Sacramento, California Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Sacramento, California and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and the entry requirements are lighter than you'd expect from a California city this size. Sacramento has run a short-term rental permit since January 19, 2016, when the City Council adopted Ordinance No. 2016-0004 and added Chapter 5.114 to the city code. There's no lottery, no cap on the number of permits, and no conditional use permit to chase in a normal house. You fill out a form, pay $260, and the city writes to your neighbors to tell them what you're doing.

Now the catch, which decides whether this is a business or a bit of side income. If the property isn't your primary residence, meaning you don't live in it at least 184 days a year, the city lets you rent it for an aggregate of 90 days and then you're finished until the term rolls over. Worse for anyone banking on that 90-day model, Sacramento is trying to delete it altogether. On March 12, 2026 the Planning and Design Commission held its public hearing on an ordinance requiring every permitted short-term rental to sit on the same lot as the owner's primary residence. It hasn't reached the City Council yet, so the 90-day rule is still live as of July 2026, though I wouldn't buy here on the strength of it.

So let's walk through what running one properly in the city of Sacramento (Sacramento County, California) takes: what the permit costs, what the Revenue Division wants from you, the three lodging charges stacked on every booking, how hard the city pushes, and who to call when something stalls. Every figure below comes from the city's own pages, its ordinances, or California statute, checked in July 2026. And if you're comparing a Sacramento house against a market where a non-owner-occupied unit can legally run all 365 nights, run both through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Sacramento, California?

Sacramento's half of that comparison rests on two pieces of city code, and once you separate them the rest falls into place.

The first is Chapter 5.114, the short-term rental chapter, amended four times since 2016 and most recently by Ordinance 2024-0007. It defines a short-term rental as lodging provided for 30 consecutive days or less, requires a city permit for every one of them, and sets the operating rules that follow.

The second is the zoning side, City Code section 17.228.104, which quietly does the heavy lifting. It makes a short-term rental a permitted use of a dwelling unit, so no zoning administrator's conditional use permit is required, and the home occupation provisions don't apply to you either. That one paragraph of code saves most hosts a planning application and several thousand dollars.

Primary Residence, or Not, Is the Line That Decides Everything

Almost everything expensive in the ordinance hangs off a single definition. A primary residence is the dwelling unit where you live for at least 184 days during the calendar year, and which side of that line you're on changes the whole shape of the business.

Live there, and no annual cap applies at all. Don't live there, and section 5.114.210 limits you to an aggregate of 90 days of paid lodging during the term of the permit. Once you cross it, the city's own guidance says you can only take stays of 31 nights or longer until the following year, which is a hard stop, not a soft warning.

There's a small inconsistency to watch out for around that number. The ordinance measures the 90 days against the permit term, while the city's short-term rental page and the application form both describe it as a calendar year. Those usually amount to the same window, since a permit runs a year, though do check your issue date before you plan a peak season around it.

Two more limits apply no matter which tier you're in. No more than six people may lodge at a short-term rental at any one time, and where your primary residence isn't on the same lot, that six-person ceiling applies per lot rather than per unit. Conferences, weddings, fundraisers and similar gatherings are prohibited outright, so the backyard-venue play is off the table before you cost it out.

What California Law Adds on Top

The city writes those rules largely on its own, because California has never created a statewide short-term rental license or registry. What the state does instead is set the edges of the box, and three pieces of it matter to a Sacramento host.

• Platforms can be compelled to hand over your listing data. SB 346, Chapter 751 of the Statutes of 2025, took effect on January 1, 2026 and lets a city require Airbnb, Vrbo and the rest to report listing addresses, license numbers and tax certifications, quarterly by default and monthly where the city requires monthly tax remittance. It isn't self-executing, mind you. A city has to adopt an implementing ordinance first, and Sacramento hasn't.
• Your advertised nightly rate has to be the real one. Since July 1, 2024, AB 537 has required short-term lodging listings to include every mandatory fee in the displayed price, government taxes excepted, with civil penalties reaching $10,000 per violation.
• State law caps what a city can fine you for an infraction. Under Government Code section 36900, short-term rental infractions that threaten health or safety top out at $1,500 for a first violation, $3,000 for a second inside a year, and $5,000 after that.

