Montreal Short Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Montreal and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? The honest answer changed in 2025, and it changed for the stricter, because Montreal is now one of the toughest short-term rental markets in Canada to legally operate in. If your plan is to buy a condo and list the whole thing on Airbnb year-round, that plan doesn't work almost anywhere in the city anymore.

What's still legal is narrower than most 2024-era guides describe. You can rent your own principal residence, the home you actually live in, for stretches between June 10 and September 10 each year. You can also run a year-round commercial tourist home, but only in specific pockets of a handful of boroughs, most of them narrow commercial strips the borough names by street. Everywhere else, the door is closed. Montreal reached this point after a fire in Old Montreal killed seven people in an illegal Airbnb in March 2023, and the city council's response, a bylaw passed on March 18, 2025, rewired how the rules get enforced.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in 2026: which boroughs still allow it, what CITQ and the city both require, what it costs, the tax layers that stack on top, and how hard Montreal actually pushes on the people who skip a step. Every figure below comes from Montreal's own site, Quebec's own statute, or the provincial government's own announcements, read directly in July 2026.

What are the Short-Term Rental Regulations in Montreal, Canada?

Two layers of law stack here, and knowing which one does what explains most of the confusion.

The bottom layer is Quebec's own statute, the Act respecting tourist accommodation, chapter H-1.01. Article 4 requires anyone operating a tourist accommodation establishment, meaning anywhere you house a paying guest for 31 days or fewer, to register with the minister first. That registration runs through the Corporation de l'industrie touristique du Québec (CITQ), the body the minister delegates the job to.

Article 23 of the same law does something else worth knowing: it protects a baseline right to host guests in your own principal residence, one reservation at a time, no meals served, and no municipal zoning bylaw can flatly ban that. Mind you, the same article carves out an exception, letting a city amend its zoning through a specific fast-track procedure to restrict even that baseline right. That carve-out is exactly the tool Montreal reached for.

The top layer is Montreal's own bylaw, tightened dramatically on March 18, 2025. Before that date, hosting your principal residence was a year-round option almost everywhere in the city. After it, principal residence rentals are permitted only from June 10 to September 10 each year, city-wide, full stop.

The city council passed this two years to the month after a fire tore through a heritage building in Old Montreal, killing seven people, six of whom were staying in illegal Airbnbs in a zone where short-term rentals had already been banned since 2018. Councillor Benoit Dorais described the intent bluntly: the new rule "reverses the burden of proof," so a listing advertised outside the summer window is an automatic violation instead of something inspectors have to build a case around.

Put the two layers together and three things fall out that no amount of paperwork changes:

• Provincial CITQ registration is mandatory for every stay of 31 nights or fewer, whether you're a homeowner renting a spare room or a company running a commercial property.
• A Montreal principal residence rental only runs June 10 through September 10, and even then it's capped at 31 nights per booking and no meals served.
• A non-principal-residence, year-round commercial tourist home is legal only where a specific borough zoning bylaw says so, and most boroughs don't say so at all.

Two boroughs-wide exceptions exist and both cut the wrong way for hosts. Lachine, Saint-Laurent and Saint-Léonard prohibit even principal residence rentals outright, all year, no summer window. And a stay of 32 nights or longer isn't a short-term rental at all under Quebec's definition, so it needs no CITQ registration and falls under ordinary landlord-tenant rules instead, the Tribunal administratif du logement's territory rather than this one.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Montreal

Unfortunately for most people reading this with an investment plan in mind, there isn't a version of that plan that clears Montreal's zoning as it stands in 2026. Buying a second unit and listing it whole on Airbnb, year-round, at nightly rates, requires a commercial tourist home designation, and most of Montreal's boroughs prohibit that outright: Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Lachine, L'Île-Bizard-Sainte-Geneviève, Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Montréal-Nord, Rivière-des-Prairies-Pointe-aux-Trembles, Saint-Laurent and Saint-Léonard among them.

