Bexar County, Texas Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Bexar County, Texas and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and Bexar County itself won't be the thing standing in your way. The county issues no short-term rental permit, runs no registration scheme, and holds no zoning power at all over land outside a city limit, which sounds permissive enough that most owners go looking for the catch.

There is one, mind you, though it sits somewhere people don't think to look. Because the county stays out of it, whichever city line your property falls inside decides nearly everything about how you're allowed to operate, and the answer can change from one street to the next. San Antonio holds nearly 1.5 million of the county's almost 2 million residents, and it runs a full permit regime with density caps, revocations and a code enforcement team that emails Airbnb directly. Hollywood Park, a town twenty minutes north, banned short-term rentals outright in 2023. Still, one obligation reaches every address either way, and that's the 1.75% county hotel occupancy tax you file monthly whether you owe a dollar or nothing at all.

So let's walk through what this takes to do properly in 2026: which layer of government actually governs your address, what a San Antonio permit costs and how long it lasts, the three taxes stacking on a single night's stay, how hard any of it gets enforced, and who to call when your situation doesn't fit the form. Every figure below comes from Bexar County's, San Antonio's or Texas's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving I've said so. Before you buy on the strength of a permit that looks easy to get, run the property through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Bexar County, Texas?

The reason the county sits this far back isn't a local quirk, since it follows from how Texas hands out power in the first place. Cities get zoning authority under the Local Government Code and counties mostly don't, so a Texas county ends up with a short list of things it may regulate. Residential land use isn't on the list.

So Bexar County says it about as plainly as a government ever says anything. Ask it how a property is zoned in the county and the answer comes back that "in the unincorporated areas of the County (any area not within a municipal city limits) there are no zoning regulations," followed by a pointer to the development rules that might still apply, such as an on-site sewer permit where there's no public sewer.

Its authority to require a building permit at all comes from Chapter 233, Subchapter C of the Texas Local Government Code, and that reaches new commercial, public-accessible and multi-family buildings rather than houses. The county's own summary of its permits draws the line in one sentence: the Fire Marshal building permit "does not apply to single family residential homes (including duplexes and triplexes)." On residential construction generally, the same FAQ concedes that "the County does not have legal authority to regulate residential construction, conduct residential construction inspections, or issue a residential Certificate of Occupancy."

Read that carefully and you'll see there's no county short-term rental ordinance to comply with, because there's no county power to write one. Which leaves three layers doing the actual work:

• Bexar County collects a 1.75% hotel occupancy tax on every short-term stay inside its borders and expects the paperwork behind it, yet issues no permit and applies no zoning.
• Your city, assuming you're in one. Bexar County's entities page lists nineteen municipalities within the county, San Antonio plus eighteen smaller cities and towns, and each of them writes its own rules from scratch.
• The State of Texas, which levies a flat 6% hotel occupancy tax and otherwise leaves short-term rentals to the cities.

San Antonio is the layer that matters for most readers here. It regulates short-term rentals under Chapter 16 of the municipal code, splitting them into Type 1, the primary residence of the owner or operator, and Type 2, a property nobody in the ownership chain lives in. The city's Finance Department defines the underlying activity as renting sleeping areas overnight for less than 30 consecutive days, but not less than 12 hours, and inside city limits a permit is mandatory before you take a booking.

Then there are the small cities, where the range runs from indifference to outright prohibition. The Town of Hollywood Park adopted Ordinance No. 2045 on November 14, 2023, adding an Article VII to its zoning chapter whose Section 78-317 reads "short-term rentals are hereby prohibited and unlawful within the Town of Hollywood Park," and giving rentals already under contract six months to wind down. Helotes went the other way and mostly wants the money, since its short-term rental page sets a 7% city hotel occupancy tax under Section 82-4(b) of its code, payable quarterly, without describing any separate operating permit.

The two towns sit twenty minutes apart, and they landed on opposite answers.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Bexar County

Since the answer swings that hard on a boundary line, the first job isn't buying furniture, it's establishing which jurisdiction your address actually belongs to. Plenty of properties with a San Antonio mailing address sit well outside San Antonio city limits, and the postal address has never been proof of anything. Do check it with the city you think you're in and with Bexar County Public Works, because getting this backwards costs you either a wasted permit fee or a citation you didn't see coming.

