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

Do you own a place in Oshawa and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that short-term rentals were never banned here. Under section 5.16 of Zoning By-law 60-94, a short-term rental is a permitted use in every zone that permits dwelling units, which is a more generous starting position than most of the Greater Toronto Area offers. Oshawa is the largest city in Durham Region, Ontario, and it sits about an hour east of downtown Toronto.

Now for the catch. Oshawa's licensing by-law defines a short-term rental operator as a registered owner of the property, and zoning requires that home to be the operator's principal residence, so a tenant can't hold the licence and neither can an off-site investor. Unfortunately for anyone picturing a second house on nightly rates, that plan isn't on offer at any price. Stays run under 28 consecutive days, 180 rental days a year is the ceiling, and the city's register of licensed properties listed 23 addresses as of July 17, 2026.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly: what the licence costs in 2026, the paperwork the city wants before it says yes, the two taxes stacked on every booking, how hard any of it gets enforced, and who to phone when something goes sideways. Every figure below comes from Oshawa's, Ontario's or Canada's own pages, checked in July 2026. Assuming you're weighing an Oshawa property against markets where a whole unit can legally run year round, run both through BNBCalc before you buy anything.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Oshawa

Those 23 licensed addresses tell you most of what you need to know about the shape of this market, so it's worth understanding why the number is that small. Two by-laws do the work, and they pull in the same direction.

The zoning side came first. Section 5.16 of Zoning By-law 60-94, added by amending by-law 52-2018, permits short-term rentals wherever dwelling units are permitted, then immediately narrows what that means:

• Stays must run under 28 consecutive days, and all of them together must not exceed 180 days in a calendar year.
• The unit has to be the principal residence, as defined in the Income Tax Act, of the person or persons operating and residing in the short-term rental. Note the "and residing" part, since it does real work.
• No bed and breakfast, home occupation, group home, lodging house or other rental accommodation may operate in a dwelling unit that contains a short-term rental. You get one or the other.
• The use can't change the external residential appearance of the home, or cause adverse effects like excessive traffic, parking, noise and hours of operation.

The licensing side arrived six years later and closed the gap. Schedule "Q" of Business Licensing By-law 122-2024, passed on October 28, 2024 and since amended by By-law 102-2025, defines an "S.T.R. Operator" as a registered owner of the property who makes it available through a booking platform. Read those two definitions together and the eligible pool is owner-occupiers only.

That rules out a few plans people arrive with. Rental arbitrage dies on the definition, because a tenant isn't a registered owner.

Buying a duplex and running the second unit nightly doesn't work either, since the city says plainly that in a two-unit dwelling, only the unit the operator lives in can be the short-term rental. Own a condo? Then you'll be attesting that your condominium board permits the use, so the board can end the conversation before the city does.

What's left is a spare-room or part-year business. You live in the home, you rent it whole while you're away or you rent up to two bedrooms while you're there, and you stop at 180 days.

Keep in mind that 180 is a hard annual ceiling rather than a target. A property that only works at 300 nights a year doesn't work in Oshawa at all.

Anyone whose numbers depended on year-round nightly income still has an exit, mind you, and it's the long-term market. Around Durham College and Ontario Tech University, though, that pivot has a licence of its own. Residential rental housing in the defined rental area needs a Class A or Class B licence, which runs $275 plus $75 per bedroom for an individually owned unit and lasts two years.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Oshawa

Assuming your home clears the principal-residence test and you're the owner on title, the licence itself is still the cheapest part of this whole exercise. The City's short-term rentals page puts the cost at $100 for the S.T.R. Operator licence plus a $50 application fee, and the Short Term Rental Operator line in Fees and Charges By-law 109-2024 carries the same $100 through its April 2026 consolidation.

You can't advertise first and license later. Section 2.1 of Schedule "Q" bars any person from promoting, advertising or offering a short-term rental unless a licence has been issued and is in good standing, so the listing itself is the offence, not the booking.

Every advertisement has to carry your City of Oshawa licence number too.

An inspection sits in the middle of the process. Applicants have to complete and pass an inspection by the city's Licensing Inspectors, arranged during the application, and once you're licensed you must give the Fire Chief, the Director or authorised staff access to the property at any reasonable time to confirm compliance.

Licences are short-lived by design. Under section 3.9 of the by-law, a licence is issued for a period not exceeding one year, and section 9.1 says no licensee may transfer or assign one, which matters if you sell the house.

The buyer starts from scratch.