Where it's allowed at all, it's allowed on named streets rather than across a borough. Ville-Marie permits it only on a stretch of Rue Sainte-Catherine between Saint-Mathieu and Atateken, with buildings kept at least 150 metres apart. Le Plateau-Mont-Royal allows it on part of Boulevard Saint-Laurent and part of Rue Saint-Denis. Le Sud-Ouest allows it on a few Griffintown streets and along Rue Notre-Dame Ouest. Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension allows it on Rue Saint-Hubert and Rue Jean-Talon Est.

Do check your own address against the city's borough-by-borough page before you get attached to a property, because the boundary between "legal commercial zone" and "flatly prohibited" often runs down the middle of a single street.

What's actually available to most people is a room-share, and it's seasonal rather than a business. You live in the unit, you register it, you host during the June 10 to September 10 window, and the revenue to model is a few months of a spare bedroom rather than a year-round unit. Even that gets narrower once you factor in the building itself: condo declarations and co-ownership syndicates can, and often do, prohibit short-term rentals in their bylaws, and CITQ registration requires proof the owner or syndicate has authorized it.

If you already own Montreal property and the nightly-rate math only worked outside that summer window, the honest pivot is a 32-night-plus furnished rental, which sits outside this entire regime and runs under ordinary lease law instead. Before you commit either way, run both scenarios, the three-month seasonal listing and the furnished mid-term rental, through BNBCalc so you're comparing real numbers rather than guessing which one clears.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Montreal

Since a Montreal rental clears zoning at all, it needs two separate registrations, not one, and skipping either is what actually gets hosts fined. Provincially, every establishment registers with CITQ. Fees, effective January 1, 2026 and still current as of July 2026, run $54 for a primary-residence establishment, $156 for a general tourist accommodation establishment, and $131 for a youth accommodation establishment, and the same fee applies to the annual renewal.

The certificate is valid for 12 months, has to be displayed at the main entrance where guests can see it, and a digital copy has to go to whichever platform lists the property.

CITQ registration also isn't optional insurance-wise. Quebec's Act and Regulation respecting tourist accommodation, in force since September 1, 2022, requires every registered operator to carry civil liability insurance of at least $2 million CAD. Just make sure you check this with your insurer before you apply, because a standard homeowner's or condo policy typically doesn't cover commercial short-term rental activity, and Airbnb's own host guarantee doesn't substitute for it.

On top of CITQ, Montreal layers its own permit. For a principal residence rental, the city fee is $350, taxes included, and the process runs in a specific order: apply online, visit an Accès Montréal office in person for identity verification with photo ID and a printed provincial Notice of Assessment, register with CITQ, email your CITQ number to the city, then wait for the permit by email. You renew it every year.

For a commercial tourist home, the city charges a compliance-review fee plus a certificate-of-occupancy fee that both vary by borough. Ville-Marie charges $338 for the compliance review and $907 for the certificate; Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce charges $63 just for the review, in the narrow area where it's even allowed.

The penalties for skipping any of this are written directly into the provincial statute, and they escalate fast:

Violation	Individual	Corporation
Failing to provide required information/documents	$500 - $5,000	$1,000 - $10,000
Missing/incorrect registration number in listings or ads	$1,000 - $10,000	$2,000 - $20,000
Operating unregistered, or a false declaration	$2,500 - $25,000	$5,000 - $50,000
Operating after refusal, suspension or cancellation	$5,000 - $50,000	$10,000 - $100,000
Platform failing its own verification duties	$5,000 - $50,000	$10,000 - $100,000

Every one of those figures doubles on a first repeat offence and triples on any repeat after that, so a $2,500 fine for an unregistered listing becomes $5,000 the second time and $7,500 or more after that. On top of the provincial fines, Montreal's own March 2025 bylaw adds a separate municipal penalty: $1,000 per day for a listing advertised outside the June 10 to September 10 window, rising to $2,000 per day for a repeat offender, and that clock runs daily rather than resetting.

