Upland Short Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Upland and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is, you're allowed to, provided you actually live there yourself. That last part matters more than almost anything else in this guide, because Upland, a city of roughly 79,000 people tucked against the San Gabriel Mountains in San Bernardino County, only permits short-term rentals at a host's primary residence. Buy a second house purely to run it as a nightly rental and you don't live in it? The city calls that a "vacation rental," and vacation rentals are flatly prohibited under Upland Municipal Code § 17.23.1.020.

Assuming you do live in the property, the path is a real one: an Administrative Use Permit (AUP) from the Development Services Department, a 10% transient occupancy tax, and a set of operating rules that read more like house rules than red tape once you're through the paperwork. None of it is unique to Upland, mind you. It's the same primary-residence model plenty of Southern California suburbs settled on once the Airbnb boom forced the question, though Upland's version is more detailed than most.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly: who qualifies, what the AUP costs and requires, the tax layers that attach once you're hosting, how strictly the city enforces its own rules, and who to call when you get stuck. Every figure below comes from Upland's own ordinance or its own city pages, checked in July 2026. If you're weighing an Upland property against a market where you don't have to live in the unit yourself, run the numbers through BNBCalc first.

What are short term rental (Airbnb, VRBO) regulations in Upland, California?

Two layers of law sit on top of each other here, and Upland's own ordinance is doing almost all of the actual work, which is the opposite of how California's larger cities usually split it.

The bottom layer is the state, and the state mostly stays out of it. California has no statewide short-term rental permit, no state registry, and no state occupancy tax. Revenue & Taxation Code § 7280 authorizes any city or county to tax stays of 30 days or less, with no cap on the rate, and leaves the rules themselves to local governments. Our California short-term rental guide covers that statewide framework in full, including the fine caps, the HOA carve-out, and the ADU rules that touch every California host. Two of those matter directly here: Civil Code § 4741(c) lets an HOA prohibit short-term rentals outright even though it can't touch longer leases, and Gov. Code § 66323(e) requires ADUs to be rented for 30 days or more, which lines up with what Upland already does on its own (more on that below).

The top layer, and the one that decides whether you can do this at all, is Chapter 17.23.1 of the Upland Municipal Code, adopted by Ordinance No. 1945 in 2020 and unchanged since. It defines a short-term rental as a dwelling unit rented for 30 consecutive days or less in exchange for money or anything of value. Legal activity then splits into two kinds: a "hosted stay," where you're on site throughout the guest's visit except during work hours, and an "un-hosted stay," where you're away for some or all of it. Both are legal, though there's one hard cap on the un-hosted kind that we'll get to in the rules section.

What the ordinance does not allow, under any permit, is a "vacation rental," which it defines as a dwelling that isn't your primary residence. Section 17.23.1.020 says an AUP "shall only be issued to authorize hosted stays and un-hosted stays," full stop, and separately states that vacation rentals "are prohibited." There's no fee that buys around that. No LLC structure changes it either. If you don't live in the unit, Upland does not have a legal path for you to rent it nightly.

Three more things fall out of reading the chapter as a whole:

• The dwelling has to be a single-family detached home or a townhome-style single-family-attached unit, sitting in a Residential Single-Family (RS) zone, a Residential Multi-Family (RM) zone, or a legally established Specific Plan. Standard apartment buildings and duplexes aren't the target here.
• Commercial, industrial and mixed-use zones are excluded entirely. Section 17.23.1.090(C) is explicit that a short-term rental "shall not be permitted" in any of them.
• ADUs can't be short-term rentals at all, regardless of whether the main house on the lot is your primary residence. Section 17.23.1.090(I) bans it outright, stricter even than the state's own 30-day ADU floor.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Upland

Since the ordinance already rules out anyone who doesn't live in the property, the honest starting point here is still a much smaller pool than "business" usually implies. What you're building is a room-share or a whole-home rental of your own house, run around your own life rather than as a separate investment vehicle.

The host has to be one of two things. Either the property owner, or their spouse, parent, or adult child, or a tenant who already lived in the unit as their primary residence before applying and has the owner's written authorization to host. Companies can't apply, and absentee owners can't either. The dwelling has to stay your primary residence the entire time the permit is active, which the city checks at application with at least two of four documents in your name: DMV registration, driver's license, voter registration, or a tax document showing the unit as your residence.

Zoning eligibility comes next, and it rules out more of Upland's housing stock than you'd expect. RS and RM zones qualify, along with single-family homes inside a Specific Plan, but commercial, industrial and mixed-use parcels are out entirely. HOA-governed properties need the HOA's written sign-off before the city will even accept the application, since Civil Code § 4741(c) lets any HOA in California ban short-term rentals in its own covenants regardless of what the city allows. Renters can apply too, but only after they've already established residency there, and only with the owner's blessing in writing.