Assuming you land outside every city limit, the constraints then stop being about permits and start being about plumbing. No inspector is coming, and what bites you out there is physical rather than administrative.

An on-site sewage facility permit is required wherever no public sewer serves the property, with a 30-day review through Bexar County Public Works, and it quietly caps your listing size: a septic field sized for a family of four won't take twelve guests every weekend, and overloading it is an expensive plumbing problem before it's ever a compliance one.

A floodplain development permit costs $50 and is required for any property encumbered by, or within 100 feet of, a FEMA-designated 1% annual chance floodplain, and both permits come out of the same office, with named contacts and review times set out in the county's permit summary.

Be aware that a quiet county isn't a lawless one either. Where the plan involves weddings or big events on acreage, the Fire Marshal's permits and applications page says a mass gathering permit must be filed with the County Judge at least 45 days ahead once an outdoor event outside any city draws more than 2,500 people, or more than 500 where at least 51% are under 21 and alcohol is expected. Deed restrictions and HOA covenants catch unincorporated owners out too, since neighbors enforce those privately and no county office will step in on either side.

Inside San Antonio the business you're starting has a known shape and a known size. The city's FY 2025 Short Term Rental Annual Report counts 3,339 active permits, 23% of them Type 1 and 77% Type 2, which tells you that non-owner-occupied investment listings are the norm rather than the exception here. That's a more permissive posture than Dallas has been defending in court, so don't write San Antonio off as another big Texas metro that legislated investors out.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Bexar County

That 77% only exists because the city keeps granting permits to people who don't live in the property, and it's worth knowing exactly what earning one involves. There's no county license to chase. So everything in this section is a city requirement, and San Antonio's is the one most Bexar County owners will meet.

The permit runs three years, it can't be transferred, you need a separate one for each individual unit, and the Development Services Department issues it within five business days once your application is complete. Fees are $300 for a Type 1 and $450 for a Type 2, identical for a new permit and a renewal, non-refundable, payable by card or e-bank. Those figures took effect on June 14, 2024, the day after City Council approved a package of amendments, per the city's own amendment fact sheet.

Two things then decide whether the city can grant it. Zoning is the easy one, since short-term rentals are allowed in any residential zoning district, and in districts with established residential use, except C-3, L, I-1 and I-2. Density is where applications die.

San Antonio's application and enforcement fact sheet puts numbers on it that the permit page leaves out: Type 1 rentals face no density limit at all, while Type 2 rentals are allowed by right only up to 12.5% of the units on a blockface, meaning one side of a street between two intersections, and only one Type 2 is allowed by right on that blockface. The city treats a property with five or more units as multi-family, and there the same 12.5% applies to the units on the property itself.

Past the limit you can still ask the Board of Adjustment for a special exception, submitted through the BuildSA portal at $400 where the property carries a homestead exemption and $600 where it doesn't. Do check the odds before you spend it. Across the life of the ordinance the Board has heard 87 of these cases with an approval rate of 25%, which the annual report states plainly. Three applicants in four paid the fee and went home with nothing.

So budget for a refusal.

One detail catches out nearly everyone buying with a plan already in mind, because the city states flatly that eligibility "cannot be made in advance of an application being submitted," which means nobody at Development Services will pre-clear an address for you over the phone. You submit, you pay the non-refundable fee, then you find out. Which is the strongest argument I know for treating a Type 2 purchase on a dense inner-loop blockface as a genuine risk rather than a formality.

Once the permit is granted, two obligations start immediately: the permit number has to appear on the advertising platforms, and your hotel occupancy tax account has to be current. Renewals are simpler, yet easy to fumble. You'll get an email reminder three months out, and letting the permit lapse means reapplying from scratch instead of renewing, and that matters more than it sounds, because a blockface that has filled up since your first application can leave the new one ineligible. The city also checks your tax account status at renewal, and that's the moment a year of skipped monthly filings surfaces.

Keep in mind that closing up shop takes two steps too: cancel the permit with Development Services, then separately close the tax account with Avenu, or the reporting obligation keeps running against a property you no longer rent.

