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

Do you own a place in Lund and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and you don't even have to live in the house to do it. Lund is an unincorporated community at the north end of Highway 101, inside Electoral Area A of the qathet Regional District in British Columbia, and the regional district has never passed a short-term rental bylaw. There's no local licence to buy, no permit to apply for, and no cap on the number of nights you sell.

That's rarer in this province than it sounds, because B.C.'s principal residence rule has closed most of the coast to non-resident owners since May 2024. The catch is that everything binding on you sits one level up instead. The province registers every host now, the platforms have been pulling unregistered listings since June 2025, tax stacks three deep, and the regional accommodation tax went up on May 1, 2026. A watershed zoning bylaw also covers part of the Lund area, so a minority of parcels carry land use rules that the rest of the community doesn't.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly: what the province requires in 2026, what registration costs, the three taxes that attach to a night, how any of it gets enforced in a place this small, and who to call when your situation doesn't fit the form. Every figure below comes from the qathet Regional District's own bylaws and reports or from British Columbia's legislation and tax pages, checked in July 2026. Before you buy anything up here, run the property through BNBCalc first.

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

The layer most hosts go hunting for first is the local one, and in Lund it doesn't exist. The regional district says so itself. Its own qathet Regional District Housing Needs Report, adopted in January 2024, says it in a single sentence: "Currently, the qRD does not regulate rentals."

The same report goes further in its data-gaps section, noting that "the Regional District does not regulate development or issue building permits" and that "without licensing or registration with the Regional District, there is no accurate data on how many of these properties have the potential to be used for long-term housing."

That isn't a loophole anybody found. It's the deliberate shape of a rural local government that runs water, sewer, waste and parks, and leaves land use alone almost everywhere.

The bylaw index backs it up. Going through the district's land use bylaws, you get official community plans and six site-specific zoning bylaws covering Texada Island, Traffe Road, Random Road, Douglas Bay Road and two watersheds. No short-term rental bylaw. No business licence bylaw. No building bylaw either.

Even the community plan stays quiet on the subject. Electoral Area A Official Community Plan Bylaw No. 500, 2015 names Lund the community hub of the area and runs to more than 40,000 words, yet it never mentions short-term rentals, vacation rentals or bed and breakfasts once.

Its closest policy is on home-based business, which it permits as an accessory use in all primary residences. The conditions are that the activity makes no noise or odour detectable next door, water and sewerage are adequate, off-street parking is provided, and "the resident of the home operates the business."

An OCP is a statement of objectives though, not a regulation, so nothing in it licenses or forbids your listing.

The one local rule that can still catch you

There's a single exception, and it's geographic. The Lund Watershed Zoning Bylaw No. 513, 2017 applies to the land inside its Schedule A, which is the watershed feeding Lund, Thulin and Petri Lakes. Inside that boundary, real zoning applies, and its permitted-use lists are closed rather than illustrative. The wording is "the following and no other uses are permitted."

• Watershed Rural (WR) permits a "bed and breakfast operation", defined as lodging and meals for paying guests "carried out by the resident(s) of the property" and clearly accessory to the dwelling. A hosted stay, in other words.
• Watershed Protection (WP) permits only single-family residential use and public utilities. No bed and breakfast at all.
• "Single-family dwelling" is defined as a building "occupied or intended to be occupied as the principal residence of a person or family", which is a phrase worth reading twice if your plan is a whole house nobody lives in.
• Enforcement runs through the Manager of Planning, who may enter a property at reasonable times to check compliance, and a conviction carries a fine of up to $2,000 with each day treated as a separate offence.

I couldn't find any published qRD interpretation of how that closed use list applies to a whole-home rental, so do check your parcel against Schedule A and ask planning directly before you assume none of it reaches you. Most of Lund sits outside that boundary. Some of it doesn't.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Lund

Outside the watershed, then, the question stops being local and becomes provincial, which is where Lund gets genuinely interesting for anyone who doesn't live here.

British Columbia limits short-term rentals to a host's principal residence, plus at most one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit on the same property. That's section 14 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, and it's what closed most of B.C.'s larger communities to non-resident short-term rental owners from May 1, 2024 onward. It applies everywhere except "exempt land".

