Pemberton Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Pemberton and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and Pemberton kept short-term rentals legal all the way through British Columbia's 2024 crackdown. The catch is who gets to run one. Since Amendment Bylaw No. 960, 2024 rewrote section 7.24 of Zoning Bylaw No. 832, 2018, a short-term rental is permitted only in a detached dwelling, a secondary suite or a detached accessory dwelling unit sitting on the same lot as somebody's principal residence.

That single sentence removes the play most investors arrive with, because a house you don't live in can't be licensed at all. And even when your own home qualifies, there may be nothing available to apply for. Section 7.24(b) caps short-term rentals at five percent of the lots in each of the neighbourhoods mapped in Schedule B, which has produced wait lists in the areas people most want to rent. As of 21 January 2025, 29 homeowners were sitting on that list, and the Village's own staff described it as stale, with almost no turnover.

Pemberton is a village of a few thousand people in the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, about half an hour north of Whistler, and three sets of rules govern it at once: the Village's zoning bylaw, its business licence bylaw, and provincial law. So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly: what the Village requires in 2026, what a licence costs, the tax layers you'll be collecting, how any of it gets enforced, and who to call when you get stuck. Before you commit to a purchase on the strength of nightly rates, run the property through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Pemberton, Canada?

Those three sets of rules don't cover the same ground, so it's worth seeing which one does what before you start filling in forms.

The zoning bylaw decides whether the use is allowed on your lot. The business licence bylaw decides how you have to run it once it is. And the provincial Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act sits above both, registering you and giving the Province its own enforcement powers.

Start with the definition, because it moved recently. Amendment Bylaw No. 1000, 2025, adopted on 25 November 2025, stripped the word "vacation" out of the bylaw and left a definition that turns on one number.

A short-term rental is the service of accommodation in the property of a property host, for a fee, provided to members of the public for less than 90 consecutive days. Home exchanges, bed and breakfasts, bed and breakfast inns, hotels and hostels are excluded.

That 90-day line matters more than it looks. The Village used to draw it at 30 days, so plenty of month-long furnished lets that once fell outside the rules now sit inside them.

Section 7.24 then attaches five conditions to the use itself:

• The unit has to be a lawful detached dwelling, secondary suite or detached accessory dwelling unit on the same lot as a principal residence.
• No short-term rental in a vehicle, recreation vehicle, tent or trailer.
• Occupancy is capped at two people per bedroom, a maximum of three bedrooms, and six guests in total.
• One off-street parking space per bedroom used for the rental.
• A valid Village of Pemberton business licence, held before you advertise anything.

Zoning also decides this street by street, which trips people up.

Short-term rental appears as a permitted accessory use in the R-1, R-3 Duplex Lot, RC-1 Residential Country Inn, RSA-1 and RSA-3 Sunstone, and RSA-2 The Ridge zones. It does not appear in R-2 Small Lot Residential, where home occupation is the only accessory use on the list, and it isn't among the permitted uses in the multi-family zones either.

So do check your zoning before anything else, because a small-lot house in Pemberton cannot host paid guests at any price.

Then there's the cap. Section 7.24(b) limits short-term rentals to five percent of the lots in each Schedule B area, and that limit is what creates the wait list.

Two things soften it. A lot can be exempted from the five percent limit on application under the Village's Short-Term Rental Exemption Policy DEV-012, and the cap doesn't apply to a bed and breakfast or a bed and breakfast inn at all.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Pemberton

Since the cap is the thing standing between most people and a licence, the honest way to picture the business here is a room or a suite attached to a home you already live in, not a second property bought to rent.

Unfortunately for anyone hoping otherwise, there's no structure that gets around it. Section 21.2 of Business Licence Bylaw No. 855, 2019 says an operator must not run a short-term rental unless the accommodation is their principal residence, a secondary suite inside the detached dwelling where they have their principal residence, or an accessory dwelling unit on that same property. A company can't satisfy that. Neither can an owner living in Vancouver.

Assuming your home does qualify, there's still the question of whether your neighbourhood has room. The wait list isn't published, though residents can phone the Village and ask where they sit on it, and back in 2025 the Sunstone neighbourhood was cited as one with no list at all.

Keep in mind that a wait list is not a queue with a predictable exit. Village staff said in April 2025 that people had stopped bothering to add their names because nothing ever moved.

The exemption policy is the route worth understanding if you travel. DEV-012 lets a lot escape the five percent limit where the property is the occupant's principal residence and it's rented short-term for fewer than 90 days in a calendar year.