Elsewhere in the county, though, licensing means whatever your city says it means. Helotes describes tax registration and quarterly reporting with no separate operating permit, while Hollywood Park doesn't license short-term rentals at all, on the grounds that it doesn't permit them. None of the smaller cities publish anything like San Antonio's material, so call the city secretary rather than reasoning from what the next town over does.

Required Documents for Bexar County Short-Term Rentals

Because that San Antonio fee doesn't come back, it pays to have the paperwork assembled before you open the application rather than halfway through it. The city's permit page sets out what a complete submission holds:

• Contact information for three people, who can all be the same person: the property owner, the applicant, and a designated operator reachable 24/7.
• A floor plan and a parking plan showing the maximum number of guests, where the fire extinguishers are, the sleeping areas, the emergency evacuation routes, and the designated off-street parking.
• A notarized authorization from the owner, wherever the person applying isn't the owner of record.
• Proof of ownership. Staff check the owner of record against the Bexar County Appraisal District, so a recent purchase that hasn't caught up in the appraisal roll needs the recorded warranty deed instead.
• A hotel occupancy tax account. The city tells operators not to wait for the permit before registering, since your first report falls due at the end of the month your account number arrives.

Occupancy isn't a number you choose, incidentally. The June 2024 amendments clarified that maximum occupancy is whatever the applicable building codes allow, so the figure on your floor plan has to match the building rather than your revenue model. And where the property has outdoor amenities such as a pool or a hot tub, quiet hours matching the city noise ordinance must be posted inside the unit.

Outside the city limits that document list shrinks to almost nothing, which is the upside of an unregulated jurisdiction and also its trap. Keep the on-site sewage facility permit and any floodplain permit where you can find them, because when a lender or an insurer asks about the septic system under a house that sleeps ten, those two pieces of paper are the whole record. There's no county certificate of occupancy to fall back on.

Bexar County Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through the permitting and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to sort out, and this is the part of Bexar County that trips up experienced operators rather than beginners. Three governments tax the same night's stay, two separate systems collect them, and a recent change in how the platforms pay has made the split much less obvious than it used to be.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
State hotel occupancy tax	6%	Texas Comptroller, remitted by Airbnb and Vrbo
City of San Antonio HOT	9% (7% general plus 2% Convention Center)	City of San Antonio, through Avenu Insights
Bexar County HOT	1.75%	City of San Antonio, on the county's behalf
Other cities, Helotes for example	7%	That city, direct

So inside San Antonio those first three stack to 16.75% of the room rate, and the city's short-term rental tax fact sheet confirms the split, explaining that the 9% is a 7% general occupancy tax plus 2% for the Convention Center expansion, and that the city collects the county's 1.75% as well.

Now for the part that changed, because it's the single thing a 2024-era guide is most likely to get wrong. Effective March 10, 2025, Airbnb and Vrbo began paying San Antonio's city HOT directly on behalf of operators, on top of the state tax those platforms have collected for years. That sounds like a simplification, and it half is, until you read the next line on the city's own hotel tax page for short-term rentals: every Airbnb and Vrbo operator must still "continue to file reports and pay Bexar County HOT through Avenu," and must still file city reports covering anything the platforms didn't pay. The county piece stays yours. No platform covers it.

Two more rules turn that into a monthly chore rather than an annual one. Reports fall due before the last day of the calendar month following the period they cover, and a report is required even when the amount due is $0.00 and even when a platform already paid on your behalf.

Watch out for the penalty schedule if you let one slide, since delinquent tax draws 5% from the first day of the second month after the reporting period, another 5% from the first day of the third month, never less than $5, plus interest from the second month at 10% a year, which the city works out as 0.833% monthly. Records have to be kept for not less than four years and produced for inspection when the city asks.

Then comes the sentence every unincorporated owner should read twice, and it sits on that same city page. "All businesses inside and outside the city limits must report their HOT tax monthly," it says. Sitting outside San Antonio spares you the 9% and the permit, yet it doesn't spare you the county's 1.75%, and the reporting route still runs through San Antonio's Avenu portal. Which is exactly why so many county hosts assume nobody wants anything from them.

File anyway.

