a condo.
4. Get your police paperwork done. Apply for a Vulnerable Sector Check and complete the Winnipeg Police Service Record Review Form for every operator on the application.
5. Build your floor plan or safety plan, and install the required smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors, and fire extinguishers before you apply, not after.
6. Apply through blo.winnipeg.ca and pay the fee, sized to your licence type and bedroom count.
7. Wait for the three approvals: the on-site inspection, the Planning, Property & Development zoning sign-off, and the Police Records Review Board decision. Your licence number arrives only once all three clear.
8. Post everything the bylaw requires: licence number and contact info at the exterior door, the emergency exit plan inside, and the human trafficking poster.
9. List only through a licensed booking platform, and put your licence number on the listing itself.
10. Set up your tax handling before your first guest: register for RST and GST as needed, and know whether your platform remits the Accommodation Tax for you or whether that's on you every quarter.
11. Diarize your renewal date. Licences run one year from the date of application, and nothing about that resets automatically.

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

Whichever step trips you up, a short list of offices covers nearly everything.

Licensing, applications, and general STR questions

Licensing & Bylaw Enforcement, the division that runs the whole short-term rental program, is the first call for anything about your application, your licence, or the rules attached to it.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 204-986-2234
• Address: Main Floor, 395 Main Street, Winnipeg, MB R3B 3N8
• Apply or renew: through the short-term rental portal at winnipeg.ca/shorttermrentals

Police record checks

The Winnipeg Police Service Records Compilation Unit handles the Vulnerable Sector Check and Record Review Form every operator needs.

• Phone: 204-986-6074
• Email: [email protected]
• Address: Winnipeg Police Service, Attn: Police Records, P.O. Box 1680, Winnipeg, MB R3C 2Z7
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., closed Wednesdays from noon
• Apply online: through the online record checks system

Provincial sales tax and property assessment

The RST and the GST both sit with different governments than the city, so a question about either belongs with Manitoba Finance rather than Licensing & Bylaw Enforcement.

• Manitoba Finance, Taxation Division: 204-945-5603, toll-free 1-800-782-0318, [email protected]
• Address: 101-401 York Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3C 0P8
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Property assessment classification questions, including the 2026 reclassification, go to the City of Winnipeg Assessment and Taxation Department at 510 Main Street, Winnipeg, MB R3B 1B9, reachable through 311.

General city inquiries

For anything that doesn't fit neatly into the above, 311 is the City of Winnipeg's general line, available at 311 within the city or 1-877-311-4974 from outside it.

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

Since enforcement is getting better funded, it's worth knowing how hosts on the ground are actually reacting to it. Here I want to be upfront about the limits of what I found. Winnipeg is a smaller market than the US metros this kind of guide usually covers. I wasn't able to locate a dedicated BiggerPockets thread on Winnipeg's rules that resolved to a page I could actually read, and Reddit sits outside what this research can responsibly cite, given the platform's own restrictions on commercial use of its data. So what follows is a read of the publicly documented reaction rather than a forum survey. Weigh it accordingly.

The clearest theme, echoed across the local legal commentary I did read, is that the February 23, 2023 ownership cutoff is the rule investors keep running into. Anyone who bought after that date with an Airbnb business plan in mind has no legal path to a non-primary licence, full stop, and that's a harder wall than a fee increase or a new tax layer. Condo owners face a related friction point: the condo board's letter of permission gives boards real veto power over whether a unit can be licensed at all, which puts the decision in the hands of neighbours rather than city hall.

On the operator side, the city's own posture reads as more collaborative than adversarial. Cormier's comments to Global News, that the department is "still open to having discussions with operators and our platforms" about future adjustments, suggest a program still being tuned rather than one locked in stone. That's consistent with the fee schedule already having moved once (from $260 to $280 on the primary tier) and the accommodation tax having moved once (from 5% to 6%), both since the 2024 launch. Assuming that pattern holds, don't be surprised if the numbers move again before your next renewal.

Whichever side of that February 2023 line you land on, run the actual numbers before you commit any capital. BNBCalc will show you what a specific Winnipeg address can realistically earn once you net out the licence fee, the three tax layers, and this year's property assessment change. The Winnipeg market page breaks that revenue picture down by neighbourhood, which is worth a look if you're still choosing between a primary residence you already own and a grandfathered non-primary property you're considering.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Winnipeg in 2026?

Yes, provided you hold a City of Winnipeg short-term rental licence. Anyone who is a Winnipeg resident can license their own primary residence with no ownership-date restriction. A non-primary property only qualifies if you owned it on or before February 23, 2023, and secondary suites are never eligible regardless of ownership date. Without a valid licence, operating a short-term rental is a bylaw violation carrying a $1,000 penalty, and the property can't legally take bookings at all.

How much does a Winnipeg short-term rental licence cost in 2026?

A primary residence licence costs $280 a year. Non-primary licences scale by bedroom count, from $280 for one bedroom up to $1,680 for six, the maximum allowed. Booking platforms themselves also pay a licence fee, tiered from $1,075 to $4,310 depending on how many Winnipeg listings they carry. These are the rates effective January 1, 2026, and the city has already raised them once since the 2024 launch, so budget for further increases at renewal.

Do you have to collect tax on a Winnipeg short-term rental?

Yes, three layers. The federal GST runs 5%, Manitoba's RST runs 7%, and Winnipeg's own Accommodation Tax runs 6% of the booking price plus cleaning fees. RST is generally collected by the platform on your behalf. Accommodation Tax often isn't: Vrbo remits it directly to the city, but if your bookings run through Airbnb, you're typically the one filing and paying it quarterly, within 20 days of each quarter's end.

Can you buy a property today and license it as a non-primary short-term rental in Winnipeg?

No. Winnipeg's bylaw only allows a non-primary short-term rental licence for a property owned on or before February 23, 2023, the date council approved the regulatory framework. A property bought after that date can only be licensed if it becomes your primary residence. There's no separate approval path, appeal, or fee that reopens that door for a newly purchased investment property.

What happens if you operate a short-term rental in Winnipeg without a licence?

The city can fine you $1,000 for operating unlicensed, and that's before any of the other penalties for related violations, like listing outside a licensed platform or advertising without a licence number, which each carry their own $1,000 fine. The city also has more capacity to catch this than it used to, having accepted a $767,499 federal grant specifically earmarked for short-term rental enforcement through March 2027.

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