That's aimed squarely at the homeowner who spends two months elsewhere and wants to cover the mortgage while they're gone. Ask for it in writing when you apply, and remember that an approved exemption isn't an approved business licence. Staff can deny the request, approve it, or approve it with conditions, and a denial can be appealed to Council.

There's a second door, and it's the one the cap doesn't reach.

A bed and breakfast under section 7.8 of the zoning bylaw runs in the owner's principal residence, with a full-time resident on site and a maximum of two guest bedrooms. You add one parking space per rented bedroom, and the guest area can carry no cooking facilities and no fridge over six cubic feet.

A bed and breakfast inn under section 7.9 goes bigger: a minimum of three and a maximum of five bedrooms, four in the Agricultural Land Reserve, again with a full-time resident host and the use contained inside the principal residence. Both need a business licence. Neither counts against the five percent.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Pemberton

Whichever of those doors you go through, the licence itself is the same object, and it's cheaper than most people expect.

Schedule F of Fees and Charges Bylaw No. 905, 2021, consolidated to 24 February 2026, sets the short-term vacation rental business licence at $300 a year, unchanged as of July 2026. A plain business licence is $150, so the rental category carries a premium.

Apply between 1 October and 31 December and the fee drops by 50%. Miss the renewal deadline and it climbs by 25%. Withdraw or get refused after an inspection and you're out a $25 administration fee plus a $100 inspection fee, and additional inspections by the Fire Chief or the Building Official run $100 each.

Applications go through Cloudpermit, the Village's online permitting portal, with payment in person at Municipal Hall or online through OptionPay.

Licences run the calendar year and expire on 31 December, renewals are due by 31 January, and a licence not renewed by 31 March can be cancelled outright by the Licence Inspector. One licence covers exactly one dwelling unit.

Part 21 of the business licence bylaw then loads on the operating conditions, and these are the ones that show up in the listing itself. Every advertisement has to disclose four things:

• Your business licence number.
• The maximum guest occupancy permitted under the zoning bylaw.
• The number and location of off-street parking spaces, stated as the maximum number of cars guests may bring.
• Quiet hours under the noise bylaw.

The same four items, plus your name, address, email and phone and the local contacts you nominated, must appear on a notice visible as guests walk in.

Two more obligations arrived with Amendment Bylaw No. 984, 2025, adopted on 7 October 2025, and they're the sharpest teeth in the whole regime:

• A decal. The Village supplies it, and you must post it prominently on the premises so the property is identifiable as a licensed short-term rental from outside.
• Proof of use, at renewal. You have to submit receipts showing the accommodation was rented for at least 12 nights during the previous licence period, with dates and fees. The Licence Inspector verifies them and may refuse the renewal if unsatisfied, although the requirement can be reduced or waived for a licence held under six months.

That second one turns a Pemberton licence into a use-it-or-lose-it asset, which is exactly what it was designed to do. Sitting on a dormant licence to keep your spot ahead of the wait list no longer works.

You'll also sign a Good Neighbour Agreement in a form approved by the Licence Inspector before the licence is issued, and breaching it is its own ground for cancellation. And if you sell the property or stop living there, section 8.4 gives you seven days to tell the Licence Inspector, at which point the licence is deemed cancelled from the date of the change.

On top of the Village licence, British Columbia's provincial registry charges its own annual fee: $100 plus a $1.50 service fee where you live in the unit, or $450 plus $1.50 where you don't, which is the band a secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit falls into. Those fees aren't refunded if the application is denied.

Required Documents for Pemberton Short-Term Rentals

Since neither fee comes back, it's worth getting the paperwork right the first time, and there are two separate stacks of it.

The Village asks for four things alongside the standard business licence application, under section 21.3:

• Confirmation of ownership, or the property owner's permission if you're renting.
• Proof that the property is your principal residence. The bylaw names a homeowner grant, employer-issued pay stubs, voter registration, documentation showing provincial or federal benefits, or income tax documentation. Watch out for the explicit warning attached to it: a driver's licence or a utility bill on its own is not enough.
• One or two local emergency contacts, other than you, with name, address and phone number.
• Proof of adequate parking under the zoning bylaw, plus a parking plan. With one space required per rented bedroom, this is where three-bedroom applications tend to fall over.

The Province asks for a different set. You'll need a BC Registries account tied to your BC Services Card, the property's parcel identifier, the number of bedrooms, your date of birth and your Social Insurance Number.