California's building safety rules ride along too. Every dwelling intended for human occupancy needs State Fire Marshal approved smoke alarms, and any unit with a fossil fuel appliance, fireplace or attached garage needs a carbon monoxide device. Sacramento doesn't inspect for either before issuing your permit, yet you're on the hook for both regardless. For how the rest of the state handles all this, the California statewide short-term rental rules cover the wider picture.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Sacramento City, California

Those state rules land on every California host equally, so what really separates Sacramento from its neighbors is the size and shape of the local program.

It's small. The city publishes a live list of every active permit on its open data portal, and as of the July 31, 2026 refresh it holds 511 active short-term rental permits across a city of half a million people.

Growth was steep and then it stopped, since the Finance Department counted 53 permits issued in 2018, 583 in 2023 and 547 in 2024. What changed underneath that flat line is who holds them. Non-primary-residence permits were 23% of the total in 2018 and 59% by 2024, which is the trend the city now wants to reverse.

Under the rules in force today, an owner, a lessee, or the holder of a similar interest in a dwelling unit may apply, and you need the property owner's written consent if you're not the owner yourself. Renters can and do hold Sacramento permits.

Multi-unit buildings are the real exception. A short-term rental inside one needs a conditional use permit in a specific list of zones, and staff report that only three such permits have been approved since the provision took effect in July 2020, covering ten dwelling units between them. Treat that route as closed.

Accessory dwelling units sit in an awkward spot worth understanding before you build one. Because permits are issued per dwelling unit and an ADU is legally separate from the main house, you can't claim the ADU as your primary residence today, so an ADU short-term rental is capped at 90 days like any other non-primary property. Hosts have complained about exactly this, and the city issued 52 ADU permits in 2024 anyway. If the pending ordinance passes, that flips in your favor.

The Ordinance That Would End the 90-Day Model

That draft ordinance matters more than anything else in Sacramento's rulebook right now, so let's get the sequence straight. On June 24, 2025 the Law & Legislation Committee, aiming at "preserving or increasing the City's supply of long-term rental units," directed staff to draft amendments to Chapter 5.114. The combined Title 5 and Title 17 ordinance then went to the Planning and Design Commission for its public hearing on March 12, 2026. As drafted, it would:

• Require the short-term rental to sit on the same lot as the permittee's primary residence, removing the non-primary option entirely.
• Issue permits only to property owners or their authorized agent, so lessees would drop out.
• Allow one permit per permittee and one short-term rental per lot.
• Bar short-term rentals on any lot with more than four dwelling units.
• Treat an ADU or junior ADU as a primary residence, which is the one change that helps owner-occupiers.
• Require hosting platforms to report permit numbers, responsible parties, street addresses and nights booked to the city at least monthly.

Existing permittees wouldn't be cut off overnight. The draft grandfather clause protects any permit valid on July 1, 2026 under the old rules and lets it renew once for a further year, then repeals itself on July 1, 2028. Keep in mind that this date has already come and gone without a City Council vote, so it will have to move.

Going through the city's legislative record in July 2026, no council file for the ordinance exists yet, which means nothing has been adopted and the 90-day allowance survives for now. My read is that it passes in some form, because the housing-supply argument behind it has already carried a committee and a commission. Then again, a draft in the pipeline is not a rule, and Sacramento's own numbers show non-primary permits are still going out the door.

So anyone underwriting a purchase on nightly rates here should model the 90-day cap disappearing. If the alternative is a county with a friendlier posture, the Placer County short-term rental rules and the Sonoma County short-term rental rules are the two comparisons worth pulling up in this region.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Sacramento City, California

Until the council actually votes, the permit you apply for is the same one that has been running since 2016, and by California standards it's cheap.

