Pawcatuck, Connecticut Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Pawcatuck, Connecticut and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that nobody at town hall is going to ask you for a short-term rental permit, because there isn't one to ask for. Pawcatuck is a village inside the Town of Stonington, in New London County, and Stonington's own Department of Planning & Land Use says in writing that the town does not currently regulate short-term rentals.

Being unregulated isn't the same as being welcomed, mind you. Stonington voters killed a proposed short-term rental ordinance at referendum in March 2023 and nothing has replaced it since, so you're operating in a gap rather than under a rulebook, and a gap can close. Connecticut handed towns explicit authority to license short-term rentals on October 1, 2024, and Stonington happens to be halfway through rewriting zoning regulations it hasn't overhauled since 1979.

So let's walk through what that actually means for a Pawcatuck host in 2026: which government makes the rules here, what the zoning regulations do and don't say, the one permit that exists and probably isn't the one you want, the 15% the state takes off every stay, and who to call before you buy. Every figure below comes from the Town of Stonington's, Connecticut's or the federal government's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where two sources contradict each other I've said which one I'm following and why. Before you commit to anything on the strength of one good summer weekend in Westerly, run the property through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Pawcatuck

Since every rule that reaches you comes from one town hall, the first thing to get straight is which town hall that even is. Pawcatuck has no government of its own, because it's a village and census-designated place inside the Town of Stonington. So the people who regulate you are the Board of Selectmen, the Planning and Zoning Commission and the Zoning Enforcement Officer, all of them at 152 Elm Street.

Three names trip owners up here, and mixing them up costs you a wasted phone call at best:

• The Town of Stonington governs Pawcatuck, and this guide is about that town.
• The Borough of Stonington is a separately incorporated borough around Stonington Point, about five road miles away, and its ordinances don't reach Pawcatuck.
• North Stonington is a different town entirely, with its own code on Municode.

Once that's settled, the town's published position still turns out to be refreshingly short. The Planning & Land Use flyer says Stonington "does not currently regulate" short-term rentals, and that "all properties within the Town of Stonington are held to the Zoning Regulations and Town Ordinances." So a violation at a short-term rental gets handled exactly the way it would at any other house on the street.

The zoning regulations back that up by omission, which is worth seeing for yourself. Stonington's Zoning Regulations, 29th Edition, effective March 4, 2026, run to roughly 100,000 words, and the phrase "short-term rental" appears in them exactly zero times.

Not once, anywhere in the whole document, in any spelling or casing.

There's one clause worth understanding before you relax completely, though. Section 4.2 says the uses listed for each district "shall be the only uses permitted or allowed," then goes further and calls all other uses "hereby prohibited," adding that they "shall not be permitted by variance."

Stonington runs a permissive list, in other words, and in some Connecticut towns that structure has been read to mean an unlisted use is a banned one.

Still, the town's own flyer settles the question in practice by treating a rented house as a house, and yet that sentence is sitting right there in the code, and it's the sentence a future zoning enforcement officer would start from.

Downtown Pawcatuck has its own zone, and it's the one corner of town where paid lodging is expressly contemplated. Pawcatuck Village (PV-5) is Stonington's commercial base district for the village center, where a hotel is allowed by special use permit and hotel unit density runs at 1,000 square feet of prorated lot area per unit against 1,500 elsewhere in town.

Parking downtown is looser too, since the Downtown Pawcatuck Parking Overlay District exists to relieve properties of standards the village's historic mixed-use blocks can't meet, and residential parking inside it runs at one space per home rather than the two a two-bedroom would need elsewhere in Stonington.

Keep in mind that all of this is being rewritten while you read it. The zoning rewrite is the town's own multi-year project, Phase One wrapped in November 2023, and Phase Two is the substantive one, bringing new districts, new use rules and a new zoning map. A town that's already reopened its use table is a town that could add a short-term rental use to it without anybody needing a fresh idea.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Pawcatuck

That flyer is the whole licensing story, and the story is that there isn't a licence: no permit, no registration, no annual fee, no number to display in your listing, no cap on nights and no owner-occupancy rule. I went through the town's full index of Special Acts and Local Ordinances as well, and the alphabetical run goes straight from the Shellfish Commission past Sidewalks and Solar Energy to Solid Waste with nothing about rentals in between.

Now, here's where a Pawcatuck host gets badly misled, and it isn't by a blog. The Connecticut General Assembly's own Office of Legislative Research published report 2024-R-0044 on February 15, 2024, naming Stonington as one of 12 Connecticut towns that expressly regulate short-term rentals, and it goes further than a passing mention.

