Camden Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Camden, New Jersey, sitting in Camden County across the river from Philadelphia, and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that nothing in the city's code bans it. Camden never adopted a short-term rental ordinance, never capped listings, and never built anything resembling New York City's registration portal. You won't find the words "short-term rental" anywhere in its municipal code.

That's also the catch, though it's a different one than most cities hand you. Instead of a clear yes-or-no answer, you get dropped into a general rental and zoning framework that was written for landlords with year-long leases, long before Airbnb existed. Every rental unit in Camden has to carry a Certificate of Rental Approval and register annually with the Office of Rent Control, and the zoning code's own residential districts never once mention "hotel," "bed-and-breakfast," or anything resembling nightly stays. So the honest answer is that you're allowed to try this, but you're doing it inside rules built for someone else's business.

So let's walk through what that actually means in 2026: what counts as a legal listing here, what the paperwork and registration cost, the tax layers that stack on top, how hard the city checks compliance, and exactly who picks up the phone when you have a question. Every figure below comes from Camden's own municipal code or the City of Camden's official site, checked in July 2026, and I've flagged the couple of spots where the city's own records don't give a clean answer. If you're sizing up a Camden property against markets with clearer short-term rental rules, run the numbers through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Camden

That gap between "allowed" and "clearly regulated" is where most of the real decisions in Camden get made. There's no zoning use called "short-term rental," so the question becomes which existing category your listing falls into, and the answer changes what you owe the city.

Camden's R-2 Residential Zone, which covers most of the rowhouse, duplex, and townhouse stock across the city, permits single-family, semidetached, duplex, and townhouse dwellings outright, and its list of conditional uses runs to just seven items: houses of worship, certain community residences, family day care, satellite dishes, public utilities, a cemetery, and home occupations. Bed-and-breakfast and hotel uses appear in neither list, and the zone's prohibited-use clause bans "lodging houses, boardinghouses, rooming houses, multifamily dwellings or any combination thereof" outright. If you're simply renting out your whole house to one group of guests at a time, the city seems to treat that as ordinary residential use of a dwelling it already permits, since nothing in the code ties a dwelling's zoning status to how many nights a guest stays.

Run it as something closer to an actual lodging business, though, room by room with a shared common area, and you're in different territory. Camden's zoning code defines a bed-and-breakfast establishment at §870-205 as a conditional use requiring Planning Board site plan approval. The standard is specific: the owner has to occupy and manage the property, guest rooms can't have separate kitchens, and nonresident staff is capped at two. Camden spells the limit out in plain words too: "the maximum stay for a guest shall not exceed 14 consecutive nights." That's about as close as Camden's code gets to a short-term-rental definition, and it only applies where a zone lists it as a conditional use in the first place, which R-2 does not. Make sure you talk to the Division of Planning before you assume your listing sits outside that box, because the line between "renting my house" and "running a lodging establishment" is exactly the kind of thing a code enforcement officer gets to interpret.

For anyone weighing Camden against a neighboring town with a cleaner answer, the Camden County guide walks through how the surrounding suburbs handle the same question, and it's worth reading before you commit to a specific block.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Camden

Since Camden never built a short-term-rental-specific permit, what you actually need is the same paperwork every landlord in the city needs. Two separate requirements stack on top of each other, and missing either one is a real problem.

The first is a Certificate of Occupancy, required for the life of the building under a city policy effective February 1, 2012. If your property has never had one, selling, rehabbing, or newly renting it triggers an inspection through the Department of Code Enforcement's Building Bureau, and it's a one-time hurdle rather than something you renew.

The second is the Certificate of Rental Approval, and this one recurs. Under §620-37 of the Property Maintenance code, rental properties get inspected "at the change of ownership and/or occupancy," meaning a new rental relationship, including your first short-term booking, is exactly the kind of event that's supposed to trigger it. On top of that, §650-26 of the Rent Control ordinance requires every owner or landlord to register all rental dwelling units with the Office of Rent Control annually, and the fee is plainly stated: $50 per dwelling unit, due every year by January 31. Camden's definition of "rental dwelling" is genuinely broad here, covering "[a]ny building, structure...rented or offered for rent," owner-occupied one- to four-family dwellings, and even "any motel or hotel space," with no minimum stay length written into the definition anywhere.