Required Documents for Montreal Short Term Rentals

Assuming your address clears both the borough zoning check and the provincial rules above, there's still paperwork to assemble before either application goes anywhere. It's fairly standard, though it has to match across two separate applications. For the CITQ side and the city permit together, expect to gather:

• A current provincial Notice of Assessment, with personal details redacted
• Valid government photo ID
• Proof of the $2 million liability insurance policy
• Either a title deed or property tax bill (owners), or a lease plus written authorization from the owner (tenants)
• A declaration of co-ownership or syndicate letter confirming short-term rental isn't prohibited (condo owners)

Keep in mind that Quebec tightened the residency proof requirement further as of September 1, 2026: applicants now have to submit two separate proofs of principal residence rather than one, aimed squarely at people who were registering an address they didn't actually live in. Owner or syndicate consent, which used to be a one-time document at registration, now has to be renewed annually using a standardized form too.

Since none of that paperwork is refundable once submitted, it's worth double-checking your borough's zoning status and your building's bylaws before you pay either fee.

Montreal Short Term Rental Taxes

Since you've cleared the licensing gauntlet, there's still tax layered on top of every booking, and it comes from two different governments that don't coordinate with each other.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
Quebec Lodging Tax (TSH)	3.5% of the nightly rate	Airbnb automatically; hosts remit it themselves on direct bookings or other platforms
GST (federal)	5%	Host, or the platform if the host isn't separately GST-registered
QST (provincial)	9.975%	Host, or the platform if the host isn't separately QST-registered

The lodging tax is the oldest and simplest piece. Quebec struck an agreement with Airbnb back in 2017, and since October 1 that year Airbnb has collected the 3.5% lodging tax automatically on every Quebec booking and remitted it to Revenu Québec quarterly by tourist region. Tourisme Montréal is the regional body that receives the city's share, and it's a meaningful chunk of that organization's budget. If you book through a platform other than Airbnb, or take a reservation directly, that 3.5% becomes your job to collect and remit.

GST and QST are a separate, federal-plus-provincial pair. From what I can tell going through the compliance guidance, rather than a page I could open directly on Revenu Québec's own site this session, they run on a small-supplier threshold. Once your short-term rental revenue passes $30,000 CAD across four consecutive quarters, registering for both becomes mandatory rather than optional. Below that, registration is voluntary but lets you recover tax on your own expenses.

Where a host hasn't registered separately, the digital platform itself is generally the one required to collect and remit GST and QST on their behalf under Canada's platform-economy rules, so do check what your specific platform states before you assume either way. And keep your booking records regardless, since your rental income is ordinary taxable income on top of all three consumption taxes, reportable to both the CRA and Revenu Québec.

Montreal wide Short Term Rental Rules

Whichever borough you're in, a few rules apply exactly the same way across all 19 of them. The CITQ registration, the $2 million insurance floor, and the three-tax stack above don't vary by neighbourhood, so a Verdun host and a Rosemont host are on identical hooks provincially even though their zoning maps look nothing alike.

What Montreal added city-wide in March 2025 sits on top of that provincial floor. The June 10 to September 10 window for principal residence rentals applies everywhere, including boroughs that otherwise allow commercial tourist homes on specific streets. The reversed burden of proof applies everywhere too: an ad posted outside the window is treated as a violation on its face, not something the city has to independently verify before issuing a fine.

Enforcement itself is centralized rather than left to each borough separately. As of June 10, 2025, oversight of tourist accommodation across all 19 boroughs was delegated to a single squad based in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, the same team that's been chasing illegal listings there since 2023, now expanded from four inspectors to ten.

Does Montreal strictly enforce STR rules? Is Montreal Airbnb friendly?

Given everything above, the answer is yes, and it got noticeably more aggressive in 2025, not less. Montreal isn't an Airbnb-friendly city anymore in the way it might have been described a few years back, and the shift traces directly to the March 2023 Old Montreal fire. Investigators found that six of the seven people who died were staying in illegal Airbnbs, in a building where short-term rentals had already been banned by a 2018 bylaw the owner simply ignored. That single incident reshaped the city's political appetite for enforcement.