For proof of principal residence it wants one piece of BC photo identification plus at least two supporting documents drawn from a fixed list:

• A land title search, or the current year's BC Assessment notice as it arrived in the mail.
• A certificate of insurance from ICBC, or a full home insurance summary.
• A property tax notice, a home owner grant confirmation, or a speculation and vacancy tax letter.
• An affidavit, a bank statement, or an official notice from a government agency.

Screenshots of a BC Assessment look-up are refused, which catches people out every year. A tenant can use a tenancy agreement or a rent increase notice as one of the two.

One document isn't needed at the start but decides whether you keep going: the receipts for those 12 nights. Start a folder for them on day one of your licence period, because reconstructing a season of bookings the week before a renewal deadline is miserable work.

Pemberton Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, though Pemberton's stack is lighter than its neighbours' and that's a real advantage.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST	5%	Canada Revenue Agency, or the platform where you aren't GST registered
BC PST on accommodation	8%	BC Ministry of Finance, or the online marketplace facilitator
Municipal and Regional District Tax	none in Pemberton	not applicable

That third row is the one worth pausing on. The Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation lists every area in the province that charges the Municipal and Regional District Tax, and Pemberton is not in it. Whistler is, at 3%. The District of Squamish is, at 3% until 1 November 2028. So a guest booking in Pemberton pays three percentage points less in provincial accommodation tax than the same guest booking half an hour down the highway, which is a small but genuine pricing edge.

The 8% PST on accommodation applies to the whole purchase price, and the Province defines that broadly enough to catch your cleaning fee, booking fee, extra-bed charge, pet fee and credit card processing charge.

Three exemptions are worth knowing. A charge of $30 or less per day, or $210 or less per week, is exempt unless the unit is listed on an online marketplace. The same guest staying 27 consecutive days or more is exempt. And a provider with under $2,500 of gross accommodation revenue in the previous 12 months who doesn't list online is exempt too.

Who remits it depends on how you take bookings. Sell only through a registered online marketplace facilitator and the platform collects and remits for you, so you don't have to register. Take a single direct booking as well and you must register yourself.

Be aware that the shortcut isn't a shield either. A host who sells only through a facilitator stays jointly and severally liable for PST the facilitator fails to remit.

GST works on similar lines. The Canada Revenue Agency applies 5% GST to accommodation occupied continuously for less than one month at more than $20 a night, and where the host isn't registered for GST/HST, the accommodation platform operator has to charge and collect it instead.

Then there's the federal rule that makes all of the above load-bearing. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies expense deductions for a "non-compliant short-term rental", meaning one in a place that doesn't permit short-term rentals or one that fails to meet all registration, licensing and permit requirements. The denial is pro-rated by non-compliant days. Operate without a Pemberton business licence and the fine is the smaller problem, because you also lose the mortgage interest, the utilities and the depreciation against that income.

British Columbia Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That federal deduction rule keys off provincial and municipal compliance, so the provincial layer is worth understanding on its own terms rather than as background noise.

The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act did three things that reach Pemberton directly. It created a provincial registry every host must join. It imposed a principal residence requirement in designated communities. And it made platforms responsible for policing both.

Registration runs through the provincial registry, renews annually, and opens its renewal window 40 days before expiry with email reminders at 40, 14 and one day out. Your registration number has to appear on every listing, alongside your Village business licence number, and the address on the listing must match the address you registered. Report a change of name or address to the Registrar within 14 days. A renewal can be refused where you've ignored a compliance order, left an administrative penalty unpaid, or broken a term of your registration.

Some accommodation escapes the registry altogether, and one exemption is a genuine pivot for a Pemberton owner: bookings over 90 days don't need to register at all. The others cover hotels, motels and hostels, RVs, tents, time shares, home exchanges, strata guest suites, student and employee housing, and seasonal accommodation that isn't equipped for year-round living.

The principal residence requirement is the piece that binds Pemberton. Under the Province's current list, stated as of 1 June 2026, Pemberton is a community where the requirement applies.

Nobody imposed that on the Village either. The requirement automatically covers municipalities over 10,000 people and their close neighbours, while smaller communities can opt in by resolution each February for a 1 November effective date, and Pemberton council directed staff on 19 March 2024 to ask the Province to include it.

Platforms carry the enforcement. Since 2 June 2025 they must stop advertising unregistered listings, and since 23 June 2025 they must cancel future bookings on them. The Province's own summary of what happens when you skip registration is blunt: your listings stop being advertised, your existing bookings are cancelled, and you can't accept new ones.

Does Pemberton Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Yes, although the mechanism here works differently from the complaint-and-inspection cycle most cities run, and understanding that difference is what keeps you out of trouble.

Pemberton's main enforcement tool isn't a fine. It's scarcity.