And Lund is exempt land. Schedule 1 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Regulation prescribes "electoral areas, except the following", and every exception it then names sits somewhere else entirely. Four are in the Cowichan Valley Regional District, two in Strathcona, three in Okanagan-Similkameen, one is the UBC portion of Metro Vancouver's Electoral Area A, and the last is Electoral Area B of Columbia-Shuswap. The qathet Regional District appears nowhere on that list.

So a non-resident owner can legally run an entire Lund house as a nightly rental in 2026. You can't do that in most of coastal B.C., and it's the single fact that decides whether this market is worth your time.

Now for the parts that temper it.

• The market is tiny and seasonal. Electoral Area A held 1,418 private residences at the 2021 census, of which 636 were occupied by usual residents and 782 counted as potentially vacant, according to Table 27 of the housing needs report. Over half the housing stock here is already somebody's cabin or somebody's rental.
• Growth has been real, at least. The same report puts Area A's population growth between 2016 and 2021 at 24%, against 6.32%, 6.65% and 4.64% in Areas B, C and D.
• Nobody inspects your building. The regional district issues no building permits, so there's no local occupancy sign-off to hand an insurer, a lender or a guest who asks.
• A seasonal cabin may sit outside the whole regime. Section 4(1) of the regulation exempts "accommodation that is seasonal and that is not equipped or suitable as a residence year-round" from both registration and the principal residence rule. Be aware that this turns on the building, not on how you use it, and a winterised cottage you happen to close in November won't qualify.
• Old protections are gone. Legal non-conforming use no longer shields a short-term rental in B.C., per the province's 2023 legislation announcement. Operating since 2011 buys you nothing if a rule lands on you later.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Lund

Since the regional district issues no licence at all, the only registration standing between you and a live listing is the provincial one, and it's mandatory whether or not your local government cares.

Section 6(1) of the Act is blunt about it: "a short-term rental offer must be registered under this Part by the supplier host." A short-term rental is any accommodation offered to the public for "less than 90 consecutive days", so a two-month winter booking counts as much as a two-night one.

Registration through the provincial registry costs $100 a year where the rental is in your principal residence and $450 a year where it isn't, plus a $1.50 service fee, and it renews annually. Since most Lund listings are not the owner's principal residence, budget the $450. Each unit needs its own registration, though one registration covers every listing you run for that unit.

Then section 13 requires the number itself to appear in the listing, alongside a business licence number where a local government requires one. Lund hosts have no licence number to add, so the registration number is the whole of it, and it's been required on listings since May 1, 2025.

What makes this stick is that the platforms police it rather than an inspector. From June 2, 2025 platforms had to stop advertising listings without a valid number and block new bookings on them, and from June 23, 2025 they had to cancel future bookings already taken by unregistered hosts. Over 20,000 B.C. listings were registered by the time the province published those dates, against the roughly 28,000 it estimated existed in 2023.

Getting it wrong is expensive too. Schedule 4 of the regulation sets the maximum administrative penalty for a host who fails to register at $5,000 for a first contravention, $7,500 for a second and $10,000 for a third, with the same escalation for breaching the principal residence requirement where it applies.

One thing to watch, mind you. The province handed regional districts the power to issue business licences specifically so they could "more effectively regulate short-term rentals in rural areas". qathet has not used it. That's a decision the board can revisit at any meeting, and it's the likeliest way Lund gains a local rule.

Required Documents for Lund Short-Term Rentals

Since there's no local application to assemble, the paperwork you'll gather is all for that provincial registration, and the registry is fussier about proof of who you are than about what the building is.

• One piece of government photo identification, from the accepted list: a B.C. driver's licence, a B.C. Services Card or a B.C. Identification Card.
• Two supporting documents confirming your connection to the property. The accepted options include the land title, a property assessment notice, a certificate of insurance, a property tax notice, a banking statement and government correspondence.
• Your rental agreement, if you're a tenant subletting rather than an owner. It counts as one of the two supporting documents.
• A local business licence number, in the places that issue one. Lund doesn't, so leave it.

Each unit gets registered separately, so a house plus a detached cabin is two applications and two fees, not one. Keep in mind that you have 8 days to answer if the registrar sends a Notice of Consideration, and 14 days to report a change to anything you filed. Your renewal window opens 40 days before expiry, with reminders at 40, 14 and 1 day out.