If any of that doesn't describe your situation, whether the property is a pure investment unit, an ADU, or sits in a zone the ordinance excludes, Upland has no legal path for you, and it's worth checking that before you spend anything on the process. Assuming it does describe your situation, the rest of this guide is your roadmap. And if you're shopping for a market where the whole-unit model is legal outright, the California guide is the place to compare cities against each other.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Upland

Because that eligibility question decides everything else, it's worth confirming it before you touch the application itself. Once you have, the permit Upland issues is called an Administrative Use Permit (AUP) for short-term rental, and it's handled entirely by the Planning Division inside the Development Services Department.

The filing fee is $950.00, set by Resolution No. 6825 and effective July 1, 2025, and it's nonrefundable regardless of whether the city approves you. Section 17.23.1.030 spells out what the application itself has to contain:

• The applicant's legal name, current address, and phone number.
• The short-term rental property's address.
• An index of everyone living in the unit, with name and date of birth.
• A site plan showing parking, plus a floor plan showing sleeping areas and proposed guest capacity.
• Documentation of the bedroom count and square footage, such as a county assessor record.
• A valid business license and a valid TOT registration certificate.
• 24-hour emergency contact information, and the primary-residence proof described above.

A separate Home Occupation Permit is explicitly not required on top of any of that.

Once you file, city staff investigate the application and schedule a property inspection within 30 days. Under Section 17.23.1.040, the city can deny an application on six grounds: false or misleading information, an incomplete application after being asked to fix it, delinquent city or county taxes tied to the rental, a prior AUP revoked within the past year, unresolved fines from an earlier violation, or a demonstrated inability to meet the operating standards in the next section. Clear all of that and the permit is valid for two years from issuance, expiring on the anniversary of that date.

Renewal works the same way each cycle. You'll need to apply no later than 30 days before expiration, pass another inspection, and pay the AUP fee again at whatever rate the Council has set by then. There's no cap on how many times you can renew. Revocation, on the other hand, is a real risk once you're operating: the Director can pull your permit for a third violation of the chapter within any period of time, or for a single violation involving the transient occupancy tax, and a revoked host has to wait a full year before applying again. A denial or revocation can be appealed in writing to Development Services under the procedures in Chapter 17.47.040. One more detail that trips people up: the permit is nontransferable. It doesn't run with the land, so selling the house, changing owners, or moving a different family member in resets the clock to zero.

Required Documents for Upland Short Term Rentals

Given how much of that fee doesn't come back if you're denied, it's worth pulling the paperwork together carefully before you file rather than after. The AUP application itself lists the filing requirements plainly, and none of them are unusual on their own, though a few are easy to get wrong on the first pass:

• A site plan and floor plan of the home, showing bedroom layout and the parking spaces you're claiming toward the requirement below.
• A diagram or photo of your legal off-street parking, meeting the minimum 9 feet by 19 feet per space required under Chapter 17.11.
• A fee schedule listing what you plan to charge guests.
• Written HOA approval, if the property sits inside a homeowners association.
• Two of four primary-residence proofs, in the host's name: motor vehicle registration, driver's license, voter registration, or a tax document.
• Two passport-size photographs of the applicant, plus color photographs of the site.
• A valid Upland business license, issued under Title 5 of the municipal code.
• A valid Transient Occupancy Registration certificate from the Finance Department under Chapter 3.12.
• Digital copies of everything on a flash drive, since the city wants both paper and digital records on file.

That last requirement about the business license and TOT certificate creates a genuine chicken-and-egg problem worth flagging early: you need those two items to file the AUP, but you'll also want to have cleared your Building & Safety inspection before you commit to the rest, since Section 17.23.1.040 schedules that inspection within 30 days of the application going in. Do check with Planning at (909) 931-4130 on the practical order they recommend before you start gathering documents, because a missing piece here is exactly what the six denial grounds in the previous section are built to catch.

Upland Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you're through all of that and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, and Upland stacks two layers on top of one another that hosts often assume a platform is handling automatically. It usually isn't, at least not for this particular city.

The core charge is the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), set at 10% of the rent you charge, and it's collected from the guest and remitted by the host. Registration for a TOT certificate runs through the Finance Division, reporting is quarterly, and the city requires a return every quarter even in a period where you owe nothing. Section 17.23.1.100 of the ordinance also puts a legal duty on hosting platforms themselves, naming them a "managing agent" of the host and requiring them to collect and remit the TOT on your behalf.

This is worth double-checking rather than assuming. Airbnb's own published list of California jurisdictions where it automatically collects and remits tax names the unincorporated parts of San Bernardino County, then explicitly excludes a list of incorporated cities from that arrangement, Upland among them. So while Upland's code says the platform should be handling this, Airbnb's own list currently says otherwise for this specific city. Don't assume either way. Check your own dashboard for whether the tax is being collected on your listings, and if it isn't, budget for filing the TOT yourself every quarter.