Guests who stay 30 consecutive days or more count as permanent residents under Texas law and fall outside hotel occupancy tax altogether. That's the standard escape hatch, and it's why a fair amount of Bexar County inventory quietly runs on monthly furnished terms instead of nightly ones. Texas has no personal income tax either, so what's left is federal, though running the property through an entity can pull you into the Texas franchise tax, where most small operators land under the no-tax-due threshold. Don't forget that the hotel taxes above were never your money in the first place, since you collect them from the guest and pass them on.

Texas-Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

All of that sits on a state framework that's unusually hands-off, and seeing it whole explains why Bexar County looks the way it does. Texas has no statute preempting local short-term rental regulation and none authorizing it either, which the Texas Municipal League's own legal guidance puts bluntly: "There is no state statute that either preempts or expressly authorizes a city to regulate STRs." Cities act instead under the general zoning power in Chapter 211 of the Local Government Code, which is precisely the authority a Texas county lacks.

There's no statewide registration, license or permit for short-term rentals either, and no state portal to look one up in. What the state does supply, though, is the tax layer. Tax Code Chapter 156 writes a short-term rental expressly into the definition of a "hotel," sets the rate at a flat 6%, and sends the tax to the Comptroller by the 20th of the following month. A guest goes exempt, mind you, once they hold the right to occupy for 30 or more consecutive days without a break in payment. I read that chapter through an Internet Archive snapshot, since the live statutes site now serves a JavaScript shell that returns no text.

Airbnb has collected that 6% for Texas hosts since May 1, 2017, and the Comptroller's hotel tax FAQ explains that a platform collecting on your behalf files Form AP-102, while a host whose platform doesn't collect has to register directly. Local hotel taxes are a separate matter the Comptroller tells you to confirm with the city or county, and Bexar County's 1.75% falls into exactly that gap.

Still, one state guardrail is worth knowing about if you're already operating. Section 211.019 of the Local Government Code, amended by SB 929 in 2023, means that where a zoning change turns an existing short-term rental into a nonconforming use, the city must either let it continue or compensate the owner for the lost property value. That doesn't stop a city writing new rules, yet it raises the price of retroactively shutting down people already in business, which matters more in a metro where small towns keep putting the question on their agendas.

Beyond the statutes, Texas short-term rental law is being shaped in court rather than in the legislature. Appellate decisions out of Austin and Fort Worth have pushed back on retroactive bans, a petition over Dallas's ordinance has been sitting at the Texas Supreme Court, and reporting suggests it was abated in February 2026, which I couldn't confirm from a court record and so wouldn't treat as settled. No short-term rental bill was enacted in the 89th Legislature in 2025. Our Texas statewide guide maps how that patchwork plays out city by city, and the Williamson County guide covers the Austin commuter belt, where the same legal questions have landed rather differently.

Does Bexar County Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how little the state constrains any of this, the honest answer is that enforcement depends entirely on which enforcer you've drawn. Bexar County itself enforces nothing here. After all, there's nothing to enforce: no ordinance, no permit, no inspection regime for a residential property outside a city limit. A neighbor out there who objects to your guests has nuisance complaints, deed restrictions or a civil suit, and no county code officer.

San Antonio is a different animal, and its process is worth walking through because it ends somewhere unusual. A 3-1-1 call goes to the Development Services code enforcement section, an inspection follows within three days, and a property found in violation gets a 14-day notice. Code Enforcement then reinspects. If the violation is still there, the city's enforcement fact sheet says staff will email the platform to remove that listing until the property complies. Notice what that skips. The city doesn't have to win a case to cost you your bookings.

The FY2025 numbers show a department that works this file rather than filing it: 863 violations reported, 1,820 investigations including proactive sweeps and reinspections, 582 violations found and 415 cleared. Three accrued citations at one property inside three years revokes the permit outright, and since June 2024 the city can also use an administrative hearing officer or a district court injunction instead of a criminal citation, or call the operator of a much-complained-about property into a mandatory meeting with the department director.

Revocations aren't rare either, since San Antonio has revoked 2,739 permits over the life of the ordinance, 516 of them in FY2025 alone, for reasons the annual report lists as hotel occupancy tax delinquency, ordinance violations, change of ownership and customer requests. Read that list again. Notice which item comes first. Tax delinquency leads it, ahead of noise, parking and parties, which brings the monthly zero-dollar filing back into focus, because the thing most likely to end a Bexar County short-term rental business is an administrative habit rather than a bad guest.