Holding the licence brings a standing list of obligations, and this is the part that catches people who assumed a licence was a one-time hurdle:

• Insurance stays in force, specific to the rental nature of the property, at no less than $2,000,000 per occurrence for property damage and bodily injury, naming the City as an additional insured, endorsed to give the City 15 days' written notice of cancellation or material change.
• A Local Contact must be able to attend the property within one hour, at all times, after a phone call or email from anyone.
• Smoke alarms on every level and carbon monoxide alarms wherever people sleep, all under 10 years old, tested annually, with the written test record kept for six years.
• Emergency instructions and your submitted floor plan stay posted in a City-approved location.
• Rented by the room, you're limited to two rooms with a maximum of two occupants each, at any one time.
• Records kept for six years: nights rented, dates rented, whole-home or by-the-room, and confirmation that each renter received the Visitor's Code. The City can demand them within 30 days, or within 24 hours if the Director says so.
• Compliance with a named list of other by-laws, including Noise By-law 112-82, Nuisance By-law 65-2009, Lot Maintenance By-law 127-2007, Winter Access By-law 92-2009, Unauthorized Parking By-law 97-2009 and Waste Collection By-law 90-2024.

The Visitor's Code is a City document you hand to every guest, and it's more useful than it sounds. It's where guests learn that most Oshawa streets carry a three-hour parking limit and that winter rules ban on-street parking between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., which is exactly the sort of thing that produces a tow, a bad review and a neighbour complaint in one night.

Required Documents for Oshawa Short-Term Rentals

Since the $50 application fee buys you a review rather than an approval, it's worth assembling all of this before you file. Section 1.1 of Schedule "Q" lets the Director refuse to even accept an incomplete application, and the list is specific.

• Evidence of compliance with Zoning By-law 60-94, including evidence of principal residence. This is the document that decides the application, so gather it first.
• Written evidence that all property owners are aware of, consent to and authorise the short-term rental use. The declaration form has signature blocks for up to four owners.
• A floor plan identifying all exits, all windows, all rooms with the bedrooms to be rented marked, and all spaces and common areas. Hand-drawn plans are accepted.
• A certificate of insurance in a form acceptable to the City, at the $2,000,000 limit, naming the City as additional insured and identifying that a short-term rental operates on the property.
• Local Contact details: name, permanent address, primary and secondary phone numbers, and email.
• The signed declaration, which attests to condominium-board permission where applicable, compliance with the Building Code Act and O. Reg. 332/12, the Fire Protection and Prevention Act and the Fire Code, the Property Standards By-law 1-2002, working alarms, the two-room limit, and delivery of the Visitor's Code.

Two lines in that declaration deserve a second read before you sign. You confirm you have no outstanding or unpaid administrative penalties or fines owing to the City, so an unpaid parking ticket is a live problem. You also agree to indemnify and save harmless the City against claims arising from your operation of the rental, which is a real transfer of risk rather than boilerplate.

The same form spells out what non-compliance buys you: suspension or revocation of the licence, administrative penalties, prosecution under Part III of the Provincial Offences Act, or an application for injunctive relief in the Superior Court of Justice. Do read it in full before you sign, because the city clearly expects you to have understood it.

Oshawa Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through all that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, and one of these layers behaves differently in Oshawa than it does in Toronto or Ottawa.

Charge	Rate	Collected and remitted by
Municipal Accommodation Tax	5% of the purchase price	You, quarterly, through the City's collection agent
HST	13%	You if you're GST/HST registered, otherwise the platform
Income tax	your marginal rate	You, on your own return

The city charge is the Municipal Accommodation Tax, set by By-law 93-2020 as amended by By-law 84-2024. It's 5% of the purchase price of accommodation supplied for a continuous period of 30 days or less, short-term rentals are named in the definition, and the City's Municipal Accommodation Tax page confirms the 5% rate took effect on October 1, 2024.

Don't forget to show it on the guest's bill as a separate line labelled "Municipal Accommodation Tax", because the by-law requires exactly that wording.

Your platform won't handle this one for you, which does surprise hosts who've operated elsewhere in Ontario. Airbnb's own list of places where it collects and remits occupancy tax covers Barrie, Mississauga, Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor and several others, and Oshawa isn't among them as of July 2026.

So the tax is yours to collect and yours to send in. The City has appointed the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association as its collection agent, and you'll be invited by email to register for the online reporting portal once your licence is approved.

Short-term rentals and bed and breakfasts remit quarterly, by the last day of each calendar quarter end, while hotels and the rest remit monthly. Miss the deadline and a 1.25% penalty lands on the first day of default, with 1.25% interest per month after that.

Unpaid amounts can also be added to your property tax roll as a lien on the land. Keep the books for seven years, since the Treasurer can audit them.

HST is federal and it's 13% in Ontario. The CRA's guidance on platform-based short-term accommodation applies it to stays under one month costing more than $20 a night. Collection then splits by your registration status. Registered hosts charge and collect it themselves, and where the host isn't registered, the platform operator has to. Registration generally becomes mandatory once you pass $30,000 in taxable supplies over 12 months, and a room-share capped at 180 nights often stays under that. Do check the threshold against your own numbers rather than assuming.