The report calls Stonington "the only town we identified that requires property owners to annually register with the town through a platform," then describes a permit, a registration number that must appear in every listing, a primary-residence limit and a $250 fine. None of that is law in Stonington, because what the report describes is the ordinance voters rejected.

The regional planning agency got it right, though. When the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments surveyed every municipality in the region, its October 2024 report gave the Town of Stonington exactly one line. That line settles it, because the answer under "does your municipality regulate STRs" is no, with the explanation "Town Ordinance defeated 3/23."

So be aware that a state agency's own report is stale on this point, and that plenty of secondary guides have copied it forward without checking. The town's flyer is newer, it's first-party, and it's the one to trust.

When two governments disagree about your town, believe the one that runs it.

The defeated draft still repays a glance, because it's the closest thing anyone has to a blueprint for whatever Stonington eventually adopts. As OLR described it, the town would've required six things: annual registration through a platform the town specified, a permit issued only after that registration, proof of residency, a phone number for someone who responds to complaints within 60 minutes, a sworn statement about working smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and the registration number in every advertisement.

I couldn't open the draft ordinance itself, since the town retired the old website that hosted it, so do treat that list as OLR's summary rather than as the text.

One permit genuinely does exist, and most hosts won't want it once they read the conditions. A bed and breakfast facility is a defined use in Stonington zoning, and the definition is narrow: "an owner-occupied private residence in which lodging and breakfast are provided for not more than eight transient paying guests," using no more than four rooms at a time. It's allowed by special use permit in most residential districts, including GBR-130, RC-120, RR-80, RA-40, RM-20, RM-15 and RH-10, and it's prohibited outright in RA-20 and RA-15.

Section 5.3.5 then attaches conditions that quietly rule out most modern housing stock:

• A special use permit application with a site plan, plus written certification from the Town Sanitarian that the water supply and sewage disposal systems can carry the use.
• Written certification from the Fire Marshal and the Building Inspector on state building and fire code compliance.
• Two off-street parking spaces for the owner, plus one for each guest room, shielded from neighboring properties and the street.
• Five guest rooms maximum, or 50% of the building's gross floor area, whichever is less, with each guest room at least 120 square feet excluding the bathroom.
• The facility has to be the owner's principal residence, and the building "shall have been built prior to 1940."
• Renewal by the Planning and Zoning Commission every three years, revocable at any time for non-compliance.
• Breakfast as the only meal, served only to overnight lodgers, and a maximum term of two consecutive weeks for the same guests.

Read that pre-1940 clause twice if you were eyeing new construction. And notice what condition N does to the business model, because a two-week cap makes a bed and breakfast permit a worse instrument for nightly rentals than holding no permit at all, which is the strange arithmetic you get in an unregulated market.

No permit really is the better permit here, at least for now.

Required Documents for Pawcatuck Short-Term Rentals

Since there's no application to file, "required documents" here means the paperwork nobody hands you and you still need. Nothing on this list goes to the Planning Department, yet every item is either a legal obligation owed somewhere else or the thing that saves you when a complaint lands.

• Your Connecticut room occupancy tax registration. Any operator charging for occupancy of 30 days or less has to register with the Department of Revenue Services, and as of July 2026 the registration fee is $100 unless you already hold a sales and use tax permit. Booking exclusively through a platform that collects for you changes what you file, not whether the tax exists.
• Proof you're allowed to do this at all. Your deed, your lease if you rent, and your condominium declaration or homeowners association rules. Stonington won't enforce a private covenant on your behalf, and it won't rescue you from one either.
• Short-term rental insurance, in writing. The town requires none, so nobody's going to check. A standard homeowners policy generally treats paying guests as a commercial exposure, though, so read yours before your first booking rather than after your first claim.
• Building permits for anything you converted. Stonington stopped accepting paper permits on May 3, 2021, and everything now runs through the Building Official's online portal. Finishing a basement bedroom or adding a bathroom needs a permit, and an unpermitted bedroom is exactly what surfaces when somebody complains.
• Septic and well capacity, wherever you're not on town sewer. Adding sleeping capacity to a house on a septic system is a Ledge Light Health District question first and a decorating question second.
• Working smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, documented. This one carries no local paperwork in Stonington today, yet it's the first thing any future ordinance will ask you to swear to, and it's the cheapest liability you'll ever retire.
• Yellow trash bags. Stonington runs a pay-as-you-throw collection program and the town is blunt about it: "All trash must be placed in these yellow bags or it will not be accepted." Guests won't know that, so leave a supply and say so in your house manual.