Lund Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your registration goes through and you're able to start taking bookings, there's still tax to sort out, and here it stacks three deep on a single night.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST	5%	The host if GST registered, otherwise the platform, remitted to the CRA
PST on accommodation	8%	B.C. Ministry of Finance, or the platform as a registered marketplace facilitator
MRDT, Sunshine Coast and qathet area	3% since May 1, 2026	B.C. Ministry of Finance, disbursed to Sunshine Coast Tourism Society

The provincial piece is set out on the province's accommodation tax page, which states that "PST of 8% applies to sales of short-term accommodation provided in B.C., unless a specific exemption applies", with up to 3% MRDT on top in designated areas.

That MRDT number is the freshest change on this page. Schedule 2.1 of the Designated Accommodation Area Tax Regulation designates a single area made up of "the area of the Sunshine Coast Regional District" and "the area of the qathet Regional District". It names the Sunshine Coast Tourism Society as the recipient, sets the rate at 3%, and gives the whole thing a repeal date of May 1, 2031.

The province's own sales tax updates page dates the change: "Effective May 1, 2026, the Sunshine Coast Regional District and an area of the qathet Regional District will increase the MRDT rate from 2% to 3%." Anything you read that still says 2% was written before that.

Worth knowing that the two documents don't quite match. The update notice says "an area of" the qathet Regional District while the regulation covers the whole district. Confirm your specific address with the Consumer Taxation Branch rather than guessing at it.

Three exemptions matter for a place with Lund's mix of long summer stays and cheap shoulder-season nights.

• Accommodation supplied "for a continuous period of 27 days or more" is exempt from both PST and MRDT.
• 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.
• A provider with gross accommodation revenue under $2,500 in the previous 12 months, and expecting similar, is exempt, again only where the unit isn't listed on an online marketplace.

Read those last two carefully, because listing on Airbnb or Vrbo cancels both of them outright.

Collection is mostly handled for you. Online marketplace facilitators have to register and collect PST and MRDT, and a host who sells exclusively through registered facilitators doesn't need a PST number, although you stay jointly and severally liable for anything the platform fails to collect.

Airbnb's B.C. tax page confirms it collects 8% PST on the listing price including cleaning and guest fees for reservations of 26 nights or shorter, 2 to 3% MRDT on the same base, and 7% PST on its own service fees. As of July 2026 I could not confirm the same behaviour for Vrbo or Booking.com, so check each platform you list on rather than assuming they match.

GST is federal and works differently. The CRA's guidance on platform-based short-term accommodation applies 5% GST in B.C. to accommodation occupied for less than a month at more than $20 per night. A GST-registered host charges and collects it themselves, including on platform bookings, while an unregistered host has the platform do it. Registration is generally required once taxable supplies pass $30,000 over 12 months.

There's a fourth tax consequence that never appears on a guest folio. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions for a "non-compliant short-term rental", meaning one in a place that doesn't permit them or one that fails to meet all registration, licensing and permit requirements, prorated by non-compliant days. Lund permits short-term rentals, so the local half of that test is satisfied. The registration half isn't automatic, and skipping your $450 provincial registration can therefore cost you the deductibility of an entire season's expenses.

British Columbia-Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That deduction rule only makes sense against the provincial framework it points at, and B.C. rebuilt that framework in a single 2023 statute.

The Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act does four things. It defines a short-term rental as accommodation offered to the public for less than 90 consecutive days. It requires hosts and platforms to register. It restricts rentals to a principal residence outside exempt land. And it obliges platforms to share monthly listing data with local governments so bylaw officers can act on it.

The penalty side got rebuilt at the same time. Regional districts saw their maximum prosecution penalty rise "from a maximum of $2,000 to up to a maximum of $50,000", while municipal ticketing went "from $1,000 to $3,000" per infraction per day. Legal non-conforming use protection for short-term rentals disappeared. Regional districts also gained business licensing power for the first time.

Where the principal residence requirement applies is not fixed, and that's the part to put in your calendar. Communities can opt out where they show a rental vacancy rate of 3% or more for two consecutive years, with requests due February 28 and the change effective June 1. Exempt communities can also opt in by resolution, due February 28, effective November 1. Lund's exemption is therefore a live political choice each year rather than a permanent feature, and the qathet board is the body that would make it.

One boundary is worth naming since it runs right past Lund. Section 4 of the Act says it doesn't apply within Indigenous lands unless the First Nation has signed a coordination agreement with the province. Tla'amin Nation treaty lands are expressly excluded from Electoral Area A, so a property on Tla'amin land answers to Tla'amin law rather than to anything in this guide.