Out in the smaller cities, enforcement can be sharper still, though it's also more contested. Hollywood Park's prohibition came with fines the town said could reach $2,000 a day, and three homeowners sued in December 2023. A federal court granted a preliminary injunction that month, and as News4 San Antonio reported, that protection reached only the named plaintiffs while everyone else in town stayed exposed. I couldn't find a final judgment as of July 2026, so treat the ban as live unless you happen to be one of the people it was enjoined against.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Bexar County

Assuming your address survives all of that, the order below matters, since the first two steps decide whether the rest are worth your time or your money.

1. Establish which jurisdiction you're actually in. City limits, not mailing address. Confirm with the city you think you're in and with Bexar County Public Works on 210-335-6700 before you spend anything.
2. Read your deed restrictions and HOA covenants. Neither the county nor the city enforces these, and neither will help you once a covenant already bars transient rentals.
3. Outside a city limit, sort the infrastructure first. Get or renew the on-site sewage facility permit, check whether you sit within 100 feet of a FEMA floodplain, and size the guest count to the septic system rather than to the bedrooms.
4. Inside San Antonio, check zoning and blockface density before you buy. C-3, L, I-1 and I-2 are out, Type 2 is capped at 12.5% of the units on a blockface, and since the city won't pre-clear eligibility, a dense blockface means budgeting for a special exception at $400 or $600 against a 25% approval rate.
5. Open the hotel occupancy tax account early. Register with Avenu before the permit is granted, since your first report is due the last day of the month your account number arrives.
6. Assemble the application. Owner, applicant and 24/7 operator contacts, floor plan and parking plan, notarized owner authorization where it's needed, and proof of ownership matching Bexar County Appraisal District records.
7. Apply and pay the $300 or $450. Expect a decision within five business days of a complete application, and treat any request for missing information as urgent, because incompleteness is what stalls permits here.
8. Post what has to be posted and set the house rules. Occupancy at whatever the building code allows, extinguishers and evacuation routes where the floor plan says, quiet hours posted inside if there's a pool or hot tub, and the permit number on every listing.
9. Diarize the monthly filing and the three-year expiry. File every month even at zero, watch for the renewal reminder ninety days out, and don't let the permit lapse, since a late renewal becomes a brand new application.

With the rules clear, the arithmetic decides the rest, and Bexar County reads quite differently depending on whether you're pricing a downtown Type 2 condo or a hill-country place out past Helotes. Comparing the county against the rest of the state on the Texas short-term rental market data is a sensible last step before you commit, and our San Antonio guide goes deeper on the city itself.

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

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, four offices between them handle almost every question a Bexar County host has, and picking the right one first saves an irritating amount of time on hold.

Unincorporated property: permits, septic, floodplain

Bexar County Public Works Department handles the permits that do apply outside city limits, including on-site sewage facilities, floodplain, storm water and right-of-way.

• Address: 1948 Probandt St., San Antonio, TX 78214
• Phone: 210-335-6700
• Hours: lobby 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., business hours 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Friday, closed on county holidays
• Email by permit type: [email protected] for floodplain, [email protected] for storm water quality, [email protected] for subdivision plats, and Mike Lara on 210-335-0295 or [email protected] for on-site sewage facilities

Fire code, commercial conversions and events

The Bexar County Fire Marshal's Office issues building permits in unincorporated areas for commercial, public and multi-family structures, and handles mass gathering applications. Applications are in person by appointment only.

• Address: 9810 Southton Rd., San Antonio, TX 78223
• Phone: 210-335-0300, option 2 for appointments
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., closed on county holidays, with the office phones monitored around the clock

San Antonio permits and code enforcement

San Antonio Development Services issues, renews, revokes and enforces short-term rental permits.

• Address: Cliff Morton Development and Business Services Center (One Stop), 1901 S. Alamo St., San Antonio, TX 78204
• Permit information: 210-207-1111
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Complaints: 3-1-1, or the 24-hour short-term rental line on 855-431-4818

Hotel occupancy tax, city and county

Avenu Insights & Analytics runs the online portal on the City of San Antonio's behalf, for the city's 9% and Bexar County's 1.75% alike.

