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

Do you own a place in Hunter and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and nobody up here is trying to shut the market down the way New York City did. Hunter sits in Greene County, in the northern Catskills, at the foot of a ski mountain, and renting your house by the night is a normal, permitted, taxed activity.

The catch is which Hunter you actually own in. The Town of Hunter adopted Local Law No. 2 of 2023 on July 27, 2023, and it requires a permit, a fire safety inspection and a fee that climbs with your bedroom count. Then it carves out the two incorporated villages sitting inside it, so an address within the Village of Hunter or the Village of Tannersville can't get the town's permit. And the Village of Hunter has never written one of its own.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly on both sides of that line: what the permit costs in 2026, the paperwork that gets applications sent back, the 8% that attaches to every stay, how hard the town pushes once a neighbour calls, and who to phone when you get stuck on something. Every figure below comes from the town's, the village's, Greene County's or New York State's own pages, checked in July 2026. And before you buy anything up here, run the property through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Hunter

That village line is the first thing to settle, because almost everything else follows from it. Greene County contains a town called Hunter and, inside that town, a much smaller incorporated village also called Hunter, plus a second village at Tannersville.

The town's own text is unambiguous about the split. Section 1(B) says the law "shall apply to all properties within the Town of Hunter excluding the area of the Town of Hunter located within the Village of Hunter and the Village of Tannersville." A mailing address tells you nothing useful here. The municipal boundary your parcel sits on is the whole question.

Outside the two villages, you're under the town's law, and its definition is broad on purpose. A short-term rental is any dwelling unit rented in whole or part for less than 30 consecutive nights. The text then reaches apartments, single and two-family dwellings, condominiums, townhouses, guest houses, cottages, cabins, RVs and any "unique sleeping structures" rented as living quarters with a kitchen.

Hotels, bed and breakfasts and dormitories sit outside it. So does your own use of your own place, which means a family weekend doesn't count against you.

The town is candid about why it wrote the law. Its purpose clause says Hunter has historically been "a small, residential resort community of owner-occupied dwellings" and that extensive short-term renting endangers that character.

Read that as a signal about temperament rather than as a rule. It does explain a few of the harder edges further down, though, like the outright ban on weddings, corporate events and commercial functions unless the Planning Board has approved them through site plan review.

Inside the Village of Hunter the picture flips completely. Going through the village's published local laws, which run through Local Law No. 3 of 2026, there is no short-term rental law of any kind.

The Village of Hunter Zoning Law, adopted October 14, 2013 as Local Law #3 of 2013, never mentions short-term rentals, transient rentals or vacation rentals either. It defines a bed and breakfast, and it stops there.

Unfortunately that isn't quite the free pass it sounds like. The state and county layers still apply, and a village with no rules today is a village that can write some tomorrow.

One quirk of the town's paperwork catches investors out immediately. The application form asks for the "Name of Property Owner (no LLC's)", so the permit is issued to a natural person even where the deed sits in an entity. Keep that in mind if you were planning to hold the property in a single-member LLC and never think about it again.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Hunter

Since a village address gets no town permit, everything that follows applies to the rest of the town. Under Section 3, owners "shall not use their property as a short-term rental without obtaining a revocable short-term rental permit."

A permit runs one year and expires the day before the anniversary of the date it was issued. It doesn't transfer either, so a buyer files a fresh application rather than inheriting yours.

The fee schedule stacks three charges, and every one of them is non-refundable. These are the rates as of July 2026.

Charge	Amount	Notes
Application fee	$175	Due with the packet, whatever the outcome
Fire safety inspection	$175	Required before any permit is issued
Permit fee, studio or 1 bedroom	$250	The permit fee scales with bedroom count
Permit fee, 2 bedrooms	$350	Rises $100 per bedroom from here
Permit fee, 5 bedrooms	$650	The fee sheet flags site plan review above 5
Permit fee, 10 bedrooms	$1,150	Plus $100 per bedroom beyond 10
Re-inspection	$75	Only if the first inspection turns up changes

So a one-bedroom cabin costs $600 to get permitted, and a four-bedroom house costs $900.

Budget it every year. Renewal repeats the whole cycle, inspection included.

Once the packet lands, the Code Enforcement Officer has 30 days to issue the permit, with or without conditions, or to deny it in writing with reasons. A provisional permit valid for 30 days can be issued at the officer's discretion while that review runs, which is the mechanism that keeps a season from being lost to paperwork.