Income tax carries the sharpest teeth for anyone thinking about skipping the licence. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions for a "non-compliant short-term rental", which includes one that doesn't meet the registration, licensing and permit requirements where it operates.

Run an Oshawa listing without the licence, then, and a city fine isn't the whole exposure. You can lose the expense deductions against that rental income federally as well. Platforms report host and property data straight to the CRA under Part XX of the same Act, so the mismatch shows up in Ottawa without anyone in Oshawa lifting a finger.

Ontario Short-Term Rental Rules

That federal deduction rule is doing unusually heavy lifting in Ontario, and the reason is what the province chose not to build.

Ontario has no provincial short-term rental statute and no provincial registry. There's no number to display in your listing the way British Columbia, Quebec and Nova Scotia now require, and no province-wide principal residence rule either.

Municipal licensing power flows instead from Part IV of the Municipal Act, 2001. That's why every Ontario city writes its own version, and why the rules change completely when you cross a municipal boundary.

The accommodation tax works the same way. Section 400.1 of that Act, together with O. Reg. 435/17, lets a municipality impose a transient accommodation tax and sets almost no limits on the rate, which Oshawa's own by-law recites in its preamble as the authority for its 5%. The province caps nothing here, so the number is a council decision.

The practical effect is that Ontario gives you no protection from your city and no obligation to it either. Oshawa's 180-day cap isn't a provincial rule and no provincial appeal undoes it. By the same token, a neighbouring municipality in Durham Region may treat the same building type completely differently, so make sure you check the by-law of the specific municipality rather than assuming Durham has one answer.

Does Oshawa Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how little the province is doing here, enforcement is entirely a City of Oshawa matter, and it runs on complaints rather than patrols. The City's by-law enforcement page asks a complainant for their name, address and phone number along with the offending address and the details, and states plainly that anonymous complaints are not investigated.

Officers respond to complaints and identify property use violations. They don't sweep listing sites.

That sounds soft until you notice how easy the City has made verification. The register of licensed short-term rentals is a public PDF carrying each licensed address, its expiry date, the contact name, a phone number and an email.

So a neighbour can check whether the house next door is on it in about ten seconds, which is a much lower bar than filing a noise complaint and waiting for an officer.

The penalty structure is where casual non-compliance stops being cheap. Section 18.4 of the licensing by-law sets administrative penalties for operating without a licence at $500, then $750, then $1,000 for repeats of the same contravention inside a calendar year. A licensee who breaches a condition faces $250, $350 and $450 on the same escalation. Those are tickets, not court.

Prosecution is a separate and much larger door. On conviction under section 17.3, the fine runs from a minimum of $500 to a maximum of $100,000. For a continuing offence it's $500 to $10,000 for each day the offence continues, and the total of those daily fines isn't capped at $100,000.

Every day you operate unlicensed counts as its own offence.

Then there's section 17.5, which is the provision to take seriously. Convicted of operating without a licence, you're liable to a special fine not exceeding the gross revenues you received from the activity, on top of any other fine. The by-law says outright that this exists to eliminate the economic advantage of contravening it.

Watch out for how that stacks with the federal rule above. The same unlicensed year can cost you the revenue through the City and the deductions through the CRA.

The accommodation tax has its own enforcement track as well, with fines of $500 to $10,000 for each day an offence continues, plus the lien and collection powers already mentioned.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Oshawa

Assuming your situation still fits after all of that, the order of these steps matters, since the early ones tell you whether the later ones are worth the trouble.

1. Confirm the home is your principal residence and you're on title. Both are non-negotiable, and neither gets waived. A tenant or a non-resident owner stops here.
2. Check the building's own rules. Condo boards can prohibit the use outright, and you'll be attesting that yours permits it.
3. Do the 180-day math before anything else. Under 28 consecutive days per stay, 180 rental days a year maximum, and no bed and breakfast or lodging house use in the same dwelling.
4. Get the insurance quote early. A $2,000,000 short-term rental policy naming the City as additional insured is not the same product as a homeowner's policy, and it's the item most likely to delay you.
5. Draw the floor plan. Exits, windows, every room with the rented bedrooms marked, and the common areas. Hand-drawn is fine.
6. Line up a Local Contact who can genuinely attend within one hour, at any time of day. A relative who lives in Whitby works; a property manager two hours away doesn't.
7. Clear any outstanding City fines or penalties, then sign the declaration and apply with the $100 licence fee and $50 application fee.
8. Pass the inspection, which the City arranges during the application process.
9. Put the licence number in every advertisement, post the emergency instructions and floor plan, and start the six-year record from your first booking.
10. Register for the accommodation tax portal when the invitation arrives, then diarise your quarterly remittance and your licence expiry, which is under a year away from day one.