I couldn't confirm the exact inspection fee for the Certificate of Rental Approval itself from an official page, since the section that sets it (§620-22, "Rental fees") wasn't reachable through the city's code site when I checked. Buildings with three or more units need a separate license under §620-23, which does have its own renewal cycle. Confirm both figures directly with the Housing Bureau before you budget, because $50 a year is the one number the code states plainly, and it's worth not assuming the rest.

Required Documents for Camden Short-Term Rentals

Since neither office publishes a clean fee schedule online, it's worth knowing exactly what to bring so a single trip to City Hall actually gets you somewhere. Camden's own rental certificate policy and housing page lay out the checklist:

• Current property taxes. The Housing Bureau checks this against the Tax Office (Room 117) before it will move your application forward.
• Utilities on at the time of inspection. An inspector can't verify heat, water, or electrical systems that are shut off.
• Inspection fees paid in full at scheduling, not after the fact.
• A correctly completed rental certification application, including an active phone or cell number and your real, permanent home address rather than the rental property's address. The city calls out incomplete applications specifically as a cause for denial or delay.
• Registration with the Office of Rent Control (Room 101) and with the Municipal Clerk's Office (Room 105), both required before a rental certificate is released.
• A site plan, if you're pursuing the bed-and-breakfast route, since that use goes through Planning Board review rather than a routine inspection.

Once the Certificate of Occupancy and Certificate of Rental Approval are both finally on file, the Housing Bureau releases your rental certificate out of Room 101. Keep a copy of everything you submit, since the city's registration data feeds directly into whether an inspector treats a future visit as routine or as a compliance check.

Camden Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you clear that paperwork and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to work out, and it comes from two different governments that don't always talk to each other. New Jersey taxes a "transient accommodation," which is a stay booked through a platform like Airbnb or Vrbo or offered by someone who manages two or more units, at the state level, and Camden has its own separate hotel tax that predates the Airbnb era entirely.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
State Sales Tax	6.625%	Airbnb/Vrbo automatically, or the host if booked directly
State Occupancy Fee	5%	Airbnb/Vrbo automatically, or the host if booked directly
Camden Hotel and Motel Occupancy Tax	3%	City of Camden, applicability to private-home STRs unconfirmed

The state layer is the one you can count on. Per the NJ Division of Taxation's Technical Bulletin TB-81R2, a stay booked through a marketplace like Airbnb or Vrbo owes 6.625% Sales Tax plus a 5% State Occupancy Fee, a combined 11.625%, and the platform collects and remits both automatically for stays of 89 nights or fewer. A direct booking from an owner with fewer than three total New Jersey units, arranged outside any marketplace, isn't taxed at all under this framework. Stays of 90 consecutive nights or longer are exempt too, along with a handful of narrower carve-outs like rentals executed entirely through a licensed real estate broker.

Camden's own local charge is murkier, and it's worth being straight about that rather than guessing. The city has run a 3% Hotel and Motel Occupancy Tax since December 1, 2020, confirmed on the state's own current municipal tax list. That older authority was written for licensed hotels and motels under Chapter 512 of the city code, though, not for private homes rented out on a platform. TB-81R2 draws that same line at the state level, explicitly excluding "hotel or hotel room" from its definition of "transient accommodation." Camden also hasn't adopted the newer, STR-specific Municipal Occupancy Tax that plenty of other New Jersey towns layer on top of Airbnb stays, so there's no second local tax stacking on here the way there might be elsewhere. Whether Camden's Tax Collector currently treats a private-home listing as subject to the 3% hotel tax is something I couldn't pin down from an official page, so watch out for that gap and confirm it with Revenue Collections before you set your pricing, rather than assuming either way.