Assuming you're going the bed and breakfast route instead, the document pack gets much heavier, since the special use permit needs the site plan, the sanitarian's certification, the fire marshal's and building inspector's certifications, and a parking layout the Commission is willing to approve.

Pawcatuck Short-Term Rental Taxes

That $100 registration is the only fee in this guide a Pawcatuck host will definitely pay, so the tax side deserves more of your attention than the licensing side ever will. Connecticut takes its lodging revenue at the state level and leaves nothing for the town, which at least makes the stack unusually simple to follow.

Four lines in that table, and only two of them will ever apply to you.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Room occupancy tax, short-term home rental	15%	Connecticut Department of Revenue Services, or your platform
Room occupancy tax, bed and breakfast establishment	11%	Connecticut Department of Revenue Services
Municipal lodging tax	none	no Connecticut town can levy one
Real estate property tax	town mill rate, applied to 70% of market value	Stonington Tax Collector

Room Occupancy Tax

Connecticut's room occupancy tax is the big one, and the Department of Revenue Services states the rates plainly on its room occupancy tax page: 15% for "hotels, motels, lodging houses, and short-term home rentals," and 11% for bed and breakfast establishments. It applies to occupancy of 30 consecutive calendar days or less, and DRS is explicit that "beginning on the 31st consecutive day of occupancy by the same person, the tax no longer applies."

Those rates live in Connecticut General Statutes § 12-408(1)(B), which imposes them in place of the ordinary sales tax. The reason a rented house falls inside them at all sits one section earlier, since § 12-407(17) defines a "lodging house" broadly enough to swallow a furnished residence.

Filing runs monthly whether or not you had a booking, on Form OP-210, submitted electronically through myconneCT and due on or before the last day of the month following the period. Remember that a zero-revenue February still wants a return.

Miss one and the penalty arrives for the filing, not for the revenue.

Most Pawcatuck hosts will never touch that form, though, because the platform handles it. Under Connecticut General Statutes § 12-408h, a short-term rental facilitator with at least $250,000 in Connecticut bookings across the trailing twelve months becomes the retailer of record and collects the tax itself.

Airbnb says so on its own books. Its Connecticut tax page confirms it charges "15% (11% for bed and breakfast establishments) of the listing price including any cleaning fee for the first 30 nights of any reservation," while a reservation over 90 nights isn't taxed at all.

The gap to watch is direct booking. Take a reservation over the phone, through your own website, or on a channel that doesn't collect, and the 15% becomes yours to register for, charge and pay over to the state. Make sure you know which of your channels is doing which before you advertise a direct rate, because guests will not accept a surprise 15% at check-in.

Sales Tax

There isn't a second sales tax stacked on top of that, which catches out people who've hosted in other states. Connecticut's 15% room occupancy tax is levied in lieu of the general 6.35% sales tax on the rent rather than alongside it, and that's exactly why § 12-408(1)(B) reads the way it does.

Separate goods and services you sell are a different matter, so bike rentals, guided tours or anything else billed apart from the room are ordinary retail sales and follow ordinary sales tax rules. Keep them on separate lines in your books and the question answers itself at filing time.

No Connecticut municipality can add a local lodging tax to any of it, either. A 2026 bill would've let towns adopt a supplemental tax of up to 2.75%, though it never reached a floor vote, and I come back to that bill further down.

Income Tax

With the state lodging tax handled, the federal side still runs on the same rules as any other rental, and there's one threshold worth knowing by heart. IRS Topic no. 415 treats a dwelling as your residence once your personal use exceeds the greater of 14 days or 10% of the days you rent it at a fair rental price, which matters enormously for a coastal house you also use yourself.

The Topic is blunt about very light use, too. Rent a home you use as a residence for fewer than 15 days in the year and you "don't report any of the rental income and don't deduct any expenses as rental expenses," which is how a handful of regatta weekends can sit outside the system entirely.

Once you go above that line, though, net rental income is ordinary income on your federal return and on your Connecticut return, and the Department of Revenue Services individual pages carry the filing detail. So nothing about Stonington's silence on short-term rentals changes any of it.

Remember, no local rule means no local paperwork, and it never meant no tax.