Denials come from five listed grounds, though the mundane ones do most of the damage: an incomplete packet, an unpaid fee, or a property that fails its inspection.

Occupancy is set by formula rather than negotiation. You get two occupants per bedroom plus two more, so a two-bedroom sleeps six and a four-bedroom sleeps ten. A studio starts at two occupants for the first 220 square feet and adds one per additional 100 square feet.

Anything that would hold more than 11 occupants needs Planning Board site plan approval before the Code Enforcement Officer can issue a permit at all. The fee sheet sets that trigger lower, at more than five bedrooms. So if you're near either threshold, do check with the building department before you file rather than after.

And note who counts. An "occupant" is anyone on the property between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., with daytime guests capped at twice that number.

Renewal is where permits get lost. Section 10 asks for the renewal application 30 days before expiry, Section 3 says renew "up to 90 days prior", and the application packet tells owners to renew within three months of the expiration date.

Those three don't line up perfectly, so treat the earliest as the real deadline and diarize it at 90 days out. The packet is blunt about the consequence, and I'm quoting the spelling as published: "If your permit expires, and you did not renew in time, you must re apply in full."

Renewal also means presenting the previous permit, passing another inspection, and clearing any outstanding violations first.

One myth deserves killing here, since it shows up on several third-party regulation pages. There is no cap on the number of short-term rental permits in the Town of Hunter.

No cap appears in the adopted law, the fee schedule, the application packet or the town's own list of local laws, which shows no amendment to the short-term rental law since 2023. So if a page tells you Hunter caps permits at 150 or 250, ask it which section that number comes from.

Required Documents for Hunter Short-Term Rentals

Because that $175 application fee doesn't come back, it's worth getting the packet right the first time. The form itself is short. Assembling the evidence behind it is what takes the weekend, and the town is specific enough that a reasonable-looking substitute gets the application returned.

• Signatures of every owner, or their designated agents, on a form that asks for a person's name rather than an entity's.
• A written statement authorizing inspection, which is how the Code Enforcement Officer gets through the door for both the initial visit and any later compliance check.
• A floor plan of every occupiable level, at least 8.5 by 11 inches, drawn to scale and certified by you. Hand-drawn is explicitly fine. It has to show all rooms and bedrooms, windows, exits, heating and cooling units, and, for the basement, the location of house utilities.
• A parking layout, plus an aerial picture in the current packet, showing where cars go and how many. The law allows one vehicle per bedroom and each space has to be a real 9 by 20 foot rectangle, so 180 square feet. Garage spaces only count if the garage is genuinely available for parking.
• Proof of insurance. The dwelling must be covered for at least its value, plus a minimum of $300,000 for third-party claims of property damage or bodily injury arising out of the rental. A copy of the current policy goes in the packet.
• A signed emergency contact form. That person acknowledges they will respond within one hour, that they're available 24 hours a day, and that their contact details will be publicly available. Any change gets reported to the building department within five business days.
• A statement that no owner has had a short-term rental permit revoked in the previous year, on any property they own alone or with others.

The town publishes its inspection checklist too, which is a gift. It covers the street address being visible from outside, guards and graspable handrails on decks and stairs, unobstructed egress, extinguishers in date, and escape windows in basement bedrooms.

The rest is electrical and housekeeping. Detectors in their proper locations, no extension cords in use, no exposed wiring, guest access to the panel box, latched bear-proof dumpsters, and the permit, emergency contact and parking map displayed in a common area. Walk the house against that list before the inspector does and you'll usually avoid the $75 re-inspection.

Hunter Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to open a calendar, there's still tax to handle, though Hunter's stack is mercifully thin compared with most ski towns.

Charge	Rate	Who remits it
New York State sales tax	4%	The booking service, or you on direct sales
Greene County local sales tax	4%	The booking service, or you on direct sales
Combined rate on a Hunter stay	8%	The booking service, or you on direct sales
Local occupancy or bed tax	None in force	Nobody, no local law authorizes one here

The 8% comes from Publication 718, the state's jurisdiction rate table effective March 1, 2025, which lists Greene County at 8% combined. That date matters for a second reason.

Effective the same day, New York State extended sales tax to short-term rental unit occupancy wherever the rate is more than $2.00 per unit per day. Before March 2025, a Catskills cabin rented by the night carried no sales tax at all. Of everything on this page, that is the change most likely to catch out an owner working from older advice.