If your unit qualifies as a "professionally managed unit" and isn't fully covered by a marketplace's automatic collection, you'll also need to register with the state through Form NJ-REG at least 15 business days before you start renting. The New Jersey statewide guide covers that registration path and the rest of the state's tax mechanics in more depth than fits here.

New Jersey Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Zoom out from Camden's own numbers, and a lot of what feels confusing at the city level turns out to be New Jersey handing the whole question down to its 564 municipalities on purpose. The state doesn't broadly preempt local short-term rental regulation, and its Division of Local Government Services says so directly: "rental of short-term transient accommodations is largely subject to municipal ordinance," per DLGS Local Finance Notice 2026-09, issued April 7, 2026. New Jersey does have an enabling statute, N.J.S.A. 40:52-1(n), that lets a town license short-term rentals under 175 days, but it's optional, and Camden runs its rental rules through its own housing and rent control ordinances rather than through that specific statute.

There's also no statewide short-term rental license or registry the way some states run. What exists is tax registration: a professionally managed unit needs Form NJ-REG, and the underlying tax framework traces back to P.L. 2018, c.49, amended by P.L. 2019, c.235 to narrow the tax to marketplace-booked or professionally-managed stays only. Everything else, licensing, occupancy caps, parking, insurance, zoning, is set town by town. That's why a neighboring suburb like the ones covered in the Bergen County guide can look completely different from Camden even though both sit under the same state law.

Does Camden Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how much of Camden's framework runs on self-registration, the honest answer is that enforcement here looks more like a patchy safety net than a determined crackdown. The city has no short-term-rental task force and no platform-level verification like New York City's registration portal. What it has is the same inspection-triggered system that applies to every rental in Camden, which means a listing mostly comes to the city's attention when you apply for your own Certificate of Rental Approval, when ownership changes, or when a complaint gets filed.

That system does have teeth when it activates. Back in 2016, the city partnered with Camden County and hired more than a dozen part-time inspectors to run neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweeps, and the numbers at the time were stark: roughly 4,000 landlords hadn't registered their units, against only about 2,000 who had. Then-Mayor Dana Redd described a graduated approach, a real chance to come into compliance before penalties, then municipal court for anyone who ignored it. I couldn't find anything current confirming a repeat sweep in 2025 or 2026, so treat that as historical evidence of a chronic compliance gap rather than an active operation, though it does tell you something about how seriously the underlying registration requirement gets taken when the city decides to look.

Violations under the Rent Control ordinance fall back on the code's general penalty section, and each affected unit counts as a separate violation. I wasn't able to confirm the exact dollar figure for that general penalty from an official page I could open, so I'm not going to hand you a number I haven't verified. What I can tell you plainly: registering costs $50 a year, staying unregistered risks a court date, and the gap between those two outcomes has historically been where a lot of Camden landlords have landed.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Camden

All of that rests on paperwork rather than a single approval, so working through it in order saves you from spending money before you know your property actually qualifies.

1. Decide what kind of listing you're actually running. A whole-home rental to one group at a time looks like ordinary residential use under Camden's zoning. A room-by-room operation with paying guests coming and going looks like a bed-and-breakfast, which needs Planning Board approval and caps stays at 14 nights.
2. Call the Division of Planning before you commit. Confirm your address's zone and whether your plan needs conditional-use approval, especially if you're in R-1 or R-2.
3. Get a Certificate of Occupancy if the property doesn't already have one. This runs through the Building Bureau in Room 403 and is a one-time step for the life of the building.
4. Schedule your Certificate of Rental Approval inspection. Have utilities on, taxes current, and the inspection fee ready at scheduling.
5. Register with the Office of Rent Control (Room 101) and the Municipal Clerk's Office (Room 105). The Rent Control fee is $50 per unit, renewed every January 31.
6. Set up your tax collection. Confirm whether your booking platform handles the 6.625% Sales Tax and 5% State Occupancy Fee automatically, and register for Form NJ-REG if it doesn't.
7. Call Revenue Collections about the local hotel tax. Confirm directly whether Camden's 3% Hotel and Motel Occupancy Tax applies to your specific listing before you set your nightly rate.
8. Run the property through BNBCalc before you sign anything, so the numbers reflect Camden's actual tax stack rather than a generic estimate.