Property tax, though, is the local piece that does move with your decision. Stonington assesses real estate at 70% of market value and applies the mill rate to that figure, and parts of the town sit inside fire districts that levy their own additional mills on top. Do check the specific parcel with the Tax Collector rather than assuming a town-wide number, since two houses a mile apart in Pawcatuck can carry meaningfully different bills.

Possible Deductions and Write-Offs

Once the income is reportable, the deductions follow the standard rental pattern, and the IRS points you to Publication 527 for the mechanics. Mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, utilities, cleaning, supplies, platform fees, repairs and depreciation all belong on the list, and none of that is Connecticut-specific.

Apportionment is where hosts quietly lose money. Use the property personally as well and you have to allocate expenses between rental and personal days, while Topic no. 415 caps your rental deductions at the gross rental income limitation, so a heavy personal-use summer can strand costs you'd already counted on writing off.

Two Stonington-specific items are easy to forget. Your yellow pay-as-you-throw bags are a genuine operating expense, and so is whatever the Building Official's portal charged you for a permit on work you did for the rental. They're small amounts, granted, though they're real and they're documented, which is more than most people can say for half their receipts.

Connecticut Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Tax is where the state shows up in your bank account, whereas regulation is where it shows up in your future, since almost everything Stonington might do next was authorised by a single 2024 statute.

Before October 2024 it wasn't even settled that a Connecticut town could license short-term rentals at all, which is part of why so few of them tried. Public Act 24-143 fixed that. It landed in the statute book as Connecticut General Statutes § 7-148qq, effective October 1, 2024. A municipality can now vote to "adopt an ordinance requiring the licensure of short-term rental properties in such municipality and regulating the operation and use of such properties." It even lets the town hire consultants to help draft the thing.

Note what the statute doesn't do, because that cuts both ways. It sets no ceiling, so no state law caps how far Stonington could go, and it creates no state-level permission that would let you override a town that says no.

There's still no statewide registry, either. House Bill 5536 would've built one at the Department of Revenue Services, with annual per-property registration at $100 and that optional municipal supplemental tax of up to 2.75%. It cleared the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee 36 to 18 on March 30, 2026, was tabled for the House calendar on April 16, and then died without a floor vote when the session adjourned on May 6, 2026.

My guess is that it comes back in 2027 in some form, but a bill that stalls on the calendar isn't something to plan a purchase around.

Regionally, Stonington's silence is closer to normal than you'd expect. Across the 22 southeastern Connecticut municipalities the Council of Governments surveyed, only Bozrah regulated short-term rentals by ordinance, with Lisbon and Preston doing it through zoning, while Ledyard's Planning and Zoning Commission actually rescinded its short-term rental regulations in September 2023.

For the wider picture, our Connecticut statewide guide maps how the state framework fits together, the Norwich guide covers the largest city in New London County if you're comparing inland options, and the Branford guide is the closest shoreline comparison in a town that did write rules.

Does Pawcatuck Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

There are no short-term rental rules in Pawcatuck to enforce strictly, so the honest answer is that enforcement here is generic rather than targeted. Nobody audits your listing, and everything that does reach you arrives because a neighbor picked up the phone.

So the complaint is the enforcement mechanism here, and your neighbours are the inspectors.

Three instruments do the work, and each one has a real number attached to it, starting with zoning. The town's ordinance on zoning violation citations, adopted under Connecticut General Statutes § 8-12a, lets the Zoning Enforcement Officer cite any violation of the zoning regulations, and it sets the price: "the fine for each citation shall be $150 (one hundred and fifty dollars), payable to the Town of Stonington."

Then the clock starts. You get 30 calendar days to make an uncontested payment, and 10 days from the date of the follow-up notice to deliver a written demand for a hearing, which then gets held between 15 and 30 days after that notice went out.

Noise is the instrument that actually bites a rental, though. Stonington's nuisances ordinance, adopted April 14, 1997 and effective since May 3, 1997, makes it unlawful to generate "unreasonably loud, disturbing, or unnecessary activity or noise" before 6 a.m. or after 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and before 8 a.m. or after 10 p.m. on Sunday.

The Department of Police Services enforces it, the fine tops out at $100, and "each day on which a violation occurs or continues after the time for correction of the violation given in any order has elapsed shall be considered a separate violation."

A hundred dollars isn't a large number on its own. Then again, a documented pattern of police responses at one address is exactly the evidence that gets read aloud at the public hearing when a town debates an ordinance, so the real cost of a rowdy guest isn't the citation.