• Phone: 888-885-7289
• Email: [email protected]
• State hotel tax: the Texas Comptroller on 1-800-252-1385, or the hotel occupancy tax pages

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Bexar County on Reddit and BiggerPockets Think about Local Regulations?

Those phone numbers exist because the county genuinely is confusing to operate in, and host discussion reflects the confusion more than any anger about the rules. What follows is my reading of recurring themes on BiggerPockets, which I could reach, rather than Reddit, which blocks automated access and which I therefore won't speak for.

The most common complaint from owners outside San Antonio isn't the rate, it's that nobody can tell them where to pay it. Back in September 2022 a Bexar County operator opened a BiggerPockets thread with exactly that problem, saying he was "trying to figure out if anyone can get me spun in the right direction with the local tax authority" for a first Airbnb in the county. His property sat outside city limits and he'd been told the city tax didn't apply to him, yet nobody could point him at a county department to register the 1.75% with.

That thread is one operator's account of a phone call rather than an official position, though the underlying problem is real enough, and the answer is unintuitive enough to be worth stating plainly. The county's tax runs through the City of San Antonio's portal even when your property has nothing else to do with San Antonio.

Inside the city, meanwhile, sentiment splits along the Type 1 and Type 2 line. Owner-occupiers tend to describe the process as slow but fair, while investors talk about blockface density as the thing that decides whether a purchase works at all, and about the Board of Adjustment as a coin flip they can't price in advance, which that 25% approval rate rather supports. The 2024 fee increase drew far less anger than you'd expect, mostly because $450 spread over three years is small next to one lost booking weekend.

The suburbs are where hosts sound genuinely nervous, and Hollywood Park is why. A town of a few thousand people voted a total ban into effect within months and has been litigating it ever since, which is the scenario every small-city host in the county now watches for on their own council agenda. Nobody I've read expects San Antonio to follow, and the worry sits instead with the twenty-minute drive north or east, where one council meeting can change the answer for good.

Rules like these look like paperwork and behave like a business model. Somewhere that regulates lightly hands you the freedom to do as you like along with the whole of the risk when it goes wrong, while somewhere that regulates hard hands you a rulebook and a reason for the neighbors to leave you alone. Both are workable. Make sure you know which of the two you're buying before you sign, because it's the part of the purchase nobody puts a number on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a permit to run an Airbnb in Bexar County, Texas?

Bexar County issues no short-term rental permit and holds no zoning authority over unincorporated land, so a property outside every city limit needs no county operating permit at all. Inside a city, the city's rules govern. San Antonio requires a permit from its Development Services Department before you take a booking, costing $300 for an owner-occupied Type 1 and $450 for a non-owner-occupied Type 2, valid for three years.

How much is the hotel occupancy tax on a short-term rental in Bexar County?

Bexar County levies 1.75%, and the City of San Antonio collects it on the county's behalf through the Avenu Insights portal. Inside San Antonio you add the city's own 9%, which is a 7% general occupancy tax plus 2% for the Convention Center expansion, and Texas adds a flat 6% statewide, for 16.75% in total. Other Bexar County cities set their own rate, and Helotes charges 7%.

Do Airbnb and Vrbo pay the Bexar County hotel tax for you?

No. Since March 10, 2025 both platforms have remitted the City of San Antonio's 9% directly, on top of the 6% Texas hotel tax they've collected for years, but the Bexar County 1.75% isn't covered by that arrangement. Operators still have to file a monthly report through Avenu and pay the county portion themselves, and the report is required even when the amount due is zero or a platform already paid.

How many short-term rentals are allowed on one street in San Antonio?

Type 1 rentals, meaning the owner's or operator's primary residence, face no density limit. Type 2 rentals are capped at 12.5% of the units on a blockface, which the city defines as one side of a street between two intersections, and only one Type 2 is allowed by right on any blockface. Past that limit you need a special exception from the Board of Adjustment, costing $400 with a homestead exemption and $600 without.

Can a city inside Bexar County ban short-term rentals?

Yes, and one has. The Town of Hollywood Park adopted Ordinance No. 2045 in November 2023, prohibiting short-term rentals within its limits and giving rentals already under contract six months to comply. Three homeowners sued, and a federal court granted a preliminary injunction in December 2023 that reached only the named plaintiffs. No final ruling was available as of July 2026.

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