The city's application form sets the fees plainly: $260.00 for a new permit, $250.00 to renew, and a $50.00 late renewal assessment fee if you miss the window. A permit runs one year from the date it's issued, it can't be transferred to anyone else or to another unit, and renewals have to be filed no later than 30 days before expiry.

You can apply online through the city's form portal, or send the paper application with payment to the Revenue Division. The city doesn't publish a processing target and nothing in the ordinance sets one, so I can't give you a reliable turnaround figure. Plan on weeks, not days, and don't book guests against a permit you don't hold yet.

Approval isn't a formality either. The city manager can deny an application on eight separate grounds, and several of them reach backwards into how the property has been run:

• The application is incomplete, or contains a false or misleading statement.
• The dwelling is subject to an open enforcement action under the nuisance, dangerous buildings or housing codes.
• The dwelling has been found in violation of those codes more than once.
• The owner or occupants have more than once violated another law, the social nuisance and noise control chapters included.
• You're delinquent on any fee, penalty or tax owed to the city on that property.
• A permit for the dwelling was denied or revoked within the previous two years.

Once a permit is granted, the city notifies every property owner within 200 feet of the unit in writing, giving them the address and your contact details. Non-primary-residence permits also carry a mandatory condition: you must name a property manager who lives within a 30-mile radius and will respond quickly to complaints, and you must tell the city whenever that person changes.

From there the permit brings a set of standing duties that are easy to breach without noticing. Post a copy of the permit in every room a guest is expected to sleep in. Put your city permit number in every advertisement, on every platform. No exterior sign advertising the rental is allowed, and advertising a rental that breaks any part of the chapter is itself a violation.

The register is the duty people forget. Record the dates you provided paid lodging, how many lodgers stayed, and the rent paid for each night, hold it in printed form for three years, and hand it over when the city asks. Non-primary-residence permittees don't wait to be asked, since they have to file that register with the city every January, April, July and October.

The penalty schedule is where casual non-compliance stops being cheap. Violating any provision of Chapter 5.114 carries civil penalties of not less than $250 and not more than $25,000 for each day the violation continues. On top of that sit criminal sanctions and administrative penalties under the city's general enforcement chapter, and the city attorney can sue to abate the rental as a public nuisance. That's not a one-time ticket. It accrues daily, and that daily multiplier is exactly where an owner who ignores two letters ends up in real trouble.

Required Documents for Sacramento City, California Short-Term Rentals

Since that $260 doesn't come back whether you're approved or not, it's worth getting the paperwork right the first time. The form itself is short and mostly self-explanatory, so the delay tends to come from the attachments.

• Proof of the site address and which unit you're renting. The form asks how many structures sit on the parcel and whether the rental is the main dwelling, an ADU, a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, a half-plex or an apartment.
• A yes or no on primary residence. This single checkbox sets your day cap, and the city can ask for documentation behind it.
• Property owner consent. If you're a lessee rather than the owner, the owner has to acknowledge the short-term rental rules and sign the city's separate Property Owner Consent form.
• Your CC&Rs or HOA rules, if any apply. Where the site is subject to them, a copy goes in with the application, and operating against them is a code violation in its own right.
• Property manager details. Name, phone, email and residential address of the person who'll respond to problems during and after business hours.
• Your rental listing URL, plus an eviction disclosure covering any eviction at the property that required an exemption under the city's Tenant Protection rules.
• An active Business Operations Tax account, which you initial to confirm, along with your acceptance of transient occupancy tax liability.

One thing that isn't on the list deserves saying out loud, because hosts keep asking about it. Sacramento does not require proof of liability insurance, a safety inspection, a parking plan, or a fire clearance to issue a short-term rental permit. Nothing in Chapter 5.114 asks for any of them. Your insurer and your mortgage almost certainly will, and the state smoke and carbon monoxide rules still bind you, but the city won't check any of it at the counter.