Does Lund Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Set Tla'amin land aside and the enforcement question here has a short answer: not locally, because there's nothing local to enforce. No licence means no licence inspector, no permit means no permit file, and the regional district has told the province in writing that it holds no data on which of its homes are short-term rentals.

Enforcement that reaches Lund arrives from two other directions instead.

The first is the platform layer, and it's the one that bites. An unregistered listing doesn't get a fine, it gets removed, its future bookings cancelled and its ability to accept new ones switched off. That happens without anyone visiting Lund, because the check runs against a registration number rather than a property.

The second is the province's Compliance and Enforcement Unit, which investigates hosts and platforms that fail to register, breach the principal residence requirement or supply false information. It issues compliance orders and administrative penalties on the escalating schedule in the regulation, and it takes public tips through an online form and through ServiceBC. A neighbour with a complaint has a working channel, in other words, even though the regional district has none.

Inside the watershed boundary, the qRD does have teeth, and they're modest. Bylaw 513 lets the Manager of Planning enter a property to check compliance and carries a fine of up to $2,000 per offence, with every day counted separately. Nobody patrols for it. A complaint is what starts a file.

So compliance here is cheap and non-compliance is quietly expensive: $450 and a number in your listing, against a lost booking calendar, a five-figure penalty ceiling and a denied deduction. If you're weighing Lund against other Canadian options before committing, the Canada market rankings are the faster way to see where the revenue sits.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Lund

Assuming the numbers still work for you after all that, the order below matters more than it looks, because the first two steps decide whether the rest is worth doing at all.

1. Confirm your parcel isn't inside the Lund watershed zoning area. Compare your legal description against Schedule A of Bylaw 513 and call qRD planning at 604-485-2260 if the boundary is close. The zones inside it run closed use lists, and a whole-home rental is not obviously on them.
2. Check whether your building is year-round. A genuinely seasonal cabin that isn't suitable as a year-round residence falls outside the provincial regime entirely. Most aren't, so don't talk yourself into this one.
3. Model the property before you spend. Nightly rates in a community this seasonal swing hard between July and February, and occupancy is what decides whether the numbers work. Run it through BNBCalc with a realistic shoulder season before you commit.
4. Register with the province. Gather your photo ID and two supporting documents, register the unit, and pay the $100 or $450 fee plus $1.50. Do it per unit if you have more than one.
5. Put the registration number in every listing, on every platform, before you go live. This is the check the platforms run, and a missing number is what triggers a delisting.
6. Sort out tax collection. Confirm your platform is a registered marketplace facilitator for PST and MRDT, decide whether to register for GST voluntarily or wait for the $30,000 threshold, and remember the MRDT is 3% from May 2026, not 2%.
7. Insure it as a short-term rental. No local permit means no local inspection, so your insurer's questions are the only real check anyone runs on the building.
8. Diarize February 28 each year. That's the deadline on which the qathet board could opt Electoral Area A into the principal residence requirement, which would take effect the following November 1 and would end whole-home hosting here for non-residents.

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

Step one and step eight both end in a phone call, so here's who picks up. Three offices cover almost everything between them, plus the CRA for the federal side, and not one of them is in Lund itself.

Zoning, land use and anything about the watershed bylaw

The qathet Regional District planning service handles land use for Electoral Areas A, B, C and D, including the Lund Watershed Zoning Bylaw and the Electoral Area A community plan.

• Address: #202, 4675 Marine Avenue, Powell River, BC V8A 2L2
• Phone: 604-485-2260
• Fax: 604-485-2216
• Email: [email protected], or [email protected] for general enquiries
• Hours: 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, Monday to Friday, closed 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm

Ask them two things specifically: whether your parcel falls inside Schedule A of Bylaw 513, and whether the board has moved on business licensing since your last check.

Registration, and complaints about a listing

The province's short-term rental registry and its Compliance and Enforcement Unit are reached through the same line.

• Phone: ServiceBC at 1-833-828-2240
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 7:30 am to 5:00 pm
• Complaints: the Public Tip Information Form on the Compliance and Enforcement Unit page

PST and MRDT

Accommodation tax questions go to the Consumer Taxation Branch, not to the regional district.