Health is the third instrument, and it's narrower than people assume. Ledge Light Health District licenses and inspects "hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts and other lodging establishments" annually and on complaint, which means a private-home short-term rental sits outside its licensing regime altogether. Overload a septic system with twelve guests in a three-bedroom house, however, and Ledge Light becomes very much your problem.

The risk that deserves your attention here isn't a fine at all. It's the calendar. Stonington already tried once to regulate short-term rentals, and it now has express state authority to try again. On top of that, it's mid-rewrite on a use table nobody has fully updated since 1979, and its 2026-2036 Plan of Conservation and Development reached its public hearing on August 18, 2026, with the Planning and Zoning Commission already working through proposed amendments.

So underwrite the property on the assumption that a permit, a night cap or an owner-occupancy rule could land inside your hold period.

Anything gentler than that is a bonus, not a base case.

One more honest wrinkle before you price it. When the Council of Governments ran its regional survey in spring 2023, the Town of Stonington answered "no" to whether it allows short-term rentals at all, even while answering "no" to regulating them, whereas the town's current published flyer takes the friendlier position of treating a rented house like any other house. Both answers came out of the same town hall, which tells you roughly how settled the question is locally.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Pawcatuck

Given that nobody's going to hand you a checklist here, the order below is still the one that keeps you from spending money on a plan the site can't support. The early steps are cheap and the late ones aren't, which is the whole reason to run them in sequence.

1. Confirm the parcel sits in the Town of Stonington rather than the Borough. A Pawcatuck address almost always does, though one call to 860-535-5095 makes it certain, and borough rules are a genuinely different set.
2. Pull the zoning district and check it against the use table. Ask the Planning Department which district your parcel sits in, and whether anything about the property is already a non-conforming use, because a property that's non-conforming for an unrelated reason is a property with an open file.
3. Read your deed, condominium declaration or association rules. Private covenants are the most common thing that stops a Pawcatuck short-term rental, and the town has nothing to do with enforcing them either way.
4. Check the sleeping capacity the house legally has. Bedroom count on the listing should match bedroom count on the permit record and on the septic design, and the Building Official's portal is where that history lives.
5. Sort insurance before the first booking. Tell your carrier you're taking paying guests, and get the answer in writing, since it costs nothing and it removes the single largest uninsured exposure in the plan.
6. Register with the Department of Revenue Services, or confirm your platform collects. The $100 registration is waived where you already hold a sales and use tax permit, and Form OP-210 is monthly once you're registered.
7. Set trash, parking and quiet hours as house rules on day one. Yellow bags, one space per home downtown, and a hard 10 p.m. noise line. Those three are what neighbours complain about, and complaints are the entire enforcement mechanism here.
8. Put the meeting dates in your calendar. The Planning and Zoning Commission meets the first and third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m., and while an ordinance never arrives without notice, it does move quickly once it starts moving.

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

Those meeting dates all run out of one building, and so does almost everything else on the list above. Town Hall at 152 Elm Street handles zoning, building, taxes and the Selectmen's office between them, with the health district a couple of streets away.

Zoning, land use and anything about the regulations

The Town of Stonington Department of Planning & Land Use answers zoning district questions, special use permits, certificates of zoning compliance and enforcement.

• Address: 152 Elm Street, Stonington, CT 06378
• Phone: 860-535-5095, fax 860-535-1023
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
• Staff: Paul Dickson, Director of Land Use; Candace Palmer, Zoning and Inland Wetland Enforcement Officer; Adrianna Bancroft-Jones, Planning and Zoning Specialist; Ashley Myers, Administrative Assistant
• Meetings: Planning and Zoning Commission, first and third Tuesday at 7:00 p.m.; Zoning Board of Appeals, second Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. (department page)

Building, fire and health

Christopher Tehan is the Building Official, reachable at 860-535-5075 on the third floor of 152 Elm Street, and every permit application goes through the town's online portal rather than on paper. For septic, wells and anything about lodging capacity, the town contracts with Ledge Light Health District, where Wendy Ireland is the Environmental Technician assigned to Stonington at 860-910-0440. The district office is 860-448-4882, and the local office at 216 Broad Street, Stonington, CT 06378 is open Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Ordinances, taxes and the political side

Ordinances in Stonington are adopted by town meeting and referendum rather than by the Planning and Zoning Commission, so anything about a future short-term rental ordinance belongs with the First Selectman's office. Bill Middleton is First Selectman, the line is 860-535-5050, and the office is at 152 Elm Street with the [email protected] inbox, open weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Property tax bills, mill rates and fire district questions go to the Tax Collector, Cindy Curioso, at 860-535-5080, also at 152 Elm Street. State room occupancy tax isn't a town matter at all, so route registration and Form OP-210 questions to the Department of Revenue Services through myconneCT instead of calling the town about them.