Sacramento City, California Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming the paperwork clears and you're able to start taking bookings, there's still tax to settle, and Sacramento stacks three separate charges on a single night's stay plus one flat annual tax on the business itself.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Transient occupancy tax	12% of taxable rent	City of Sacramento, monthly
Sacramento Tourism Infrastructure District	1% of gross room rent	City of Sacramento, monthly
Sacramento Tourism Marketing District	1.33% to 4.00% depending on zone, from August 1, 2026	City of Sacramento, monthly
Business operations tax	$50 a year, flat, taxed as a hotel	City of Sacramento, annually

The transient occupancy tax is 12% under City Code Chapter 3.28 and applies to any stay of 30 days or less. Returns are monthly, due on the last day of the month following the reporting period, and you file even in a month with no revenue at all. Miss the date and a 10% penalty attaches, with a further 10% if you're still unpaid 30 days later, plus interest at 0.5% a month.

Do check what you're treating as rent, too, because the city's guidelines make non-optional charges such as cleaning fees fully taxable while exempting documented stays of 31 days or more.

The two district assessments are the piece out-of-town owners miss. The Sacramento Tourism Infrastructure District takes 1% of gross room rent, and its management district plan defines a lodging business to include any structure permitted by the city or county for short-term rentals, so a permitted Airbnb is squarely inside it.

The Sacramento Tourism Marketing District charges a rate that depends on which of four benefit zones your address falls in, and it has just gone up. The district's committee voted on May 20, 2026 to raise the rates from 3.45%, 2.875%, 2.30% and 1.15% to 4.00%, 3.33%, 2.66% and 1.33% respectively, effective August 1, 2026. Assuming you pass the assessment on to guests, the city's letter tells you to start collecting the new amount on that date and to show it on the receipt as a separately stated marketing district assessment.

Your zone is in the city's Land Information Lookup App, which also returns your land use rules and any business improvement district you sit inside.

Now the part that saves you most of this work. Airbnb collects and remits all three charges in Sacramento, listing 12% transient occupancy tax, 1% for the infrastructure district and the marketing district band on reservations of 30 nights and shorter. City code pushes the same way, since it makes a hosting platform an "operator" for transient occupancy tax purposes regardless.

Don't take that as permission to stop looking, though. Airbnb's page still shows the old 1.15% to 3.45% marketing district band, so make sure you check your payout detail after August 1, 2026 and chase the difference if the higher rate isn't showing. Direct bookings, and any platform that doesn't collect, remain entirely your problem. The $50 business operations tax sits outside all of it and is billed annually as a hotel.

Possible Deductions and Write-Offs

Federal treatment turns on how much you personally use the place, which for a Sacramento owner-occupier is the whole ballgame. The IRS treats a dwelling unit as a residence once your personal use exceeds the greater of 14 days or 10% of the days you rent it at fair market value. Past that threshold you have to split every expense between rental and personal use, and you can't deduct rental expenses beyond gross rental income.

There's a neat exception underneath it. Rent the place for fewer than 15 days in the year and you report no rental income and deduct no rental expenses at all. Above that line the ordinary deductions apply, so the permit fee, the district assessments, cleaning, supplies, platform fees, insurance, mortgage interest, depreciation and utilities all come into play on the rented portion. Remember that a room inside your own home means apportioning nearly everything, which is fiddlier in practice than it looks on a spreadsheet.

Does Sacramento City, California Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Taxes are the part the platforms mostly handle for you. Enforcement is the part they don't.

Sacramento enforces by complaint rather than by patrol. Neighbors report problem rentals through Sacramento 311, or on (916) 808-5011 from outside city limits, and the city's own short-term rental page invites exactly that with a "Report a short-term rental" link for properties operating without a permit.

Two things make those complaints unusually easy to file. Every permit holder's address is public on the open data portal, so anyone can check whether a given house is licensed before picking up the phone. And the city already wrote to every property owner within 200 feet when the permit was issued, which means the neighbors know.