The numbers since then tell the story. In 2023 the city stood up a task force of a coordinator and three inspectors covering just Ville-Marie, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal and Le Sud-Ouest, the three boroughs that carried the bulk of Montreal's Airbnb listings, with fines running $1,000 to $4,000 per violation. By March 2025, that had grown into a citywide bylaw with a ten-inspector squad, automatic fines for out-of-season listings, and Mayor Valérie Plante publicly framing the goal in housing terms: returning roughly 2,000 units to the long-term rental market.

Airbnb itself pushed back hard, warning the bylaw could jeopardize more than $400 million in tourism-linked economic activity and 4,400 jobs, which tells you how seriously the industry is taking a rule most cities would treat as a modest zoning tweak.

Provincially, Revenu Québec runs the inspection and investigation side under the tourist accommodation statute. The fine structure scales with how brazen the violation is: a first missing-document slip tops out around $10,000, while operating after your registration's already been cancelled tops out at $100,000 for a corporation, doubling again on a repeat.

Put the city and province together and Montreal is enforcing on two fronts at once, one built around zoning and the calendar, the other built around registration and disclosure.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Montreal

Assuming your situation still fits after all of that, and you're able to get through it, the order below is the one that actually saves time, because the early steps decide whether the later ones are worth bothering with at all.

1. Check your exact address against your borough's zoning page first. Confirm whether you're in a borough that bans commercial tourist homes outright, and if not, whether your street falls inside the narrow authorized zone.
2. Read your lease, condo declaration or syndicate rules. You'll need written authorization if you're a tenant, and confirmation from the syndicate if you're in a co-owned building; both get renewed annually now.
3. Get a $2 million civil liability policy quoted before you apply anywhere. A standard homeowner's or condo policy generally won't cover this, and neither fee below is refundable if you fail on insurance later.
4. Register with CITQ. Pay the applicable fee ($54 primary residence, $156 general, $131 youth), and keep the certificate and registration number handy.
5. Apply for your city permit. For a principal residence, that's the $350 host permit through the online process, including the in-person ID check at Accès Montréal. For a commercial tourist home, it's the borough's compliance review plus certificate of occupancy.
6. Match your listing to your registration exactly, and display your registration number wherever you advertise, including social media, not only the platform listing.
7. Set the calendar before you set the price. A principal residence listing only runs June 10 to September 10; build your model around three months of revenue, not twelve.
8. Register for GST and QST once you're near the $30,000 threshold, or sooner if you want to recover tax on setup costs.
9. Diarize your renewal dates. CITQ, the city permit and the annual syndicate consent all run on a one-year clock, and letting any one lapse mid-season is the fastest way to lose the whole summer.

Who to contact in Montreal about Short Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever step trips you up, three organizations own almost the entire process between them, and knowing which one to call first saves a genuinely frustrating amount of back-and-forth.

City permits, zoning and enforcement

The City of Montreal, through 311 and your borough's own permit counter, handles the host permit, the commercial certificate of occupancy, and complaints about illegal listings.

• Phone (311): 311, or 514-872-0311 from outside Montreal
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Online: the short-term tourist accommodation hub links every borough's own permit page and the report suspicious accommodation form

Provincial registration

CITQ (Corporation de l'industrie touristique du Québec) handles the registration certificate every host needs before applying for anything municipal.

• Phone: 450 679-3737, or toll-free 1 866 499-0550
• Fax: 450 679-1489
• Email: [email protected]
• Address: 1010, De Sérigny, bureau 810, Longueuil (Québec) J4K 5G7
• Online: citq.qc.ca

Taxes

Revenu Québec administers the lodging tax, GST and QST for anyone taking bookings outside a platform that collects automatically. I wasn't able to confirm a direct phone line by reading Revenu Québec's own site this session, since it blocked automated access outright, so the safest route is the department's own site, revenuquebec.ca, where the current tax-on-lodging guidance lives. In practice, most hosts booking exclusively through Airbnb won't need to call at all, since the lodging tax is collected for you automatically.