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

Whichever step trips you up, five offices between the city and the state cover almost every question a Camden host runs into.

Zoning and use questions

The Division of Planning staffs the Planning Board and Zoning Board of Adjustment and is the right first call if you're unsure whether your property's zone allows what you're planning.

• Address: 520 Market Street, City Hall, Room 224, Camden, NJ 08102
• Phone: 856-757-7000

Rental registration and certificates

The Housing Bureau, inside the Department of Code Enforcement, handles Certificate of Rental Approval applications and Rent Control registration.

• Address: 520 Market Street, City Hall, Room 101, Camden, NJ 08102
• Phone: 856-757-7000
• Rental application questions: 856-757-7345 or 856-757-7032

Certificate of Occupancy

The Building Bureau handles Certificate of Occupancy inspections for properties that don't already have one on file.

• Address: 520 Market Street, City Hall, Room 403, Camden, NJ 08102

City taxes and property tax status

Revenue Collections (the Tax Collector's office) confirms whether your property taxes are current, which is required before a rental certificate is released, and is the right office to ask about the local Hotel and Motel Occupancy Tax.

• Address: 520 Market Street, City Hall, Room 117, Camden, NJ 08102
• Phone: 856-757-7000

State sales tax and NJ-REG registration

The New Jersey Division of Taxation handles Sales Tax, the State Occupancy Fee, and NJ-REG business registration for professionally managed units.

• Phone: 609-292-6400, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on business days
• Register: through Form NJ-REG with the Division of Revenue and Enterprise Services

Before you call any of them, it's worth knowing whether Camden is even the right bet compared to the rest of the state. The New Jersey market data breaks down occupancy and revenue by area, so you can see where the numbers actually work before you spend a morning at City Hall.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Camden, New Jersey, in 2026?

Yes, with real caveats. Camden has no citywide ban and no dedicated short-term rental ordinance. Instead, hosts fall under the city's general rental rules: a Certificate of Occupancy, a Certificate of Rental Approval tied to inspections, and annual $50 registration with the Office of Rent Control. The zoning code never defines "short-term rental" specifically, so a whole-home rental appears to fall under ordinary residential use, while a room-by-room operation may need Planning Board approval as a bed-and-breakfast.

Does Camden require a short-term rental permit or license?

Not a dedicated one. Camden has no Airbnb-specific permit like New York City's registration portal. What it requires is the same paperwork every rental property in the city needs: a Certificate of Occupancy, a Certificate of Rental Approval issued after inspection, and annual registration with the Office of Rent Control at $50 per dwelling unit, due every January 31.

How much does it cost to register a rental property in Camden?

The confirmed figure is $50 per dwelling unit per year for Rent Control registration, renewed every January 31. The separate inspection fee for the Certificate of Rental Approval wasn't published on a page this guide could verify, so confirm that amount directly with the Housing Bureau at 856-757-7000 before budgeting for your first listing.

Do you have to collect tax on a Camden Airbnb?

Generally yes. A stay booked through Airbnb or Vrbo owes New Jersey's 6.625% Sales Tax and 5% State Occupancy Fee, a combined 11.625%, which the platform collects and remits automatically for most bookings. Camden also runs its own 3% Hotel and Motel Occupancy Tax, though it's unclear from official sources whether that applies to private-home short-term rentals rather than only licensed hotels and motels, so confirm that piece with Revenue Collections.

Does Camden's zoning code allow short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods?

It doesn't address them directly. The R-2 Residential Zone, which covers most of the city's rowhouses and duplexes, permits single-family and multi-unit dwellings without regard to lease length, but explicitly bans lodging houses, boardinghouses, and rooming houses. A whole-home rental appears to fall under the permitted category, while a room-by-room lodging operation could trigger the bed-and-breakfast conditional-use standard, which isn't available in R-2 at all. Confirm with the Division of Planning before you list.

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