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

Most of those steps run through one counter, which makes this simpler than it is in bigger cities. Knowing which line to use for which question still saves an afternoon.

Licensing, zoning and the application itself

Service Oshawa handles short-term rental licensing enquiries, applications and by-law complaints.

• Address: Oshawa City Hall, 50 Centre St. S., Oshawa, ON L1H 3Z7
• Phone: 905-436-3311
• Toll free: 1-800-667-4292
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Other City Hall departments run Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The accommodation tax

The Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association collects the Municipal Accommodation Tax on the City's behalf and runs the reporting portal.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 905-361-0268
• City finance: [email protected], or 905-436-3311

Complaints, in both directions

By-law complaints go through Service Oshawa on the same number, and remember that the City won't act on an anonymous one. If you're on the receiving end, that cuts both ways: the complainant's details go to the City, not to you.

Records and personal information

The declaration form names the City's Information Access and Privacy Officer for questions about the personal information your application collects. That's 50 Centre Street South, Oshawa, Ontario, L1H 3Z7, on 905-436-3311.

Be aware that your name, phone number and email end up on a public register.

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

That public register shapes the conversation more than anything else in the by-law, since it means Oshawa hosts operate in the open. What follows is my read of the recurring themes rather than a survey.

One caveat before the themes. I didn't read Reddit threads for this, because Reddit blocks automated access and scraping it for a commercial guide like this one isn't allowed under its platform terms, so I'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

• Investors treat Oshawa as a long-term rental market, not a short-term one. The principal-residence rule plus the 180-day cap removes the model most people arrive looking for, and the discussion usually turns to student housing near Ontario Tech and Durham College, or to mid-term furnished rentals, both of which sit outside the short-term regime.
• Owner-occupiers describe the licence as cheap but fiddly. At $150 it's a rounding error next to the $2,000,000 insurance endorsement and the inspection, and the insurance is where the timeline usually slips.
• The one-hour local contact rule draws the most complaints from people who travel. Renting the whole home while you're away is the obvious use case for a 180-day cap, and it's also the case where "someone who can be here in an hour" is hardest to arrange.
• Nobody argues the rules don't exist any more. The 2024 licensing by-law ended that debate. What people argue about now is whether 180 days is the right number, which is a different conversation and one for council.

Anyone weighing Oshawa against places where a whole unit can legally run all year should put the numbers side by side first, and the Canada market pages are a reasonable place to start. Run the property through BNBCalc at 180 nights rather than 365, since that's the only version of the business Oshawa will license.

The broader lesson travels past this city. When a municipality ties the licence to who sleeps in the building rather than to how the building gets used, the rule isn't about tourism at all, and no amount of structuring gets around it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Oshawa in 2026?

Yes, with two hard conditions. The operator must be a registered owner of the property, and the dwelling must be that person's principal residence as defined in the Income Tax Act. You also need a City of Oshawa S.T.R. Operator licence before advertising, and the licence number must appear in every listing. Stays run under 28 consecutive days, with a ceiling of 180 rental days per calendar year.

How much does an Oshawa short-term rental licence cost?

The licence is $100 plus a $50 application fee, so $150 to apply. It lasts no more than one year and can't be transferred or assigned, meaning a buyer of the property has to apply fresh. The larger costs sit around it: commercial liability insurance of at least $2,000,000 per occurrence naming the City as an additional insured, and a property inspection by City licensing inspectors.

What are the penalties for running an unlicensed short-term rental in Oshawa?

Administrative penalties for operating without a licence escalate at $500, $750 and $1,000 for repeats of the same contravention within a calendar year. Prosecution is heavier: a minimum fine of $500 and a maximum of $100,000, or for a continuing offence, $500 to $10,000 for each day it continues. A convicted operator is also liable for a special fine of up to the gross revenue the unlicensed rental earned.

Does Airbnb collect Oshawa's accommodation tax for hosts?

No. Oshawa doesn't appear on Airbnb's list of jurisdictions where it collects and remits occupancy tax, unlike Toronto, Ottawa, Mississauga and Barrie. Oshawa hosts collect the 5% Municipal Accommodation Tax themselves, show it as a separate line on the guest's bill, and remit quarterly through the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association's reporting portal. Late payment draws a 1.25% penalty plus 1.25% interest per month.

Can you rent out a second property or a basement apartment in Oshawa on Airbnb?

No. The zoning by-law requires the unit to be the principal residence of the person operating and residing in it, and in a two-unit dwelling the City permits only the unit the operator lives in to be a short-term rental. Renting up to two bedrooms of your own home, with a maximum of two occupants per bedroom, is permitted. A separate investment property has to go to the long-term or mid-term market instead.

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