Because of the five percent cap, an unlicensed operator is holding a slot that somebody on the wait list has wanted for years, and that neighbour knows which houses on their street are supposed to be licensed. The decal makes it visible from the sidewalk. The advertisement disclosure rules make it checkable from a laptop, since a Pemberton listing carrying no business licence number is admitting the problem in public.

The 12-night renewal receipts close the other gap. A licence held for insurance purposes, or held to block a neighbour, now has to show real bookings or it lapses.

When the Village does reach for penalties, the numbers are not trivial. Under the zoning bylaw each day an offence continues is a separate offence, proceedings under the Offence Act carry a fine to a maximum of $50,000, and where no specific penalty is set the range is $150 to $10,000 plus the costs of prosecution.

The business licence bylaw mirrors that, adding tickets to a maximum of $1,000 under the Village's Municipal Ticket Information bylaw and bylaw notice penalties on top. Both are enforced by the Licence Inspector, their designate, or a Bylaw Enforcement Officer.

Noise is the complaint that most often starts the chain, and Pemberton rewrote that bylaw this year. Noise Regulation Bylaw No. 1006, 2026, adopted on 12 May 2026, defines daytime as 7:00am to 11:00pm on a weekday or Saturday and 9:00am to 11:00pm on a holiday, which makes everything else quiet hours.

In a quiet district the limit falls to 45 dBA during those hours, measured at the point of reception. Make sure those hours are in your house rules and on the notice inside the unit, because the business licence bylaw requires them to be disclosed and a hot tub at midnight is how a good operator becomes a file.

Above all of that sits the Province, and its penalty schedule is where the real money is.

Schedule 4 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Regulation sets maximum administrative penalties of $5,000 for a first contravention, $7,500 for a second and $10,000 for a third where a host fails to register an offer or breaches the principal residence requirement. Leaving a business licence number or a valid registration number off a listing runs $500, $750 and $1,000 on the same escalating scale.

Under section 27(2) of the Act, a separate penalty can be imposed for each day a contravention continues. That's not a one-time fine. It accrues, and that's exactly where owners get badly hurt.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Pemberton

Given how much of this is decided before you spend anything, the order below matters, and working through it out of sequence tends to cost you a licence fee for nothing.

1. Check your zone first. Short-term rental has to be a permitted accessory use where you are. R-2 Small Lot Residential and the multi-family zones don't carry it, so confirm your zoning with Development Services before anything else.
2. Confirm the unit qualifies. It must be a detached dwelling, a secondary suite or a detached accessory dwelling unit on the same lot as a principal residence, and that residence has to be yours.
3. Ask the Village where your neighbourhood sits against the five percent cap. The wait list isn't public, but you can phone and ask. Do this before you furnish anything.
4. Decide whether you need the DEV-012 exemption, and if you're renting only while you travel, request it in writing at the same time you apply.
5. Work the parking. One off-street space per rented bedroom, with a parking plan. Three bedrooms means three spaces, on top of what the dwelling already needs.
6. Gather the principal residence proof. A homeowner grant, pay stubs, voter registration, benefits documentation or tax documents. A driver's licence or utility bill alone will be rejected.
7. Apply through Cloudpermit and pay the $300, or $150 if you're applying between October and December. Sign the Good Neighbour Agreement when it's put in front of you.
8. Register with the Province and pay $100 or $450 plus the service fee, then put your registration number and your business licence number into every listing along with the matching address.
9. Post the decal and the in-unit notice, and set up your listing text to carry the licence number, the occupancy cap, the parking count and the quiet hours.
10. Sort out tax before your first guest. If every booking comes through one registered platform, the platform handles PST and GST. Take direct bookings and you register yourself.
11. Keep the receipts. Twelve nights minimum, with dates and fees, or the renewal fails.

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

Most of those steps run through one small building, which does make this simpler than it is in a bigger city.

Village of Pemberton, Municipal Hall

• Address: 7400 Prospect Street, PO Box 100, Pemberton, BC V0N 2L0
• Phone: 604-894-6135
• Front counter hours: Monday to Thursday, 9:00am to 4:00pm. Fridays are handled by email or phone.
• Operations emergency line: 1-855-215-4941

Which inbox you want depends on the question. Corporate and Legislative Services owns business licences, licensing and permits, and bylaw enforcement, at [email protected]. Zoning, land use and the permitted-use question belong to Development, Planning and Climate Action at [email protected]. Finance is at [email protected], and certified copies of any bylaw come from [email protected]. Business licence applications themselves are submitted through Cloudpermit rather than by email.