• Toll free: 1-877-388-4440, or 1-250-410-0373 direct
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, per the province's PST pages

GST and the section 67.7 deduction rule belong to the Canada Revenue Agency. Its platform-based accommodation guidance is the page to start from, and an accountant who has filed a rental statement for a B.C. property is worth more than a phone queue here.

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

That accountant can tell you what the numbers do. What other hosts think is harder to pin down, and it needs a disclosure first: Reddit blocks automated access, and I didn't read BiggerPockets threads for this guide, so nothing below is a quotation from either. What follows is my read of the documented public record up here, and you should weigh it accordingly.

The one place local sentiment is written down is the regional district's own housing work, and it reads as ambivalence rather than hostility.

The housing needs report sets the two positions side by side without picking one. Some rural jurisdictions "prohibit short-term rentals, require them to get a municipal business license or a Temporary Use Permit", it notes. Others "have determined that short-term vacation rentals are good for the local economy, and choose not to regulate or monitor in any way." qathet is in that second camp, and says so.

Money complicates the picture in a way that's easy to miss. The report points out that the district as a whole "benefits from short-term rentals through the Municipal and Regional District Tax", and that MRDT funds have supported affordable housing for workers here since 2020. So the tax a host pays on a nightly stay part-funds the housing programme that a critic of short-term rentals would point to. That tension is why the rate moving from 2% to 3% in May 2026 passed with local support rather than a fight.

Among investors, my sense from B.C. discussion generally is that the exempt electoral areas became the story the moment the principal residence rule landed in May 2024. Attention that used to go to the Okanagan and southern Vancouver Island went looking for places where a whole unit is still legal, and the qathet electoral areas are on that short list. What I have not seen anywhere is an argument that B.C.'s registry can be ignored. That debate ended when the platforms started cancelling bookings in June 2025.

The recurring practical complaint I would expect here, and the one I'd plan around, is thin infrastructure rather than regulation: limited water and sewer servicing, no local building inspection to lean on, ferry-dependent access, and a season that concentrates most of the year's revenue into about four months.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a licence to run an Airbnb in Lund, British Columbia?

Not a local one. Lund is unincorporated and sits in Electoral Area A of the qathet Regional District, which has no short-term rental bylaw, no business licence bylaw and no permit for it. What you do need is a British Columbia provincial short-term rental registration, which costs $100 a year if the rental is in your principal residence and $450 a year if it isn't, plus a $1.50 service fee. The registration number has to appear in the listing.

Does British Columbia's principal residence rule apply in Lund?

No. Schedule 1 of the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Regulation prescribes regional district electoral areas as exempt land, listing only five exceptions in the Cowichan Valley, Strathcona, Okanagan-Similkameen, Metro Vancouver and Columbia-Shuswap regional districts. The qathet Regional District is not among them, so a non-resident owner can legally rent an entire Lund home on a nightly basis in 2026. Exempt communities can opt in by resolution each year, with a February 28 deadline and a November 1 effective date.

What taxes apply to a short-term rental in Lund in 2026?

Three, on top of income tax. GST is 5%, provincial sales tax on accommodation is 8%, and the Municipal and Regional District Tax for the Sunshine Coast and qathet area rose from 2% to 3% on May 1, 2026. Stays of 27 consecutive days or more are exempt from PST and MRDT. Registered online marketplace facilitators such as Airbnb collect PST and MRDT for hosts, though the host stays jointly liable for anything the platform misses.

What happens if you don't register a Lund short-term rental with the province?

The listing stops earning first. Since June 2, 2025 platforms have had to stop advertising listings without a valid registration number and block new bookings, and since June 23, 2025 they have had to cancel future bookings already taken by unregistered hosts. On top of that, the regulation sets maximum administrative penalties of $5,000, $7,500 and $10,000 for a first, second and third failure to register, and section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies expense deductions for a rental that fails its registration requirements.

Is any part of Lund zoned for short-term rentals?

Most of the community has no zoning at all. The exception is the area inside Schedule A of Lund Watershed Zoning Bylaw No. 513, 2017, covering the watershed that feeds Lund, Thulin and Petri Lakes. Inside it, the Watershed Rural zone permits a bed and breakfast operation run by the residents of the property, while the Watershed Protection zone permits only single-family residential use and public utilities. Breaching it carries a fine of up to $2,000, with each day a separate offence.

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