Who collects it depends on how you sell. Booking services register as New York State sales tax vendors and collect on every occupancy they facilitate.

You're relieved of collecting yourself only if a booking service handles all of your sales and you hold either Form ST-155, the Booking Service Certificate of Collection, or a publicly available agreement saying the platform will collect. Take one direct booking outside the platform, though, and you're back to registering as a vendor and filing returns yourself. Guests who settle in for 90 consecutive days become permanent residents and drop out of the tax entirely.

Now the part several other guides get wrong. There is no Greene County occupancy tax on a Hunter short-term rental, because New York counties need express Tax Law authorization before they can levy a bed tax at all, and Greene County has never been given one covering the whole county. Inside its borders the only such authorizations run to the village of Catskill under Tax Law § 1202-bbb, at 4% on hotels and motels, and to the village of Coxsackie.

Neither one covers Hunter.

Greene County also doesn't appear on Airbnb's list of New York jurisdictions where it collects occupancy tax, which is a decent cross-check. So if you see a "4% Greene County occupancy tax" quoted somewhere, ask that source which local law it's reading.

Your rental income is ordinary taxable income on top of all this, and the deduction picture for a seasonal mountain house is fiddlier than a spreadsheet makes it look. Be aware that personal-use nights change what you can write off.

New York Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That county line is worth understanding, because Greene County's choices under a new state law now sit above everything the town does. Two chapters built the framework. Chapter 672 of the Laws of 2024 created Real Property Law Article 12-D, and Chapter 99 of the Laws of 2025 restructured it into a county-run model with a local opt-out.

Real Property Law § 447-b sets a floor that applies statewide. Every short-term rental unit needs a conspicuously posted evacuation diagram showing all means of egress, a posted list of emergency phone numbers, a working fire extinguisher, and insurance for the value of the dwelling plus at least $300,000 in third-party coverage.

If that last figure sounds familiar, it's because the Town of Hunter wrote the identical number into its own law two years earlier. Hosts also keep records of every stay for two years after the end of the calendar year, covering dates, guest counts, cost and an itemized breakdown of the tax collected.

Counties then had a choice, and the window has closed. The New York State Association of Counties implementation memo of May 28, 2025 puts the last date to opt out at roughly June 25, 2026.

Greene County opted in. It runs a registry through a free county registration portal, and the county says plainly that "there is no fee to register your short-term rental unit." Registrations under the state framework last two years rather than one.

Two subdivisions of § 447-b decide who registers where, and they're the reason the two Hunters diverge again. Subdivision 6 lets a town that already ran its own registry keep running it, with units in that town registering there. Subdivision 7 bars a city, town or village from creating a new registry once the county has one.

So the Town of Hunter's 2023 permit survives on grandfathered footing, while the Village of Hunter has lost the option of building its own scheme and its hosts fall to the county registry instead. Remember that the county registry is free, which makes ignoring it a strange economy.

Penalties at this layer are modest but real. A host can be fined up to $200 for a third violation, with warnings and corrective actions required for the first two. Booking services carry the heavy end at $500 per day per violation, enforceable by the Attorney General, and that exposure is what makes platforms police registration numbers.

What the state has not done is take power away from towns. A New York Department of State training deck for local governments puts it flatly: it is up to each municipality to define, prohibit and/or regulate short term rentals as they choose.

So there's no statewide preemption protecting your right to rent, and a town can ban outright if it decides to. The one statewide prohibition, the Multiple Dwelling Law class A occupancy rule, is essentially a New York City apartment concept and doesn't reach a Catskills single-family house.

Our New York statewide guide maps the whole picture, while the Westchester County guide and the Erie County guide show how differently two other New York counties have handled the same law.

Does Hunter Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Enforcement here starts with a neighbour, not a patrol. The complaint process in Section 9 sends the complaining party to your designated contact person first, and that contact "shall, within sixty minutes of receiving the complaint, respond to the complaint and remedy as soon as reasonably possible" whatever is out of compliance.

Fire Department Dispatch holds the contact list, so a caller doesn't need to find you. If the response doesn't satisfy them, a written complaint goes to the Code Enforcement Officer, who investigates and can attach conditions, suspend the permit, order corrective action within 30 days, issue a court appearance ticket, or revoke.

The fines are graduated and they compound. A first offense draws not less than $350 and not more than $1,000. A second offense within five years runs from $1,000 to $3,000.