The complaint data tells you where the friction sits. Staff told the Planning and Design Commission that non-primary-residence permit locations "constituted approximately 2/3rds of all complaints in 2025," even though non-primary permits were 59% of those issued in 2024. The most common complaints the prior year were unpermitted operation, noise and traffic. That imbalance is the evidentiary spine of the ordinance now in the pipeline, so the enforcement pattern and the policy direction are pointing the same way.

There's a second lever that works without any inspector at all. Under section 5.114.400, no hosting platform may accept a fee for a booking transaction unless the host holds a valid city permit, and that single sentence turns a listing without a permit number into a commercial dead end instead of a mere risk.

Layered on top, the city manager can suspend, revoke, or attach conditions to a permit on any ground that would have justified denying it, including making you stay on site during certain hours or cutting your allowed guest count or nights. You get a hearing before that happens, except where public safety demands immediate suspension, then ten calendar days to appeal in writing. A revocation then blocks a new permit at that address for two years.

So how strict is strict? Honestly, Sacramento sits in the middle. The rules are real, the penalties reach $25,000 a day, and the platform gate is a genuine constraint, yet the city hasn't published citation counts or revocation numbers for the program, so I can't tell you how often that ceiling gets used.

What I can tell you is that this is a 511-permit program, complaint-driven, run by a Finance Department that has spent a year making the case that a large slice of it should be shut down. Be aware that operating unpermitted here isn't a quiet risk. It's a public record waiting for one annoyed neighbor.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Sacramento City, California

Given all of that, the order you work in matters more than it looks, because the first two steps decide whether the rest is worth paying for.

1. Settle the primary residence question before anything else. Will you live in this unit at least 184 days a year? A yes means no night cap. A no means 90 days and a business the city is trying to legislate away, so run the numbers on 90 nights, not 365.
2. Check the property, the lot and the paperwork that binds it. Confirm the unit is a dwelling unit rather than part of a building with multiple units (which needs a conditional use permit you're unlikely to get), pull your CC&Rs or HOA rules, and read your lease if you rent.
3. Look up your Sacramento Tourism Marketing District zone in the Land Information Lookup App, because the difference between Zone 1 and Zone 4 is roughly 2.7 percentage points of every night's revenue from August 1, 2026.
4. Open a Business Operations Tax account with the Revenue Division. You need it active before the short-term rental permit issues, and it costs $50 a year for a lodging business.
5. Register for transient occupancy tax and set up monthly filing, including the infrastructure and marketing district returns that ride along with it.
6. Line up the property owner consent form if you're a lessee, and the property manager who lives within 30 miles if the unit isn't your primary residence.
7. File the short-term rental permit application and pay the $260, then expect your neighbors within 200 feet to get a letter with your name and address on it.
8. Add your permit number to every listing the moment it's issued, put a copy of the permit in each sleeping room, and take down any exterior sign.
9. Start the register on night one. Dates, lodger counts, nightly rent, printed, kept three years, and filed quarterly if this isn't your primary residence.
10. Diarize your expiry date and file the renewal 30 days early. Don't forget that a late renewal costs $50 on top of the $250, and a lapsed permit means the platforms shouldn't be taking your bookings at all.

Who to Contact in Sacramento City, California about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever of those steps trips you up, three offices handle nearly all of it between them, and picking the right one first saves an irritating amount of time.

Permits, Fees and the Application Itself

The City of Sacramento Revenue Division, Permits and Taxes unit issues short-term rental permits and business operations tax accounts.

• Address: 915 I Street, Room 1201, Sacramento, CA 95814
• Phone: (916) 808-8500
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone and email hours: Monday to Thursday 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Friday 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
• Public counter: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., expanding to include Mondays from August 3, 2026

Transient Occupancy Tax and the District Assessments

Monthly returns and district assessments run through the same division at a different room number, so send tax filings to this address and not the permits one.