For the provincial side, the ServiceBC Contact Centre handles the registry on 1-833-828-2240 or [email protected], Monday to Friday from 7:30am to 5:00pm, with support available in 140 languages. Changes to an existing registration go to [email protected]. PST questions belong to the Ministry of Finance on 1-877-388-4440 or [email protected].

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Pemberton Think about Local Regulations?

The people staffing those inboxes have heard from hosts a lot over the past two years, because Pemberton's rules were rewritten in public and the arguments are on the record.

What follows is my read of the reporting rather than a survey, so do weigh it accordingly.

The loudest fight wasn't about whether short-term rentals should be legal.

In April 2025 the Village proposed capping business licences at two years in wait-listed neighbourhoods, so operators would cycle off and let somebody else on. Owners pushed back hard, arguing the plan punished compliant operators and threatened the tourism businesses around them.

The Village pulled the proposal and came back with a softer bylaw in July 2025 that dropped the two-year limit entirely. What replaced it was the 12-night proof of use and the decal, which target dormant licences instead of active ones. On that narrow question, the operators won.

Where they didn't win is the cap. Council had shown interest in loosening the five percent limit, and staff advised against it. New short-term rentals, they wrote, "would reduce the long-term rental housing supply, negatively impact hotels and result in a net financial loss to the community."

A policy brief prepared with students from the University of Victoria's School of Public Administration modelled a $1,000-per-unit buy-back subsidy for licence holders willing to hand back their permits, and scored it as the strongest option at $8.2 million of net gain over a decade. Nobody at the Village is arguing for more short-term rentals.

The sympathetic case, and it's the one elected officials keep returning to, is the resident who leaves for a month.

At the March 2024 council meeting Mayor Mike Richman said the under-90-days framing was restrictive for people who visit family elsewhere in the country, and that he didn't want to overly regulate how people use their own homes. Councillor Katrina Nightingale made the same point about principal residents who go away for a while. DEV-012, with its fewer-than-90-days-a-year exemption from the cap, is the answer that came out of those conversations.

So the argument in Pemberton has settled somewhere unusual. Nobody is fighting about legality, and almost nobody is fighting about enforcement. They're fighting about allocation, which is what happens once a community decides how many of these it wants and then has to choose between neighbours. If you're comparing this against somewhere with room to grow, the numbers across the Canada market will tell you more than another read of the bylaw will, and BNBCalc will tell you whether a single spare bedroom carries the mortgage.

A capped market is a different asset from an open one. Where supply is rationed, the licence is worth more than the property improvement, and the rules that decide who keeps a licence deserve more attention than the ones that decide who gets one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you run an Airbnb in Pemberton, BC in 2026?

Yes, with two conditions. The unit has to be a detached dwelling, a secondary suite or a detached accessory dwelling unit on the same lot as your principal residence, and short-term rental has to be a permitted accessory use in your zone. R-2 Small Lot Residential and the multi-family zones don't allow it. You also need a Village business licence and a British Columbia registry number, and both must appear in your listing.

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

The Village charges $300 a year for a short-term vacation rental business licence under Schedule F of Fees and Charges Bylaw No. 905, 2021. Apply between 1 October and 31 December and the fee halves. Renew after 31 January and it rises 25%. Provincial registration is separate, at $100 plus a $1.50 service fee where you live in the unit or $450 plus $1.50 where you don't.

What is Pemberton's five percent short-term rental cap?

Section 7.24(b) of Zoning Bylaw No. 832, 2018 limits short-term rentals to five percent of the lots in each of the neighbourhoods mapped in Schedule B of that bylaw. Once an area hits the limit, new applicants go on a wait list, which had 29 names on it as at 21 January 2025. Bed and breakfasts and bed and breakfast inns are not counted against the cap.

Do you pay tourist tax on a Pemberton short-term rental?

Guests pay 5% GST and 8% BC provincial sales tax on accommodation. Pemberton charges no Municipal and Regional District Tax, unlike Whistler and Squamish, which both add 3%. Where every booking comes through a registered online marketplace facilitator, the platform collects and remits both taxes. Take direct bookings as well and you have to register and remit yourself.

What happens if you rent short-term in Pemberton without a licence?

The Province can impose administrative penalties up to $5,000 for a first contravention, $7,500 for a second and $10,000 for a third, and a separate penalty can be applied for every day it continues. Platforms must delist unregistered properties and cancel their future bookings. Village bylaw offences carry fines from $150 to $10,000, or up to $50,000 on prosecution, and the Canada Revenue Agency denies expense deductions on non-compliant rental income.

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