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

Knowing who to call is one thing, and knowing what other owners have already run into is another. A caveat first, since it matters for how much weight to give this: Reddit blocks automated access, so I haven't read those threads and won't pretend otherwise. What follows comes from BiggerPockets, plus what the official record itself shows, and I did read the BiggerPockets thread directly.

The dominant conversation about this corner of Connecticut isn't about regulation at all. It's about the border. On BiggerPockets, an investor hunting a three-bedroom single-family short-term rental on a budget of "$500-600K" framed the whole decision as Mystic and Stonington against Westerly and Narragansett. That framing makes complete sense when you're standing in Pawcatuck, since the Rhode Island line runs down the middle of the river at the end of the street.

The most useful reply came from a Rhode Island owner, who warned that cheap coastal listings often aren't what they look like, because many of them "are May to October camps that may also be on leased land" and you can't occupy those year-round. So she put a realistic year-round entry point at "350-400 k and you are probably better off at 500k."

Different state, same lesson for a Pawcatuck buyer: seasonality and legal occupancy do more damage to a pro forma than the regulatory question everyone asks first. Don't forget that the Rhode Island side is a separate jurisdiction with its own registration rules, so everything you learned about Stonington stops at the bridge.

What that thread notably contains is zero regulatory analysis, and the absence is itself the pattern. The recurring confusion I ran into wasn't hosts arguing about Stonington's ordinance, it was hosts believing there is one, and you can trace most of that straight back to the state's own 2024 legislative report describing a registration and permit scheme that voters had already rejected the year before. So if anyone quotes you a $250 Stonington short-term rental fine, they're quoting a draft that never became law.

Assuming Pawcatuck is one of several places you're weighing before you commit, the Connecticut market page is where the revenue and occupancy comparison lives, and it's worth running that side by side with the regulatory read rather than after it.

And a town that hasn't written a rule hasn't made you a promise either. That's the thing to carry into any market where the answer today is silence: price the property as though the rules you'd least like already exist, then treat the years before they arrive as upside rather than as the plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a permit to run an Airbnb in Pawcatuck, Connecticut in 2026?

No. Pawcatuck is a village in the Town of Stonington, and the town's Department of Planning & Land Use states in its own published guidance that Stonington "does not currently regulate short-term rentals." There's no licence, registration, permit fee or night cap. Ordinary zoning, noise and building rules still apply, and they're enforced the same way they would be at any other property in town.

What tax do you pay on a short-term rental in Pawcatuck?

Connecticut charges a 15% room occupancy tax on short-term home rentals, or 11% for a bed and breakfast establishment, on stays of 30 consecutive days or less. No Connecticut town can levy a municipal lodging tax on top. Airbnb collects and remits the 15% on the listing price including cleaning fees for the first 30 nights of a reservation, while direct bookings stay the host's responsibility, which means registering with the Department of Revenue Services for $100 and filing Form OP-210 monthly.

Did Stonington ever pass a short-term rental ordinance?

No. A proposed ordinance requiring annual registration and a permit went to referendum in March 2023 and was defeated, and nothing has replaced it since. A February 2024 Connecticut Office of Legislative Research report still lists Stonington as a town that regulates short-term rentals, describing that defeated draft as though it were law. The Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments recorded the outcome correctly: "Town Ordinance defeated 3/23."

Can you run a bed and breakfast in Pawcatuck instead?

Yes, by special use permit, though the conditions are strict enough to disqualify most houses. Stonington zoning defines a bed and breakfast facility as an owner-occupied residence lodging no more than eight paying guests in no more than four rooms, capped at five guest rooms or half the building's floor area. The building must have been built before 1940, the permit renews every three years, breakfast is the only meal allowed, and no guest may stay longer than two consecutive weeks.

What happens if a neighbor complains about your Pawcatuck short-term rental?

Complaints route to whichever department owns the underlying issue, because Stonington has no short-term rental office to send them to. A zoning violation draws a $150 citation from the Zoning Enforcement Officer, with 30 days to pay uncontested. A noise complaint goes to Stonington police under the town's nuisances ordinance, which carries a fine of up to $100 and treats each continuing day as a separate violation.

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