• Mailing address for returns: City of Sacramento, Revenue Division, 915 I Street, Room 1214, Sacramento, CA 95814-2604
• Phone: (916) 808-8500
• Business operations tax questions: [email protected]
• Marketing district assessment questions: Brittany Chargualaf, (916) 808-5669
• Finance Administration: 915 I Street, 5th Floor, (916) 808-5845, listed on the Finance Department contact page

Zoning, Land Use and Code Enforcement

Whether a specific building can host a short-term rental at all is a Community Development question, not a Finance one.

• Public counter: 300 Richards Boulevard, 3rd Floor, Sacramento, CA 95811, by appointment
• Planning and zoning: [email protected], published on the Community Development contact page
• Code enforcement: dial 311 inside city limits, or check an open case through the city's code database
• Rental Housing Inspection Program: [email protected]

The two staff running the pending ordinance are named in the city's own reports, which is useful if you want to track it: Kevin Colin, Zoning Administrator, (916) 808-5260, [email protected], and Bryan Howard, Finance Manager, (916) 808-4847, [email protected].

Complaints, Whether You're Filing One or Fielding One

Sacramento 311 takes short-term rental complaints and routes them to the right division, so it's worth knowing the number in both directions.

• Phone: dial 311 inside the city, or (916) 808-5011 from outside city limits
• Email: [email protected], with a typical response inside 72 business hours
• Online and app: complaints can be filed through the 311 customer service help center or the Sac311 smartphone app

If you're weighing Sacramento against the Central Valley markets an hour either side of it, the San Joaquin County short-term rental rules cover the Stockton and Lodi side, and BNBCalc Markets shows what the revenue gap between those markets actually looks like at neighborhood level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Sacramento, California in 2026?

Yes. The City of Sacramento permits short-term rentals citywide under City Code Chapter 5.114, and a rental of 30 days or less is a permitted use of a dwelling unit with no conditional use permit required in a normal house. You need a short-term rental permit from the Revenue Division, a business operations tax account, and transient occupancy tax registration. If the home is not your primary residence, you are limited to 90 rental days, and the city is drafting an ordinance to remove that option altogether.

How much does a Sacramento short-term rental permit cost?

A new short-term rental permit costs $260.00 and a renewal costs $250.00, with a $50.00 late renewal assessment fee if the application arrives less than 30 days before the permit expires. The permit runs one year from issue and cannot be transferred to another person or another unit. Separately, every short-term rental operator owes an annual business operations tax of $50, billed as a hotel, and that account must be active for the permit to stand.

Do you have to live in the property to run a short-term rental in Sacramento?

Not today, though it matters enormously. If the unit is your primary residence, meaning you live there at least 184 days a year, no annual limit applies to how many nights you rent. If it is not, City Code section 5.114.210 caps you at an aggregate of 90 days of paid lodging per permit term, after which only stays of 31 nights or longer are allowed until the following year. A pending city ordinance would require every permitted short-term rental to be the owner's primary residence.

What taxes do Sacramento short-term rentals pay?

Three charges apply to each stay of 30 days or less: a 12% transient occupancy tax, a 1% Sacramento Tourism Infrastructure District assessment, and a Sacramento Tourism Marketing District assessment that runs from 1.33% to 4.00% depending on the benefit zone from August 1, 2026. All three are remitted monthly to the City of Sacramento, due the last day of the following month. Airbnb collects and remits all three. A flat $50 annual business operations tax is separate.

What happens if you run a short-term rental in Sacramento without a permit?

Violating Chapter 5.114 carries civil penalties of not less than $250 and not more than $25,000 for each day the violation continues, plus criminal sanctions, administrative penalties, and a public nuisance abatement action by the city attorney. Hosting platforms are also barred from accepting a fee for any booking at an unpermitted property. Because the city publishes every active permit address publicly, an unpermitted listing is straightforward for a neighbor to identify and report.

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