What do Airbnb hosts in Montreal on Reddit and Bigger Pockets think about local regulations?

What follows is my read of the recurring public themes rather than a survey of specific threads, since Reddit blocked automated access outright this session and I couldn't pull a Bigger Pockets thread cleanly either. Weigh it accordingly.

• Investors talk about Montreal the way New York investors talk about their city now: mostly in the past tense. The nightly-rate, entire-unit business model that used to draw investment in Montreal doesn't really exist anymore outside a handful of named streets, and the general advice pattern is to either chase one of those narrow zoning windows or look elsewhere.
• Existing hosts describe the seasonal cap as the single biggest shift. Going from a year-round listing to a three-month one doesn't just cut revenue, it also changes the math on furnishing, cleaning turnover and whether a property manager is worth paying for at all.
• The 2023 fire comes up constantly as the reason nobody expects a rollback. Even hosts who think the bylaw overreaches tend to concede that the political story behind it, seven deaths in an illegal listing, makes a future council unlikely to loosen the rules again soon.
• The furnished mid-term pivot is the most common workaround discussed. Since a stay of 32 nights or more sits outside this entire framework, plenty of former nightly-rate operators describe shifting toward 30-plus-night furnished rentals instead, the same move New York City hosts made after that market tightened.

Enforcement, in other words, isn't something Montreal hosts describe as a background risk anymore. It's the headline.

Before you commit to either the seasonal or the furnished-rental path, it's worth running the actual numbers rather than guessing at them. BNBCalc can model both scenarios against real comparable data, and the Montreal market page breaks down what similar listings are actually pulling in, which matters a lot more here than in a city where you can list year-round.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Montreal in 2026?

Yes, but only within tight limits. If it's your principal residence, you can host from June 10 to September 10 each year, with a CITQ registration, a $350 city permit, and $2 million in liability insurance. A property you don't live in can only be rented short-term as a registered commercial tourist home, and that's legal in only a handful of boroughs, on specific named streets. Outside those paths, and outside three boroughs that ban it entirely, short-term rental isn't available at any price.

How much does it cost to register a short-term rental in Montreal?

Expect two separate fees. CITQ, the provincial registry, charges $54 for a primary-residence establishment or $156 for a general tourist accommodation establishment, renewed annually. Montreal's own host permit costs $350, taxes included, also renewed every year. A commercial tourist home certificate of occupancy costs more and varies by borough, running roughly $338 to $907 in Ville-Marie, for example. None of these fees are refundable once submitted.

Can you rent out a Montreal apartment you don't live in on Airbnb?

Only as a registered commercial tourist home, and only where your specific borough's zoning allows it, which in most of Montreal it doesn't. Boroughs including Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Lachine and Saint-Laurent prohibit commercial tourist homes outright. Where it is allowed, it's typically restricted to a few named commercial streets rather than the whole borough, so check your exact address against the city's zoning page before assuming you qualify.

What happens if you operate an unregistered short-term rental in Montreal?

Provincial fines start at $2,500 to $25,000 for an individual and $5,000 to $50,000 for a corporation, and those figures double on a first repeat offence and triple after that. Montreal's own bylaw adds a separate municipal fine of $1,000 per day for a listing advertised outside the permitted window, rising to $2,000 per day for repeat offenders. Between the province and the city, an unregistered listing is exposed on two fronts at once.

Is there a way around Montreal's June to September rental window?

Not for a short-term stay under 32 nights, no. The window applies city-wide to principal residence rentals under the March 2025 bylaw, and it's enforced with a reversed burden of proof, so an ad posted outside the window is treated as a violation automatically. The one real alternative is switching to a stay of 32 consecutive nights or more, which falls outside the short-term rental framework entirely and runs under ordinary lease law instead, available year-round.

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