And each week's continued violation constitutes a separate additional violation, which is the clause that turns a stubborn unpermitted rental into real money over a season. Willful violators also reimburse the town for its enforcement costs, staff time and attorney's fees, while court ticket fees are set at minimum equal to a full year of permit fees.

Revocation is the sharper consequence. Lose a permit and no owner of that property can obtain another one for a year. A revocation on health, safety or fire grounds terminates rentals already in progress immediately, and your rental agreement is required to carry a clause allowing exactly that.

Septic is the quiet risk. A failure from overuse, age or damage revokes the permit until the town is satisfied it's fixed. Watch out for that one if you're buying an older house and stretching occupancy to the formula maximum.

Detection is easier than owners assume, since the permit number has to appear in every advertisement. That single requirement turns compliance checking into a desk exercise: pull the listings, match the numbers.

Greene County has been building the same capability at scale. Its request for proposals for short-term rental compliance services, with bids due July 3, 2025, asked vendors to locate listings and owners, identify patterns of non-compliance, tie addresses to county parcel data, and monitor nights booked and associated revenue. That procurement is finished, and the county's registration portal now runs on a commercial compliance platform.

One honest caveat, since I'd rather flag a gap than fill it with a guess. The Town of Hunter doesn't publish permit counts, complaint volumes or fine totals, and I couldn't find enforcement statistics on any official page. What the documents show is a system built to be enforced, with a one-hour response clock, a public advertisement requirement and a county-funded monitoring contract behind it.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Hunter

Given how much of the above turns on the boundary, the order of these steps matters more than it looks. The early ones tell you whether the later ones apply to you at all.

1. Establish which jurisdiction you're in. Town of Hunter outside the villages, or Village of Hunter, or Village of Tannersville. Call the town building department with your tax map number if there's any doubt at all.
2. In the villages, register with Greene County. It's free, it takes one session at the county portal, and it satisfies the state framework. Then ask the village building inspector directly whether anything in the zoning law affects your plan.
3. Outside the villages, size the property against the occupancy formula. Two per bedroom plus two. If your plan needs more than 11 people, or you're above five bedrooms, budget time for Planning Board site plan review before anything else.
4. Fix the safety items before you pay for an inspection. Detectors in every sleeping room and on every floor, extinguishers on each floor and in the kitchen, flues cleaned within the last 12 months, egress clear, fire number visible from road and driveway.
5. Get the insurance right. Dwelling value plus $300,000 third-party minimum, from a carrier licensed in New York or through a licensed excess line broker.
6. Line up a local contact person who will genuinely answer inside an hour, day or night, and who accepts that their details become public.
7. Assemble and file the packet with the fees. Floor plans, parking plan and aerial, insurance copy, emergency contact form, owner agreement. Expect a decision inside 30 days, and ask about a provisional permit if a booking is already on the books.
8. Post everything on day one. Permit and number, occupancy limit, parking limit, contact form and standards near the front door, evacuation procedures in each sleeping room, and a boundary map for guests so they don't wander onto a neighbour's land.
9. Put the permit number in every listing and sort out sales tax before the first guest, either by confirming your platform collects or by registering as a vendor yourself.
10. Diarize renewal at 90 days out. Let it lapse and you reapply from scratch, fees included.

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

Whichever step you get stuck on, four offices cover almost all of it. Knowing which one owns your question saves a genuinely irritating amount of time.

The town permit, inspections and complaints

The Town of Hunter Code Enforcement Officer / Building Inspector administers Local Law No. 2 of 2023, reviews floor plans, runs the fire safety inspection and handles complaints.

• Mail: Town of Hunter, P.O. Box 70, Tannersville, NY 12485
• In person: Town Hall, State Route 23A, Tannersville, NY 12485
• Phone: 518-589-6150 ext. 307, listed as 518-589-6209 ext. 307 on the town's government directory
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:00am to 4:00pm
• Forms: the law, the fee sheet, the application packet and the general complaint form all sit on the town's short-term rental page

The Village of Hunter

If your parcel is inside the village, the town's building department can't help you and the county registry is your registration route. For zoning questions, the Village of Hunter office handles building permits and code enforcement.

• Address: Village Hall, 7955 Main Street, Hunter, NY 12442, mailing P.O. Box 441
• Phone: (518) 263-4020, Monday to Friday, 9:00AM to 5:00PM
• Building Inspector: Carl Giangrande, (518) 263-4020 ext. 1, [email protected]
• Clerk and Treasurer: Kathleen Hilbert, [email protected]
• Online: the village's officials page carries current names and terms

The county registry

Greene County runs the registration system created under Real Property Law Article 12-D, and registration is free.

• Registry contact: Erin Dennin, Senior Tourism Marketing Manager, (518) 943-3223, [email protected]
• County Legislature: 411 Main Street, Suite 408, Catskill, NY 12414
• County Administrator: 518-719-3270
• Treasurer: 518-719-3530, [email protected]

State sales tax

Sales tax registration, returns and the Form ST-155 question belong to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, not to the town or the county. Its short-term rental occupancy publication is the page to read before you decide whether you need to register as a vendor.

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

Those four phone numbers cover the rules. Sentiment is messier, and I'd rather be straight about what I did and didn't read.

Reddit blocks automated access, and its platform terms don't permit the commercial data use that surveying it properly would need, so nothing below is drawn from Reddit threads. BiggerPockets I read directly. The honest finding there is that the useful Hunter discussion is old.

The clearest example is a BiggerPockets thread on short-term rentals in Hunter and Windham from May 2022, more than a year before the permit law passed. An experienced local investor called Hunter, Windham and Jewett "safe" for short-term rentals because locals wanted them to stay legal.

He then warned that shoulder-season revenue was already sliding off its pandemic peak, and that anyone underwriting a Catskills deal should model 2019 rather than 2021. He also flagged New York property taxes as the main drag on cash flow, which is still true and still underestimated by out-of-state buyers.

That "safe" read has aged reasonably well on the legal question and badly on the cost question. Hunter didn't ban anything.

What it did was add roughly $600 to $900 a year in fees, an annual inspection, an insurance floor and a one-hour response obligation, so the market moved from unregulated to administered in about two years. Anyone still working from 2022 forum advice is missing all of that, plus the 8% sales tax that arrived in March 2025.

What I can't give you is a current, sourced picture of how hosts feel about the permit in practice. The town doesn't publish complaint or enforcement data, and no recent thread I could reach discusses it.

So anchor on numbers instead of mood. The Oneonta market page carries real revenue and occupancy data for an upstate New York market, and a seasonal, drive-to, weekend-heavy market like that is a fairer benchmark for Hunter than any national average.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a permit to run an Airbnb in Hunter, New York?

In most of the Town of Hunter, yes. Local Law No. 2 of 2023 requires an annual short-term rental permit for any dwelling rented for fewer than 30 consecutive nights, along with a fire safety inspection and proof of insurance. The law expressly excludes the Village of Hunter and the Village of Tannersville, and neither village has adopted its own short-term rental law, so hosts inside those village lines register with Greene County instead, at no cost.

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

The Town of Hunter charges a $175 application fee and a $175 fire inspection fee. On top of that sits a permit fee that scales with bedroom count, from $250 for a studio or one bedroom to $1,150 at ten bedrooms, rising $100 per bedroom in between. A one-bedroom therefore costs $600 and a four-bedroom costs $900. All of it is non-refundable, a failed inspection adds $75 for a re-inspection, and the whole cycle repeats every year.

What taxes apply to a short-term rental in Hunter?

Combined New York State and Greene County sales tax of 8% applies to short-term rental occupancy where the rate exceeds $2.00 per unit per day, effective March 1, 2025. Booking services register as New York State sales tax vendors and collect on bookings they facilitate. There is no county or town occupancy or bed tax in Hunter, since the only Greene County authorizations in the Tax Law cover the villages of Catskill and Coxsackie.

How many guests can a Hunter short-term rental sleep?

The Town of Hunter allows two occupants per bedroom plus two additional occupants, so a two-bedroom sleeps six, a four-bedroom sleeps ten and a six-bedroom sleeps fourteen. A studio starts at two occupants for the first 220 square feet and adds one per further 100 square feet. Any unit holding more than eleven occupants requires Planning Board site plan approval first. Occupants are counted between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., and daytime guests cannot exceed twice the overnight number.

What are the penalties for renting without a permit in Hunter?

A first offense carries a fine of not less than $350 and not more than $1,000, and a second offense within five years runs from $1,000 to $3,000. Each week a violation continues counts as a separate additional violation, so the exposure compounds rather than capping. The Code Enforcement Officer can also suspend or revoke a permit, and revocation bars any owner of that property from holding a short-term rental permit for one year.

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