On top of the TOT, you'll also need the business license mentioned in the required-documents list, administered through the city's licensing partner HDL at upland.hdlgov.com or (909) 348-0460. I couldn't confirm a specific business license tax rate for short-term rentals from a source I could read; the city's own rate pages for this render through a JavaScript app that returned no readable content in the copies I could access, so treat the exact figure as something to confirm directly with HDL rather than something quoted here. There's also a small statewide add-on worth knowing about: the California Tourism Assessment, a self-assessment on travel-and-tourism revenue administered by the state Office of Tourism, which the accommodations category pays at roughly 0.195% of assessable revenue. That filing runs separately, through the state, not through Upland.

Your rental income itself is ordinary taxable income at the state and federal level regardless of any of the above; the Franchise Tax Board taxes California residents on all rental income and nonresidents on income sourced to California property.

Upland-wide Short Term Rental Rules

Getting the permit and the tax registrations squared away is only the setup. Section 17.23.1.090 of the ordinance lays out the operating conditions you live under once you're hosting, and they're detailed enough that it's worth treating them as a checklist rather than skimming past them.

• Occupancy caps at two guests per bedroom, counting the host, other residents and guests together. A three-bedroom house tops out at six people total, no exceptions.
• Parking requires one additional space per bedroom, beyond whatever the dwelling's normal parking requirement already is, at minimum 9 feet by 19 feet per space.
• Un-hosted stays are capped at 120 days per calendar year at the same dwelling. Hosted stays, where you're on site, have no such limit at all.
• One group booking at a time. You can't split a house into two simultaneous short-term rentals.
• Every listing must display your permit number, a street-view photo of the house, and the maximum occupancy, on every hosting platform and any other advertising.
• Quiet hours run 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., tied to the city's general noise standards in Chapter 9.40, and pools or hot tubs need posted hours of their own.
• No exterior signage beyond what a normal residential use is already allowed under Chapter 17.15.
• ADUs and non-habitable structures are off the table entirely. Trailers, tents, tree houses, and garages can't be used as the rental or count toward the host's occupancy requirement.
• Records survive for three years. You need to keep guest information, hosting dates, and financial documentation, and produce it for the city on request.
• You or an authorized agent must be reachable 24/7, and on-site within one hour of being contacted by the city's Enforcement Officer over a compliance or nuisance issue.

Guests take on their own obligations too, and the city makes hosts responsible for spelling them out in signed house rules:

• No blocking emergency vehicle access, and no limousine or bus parking or stopping that interferes with it.
• Trash out no earlier than 24 hours before pickup, and removed promptly afterward.
• No weddings, receptions, auctions, or other commercial functions.
• Parking only in the designated, approved spaces.
• No discharge of fireworks, at any time.

None of this reads like a business license so much as a very specific lease addendum, which is a fair description of what an owner-occupied short-term rental is under this ordinance.

Does Upland Strictly Enforce STR Rules? Is Upland Airbnb Friendly?

Given how granular that operating-conditions list is, it's fair to ask whether Upland checks any of it or leaves the paperwork sitting in a file. The honest answer, from what the ordinance itself sets up, is that enforcement here runs through several channels at once rather than one big headline mechanism.

The chapter defines an "Enforcement Officer" broadly, as the Director, the Building Official, the Fire Marshal, Code Enforcement, or any other city employee the Director designates, which means a noise complaint, a fire-code issue and a zoning dispute can all trigger the same enforcement path rather than getting routed to three separate departments. Section 17.23.1.110 treats any violation of the chapter as a public nuisance, which the city can abate through administrative citations under Chapter 1.22 or prosecute outright as a misdemeanor under Chapter 1.16, and every day a violation continues counts as a separate violation. Then there's the direct financial lever: a third violation, or even a single TOT-related one, gets the permit revoked outright, with a mandatory year-long wait before you can reapply.

Platforms carry their own compliance duty here too, and it's a meaningful one. Once the city notifies a hosting platform that a listing is non-compliant, that platform has five business days to stop taking bookings for it, and it can't resume until the city confirms compliance. That's the same mechanism, in miniature, that New York City built its entire enforcement model around, applied to a much smaller market.

I couldn't find published enforcement statistics for Upland specifically, no public count of active permits, no revocation numbers, no citation totals, so I won't invent one. What the ordinance text does show is a detailed, multi-department framework rather than a rule that exists only on paper. Whether that reads as "Airbnb friendly" depends entirely on your situation. Assuming you already live in a qualifying home, Upland is a workable, moderately bureaucratic path with real costs but no ambiguity about the rules. If you were hoping to run an absentee investment property instead, it isn't available here, and no amount of persistence changes that.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Upland

Assuming your situation clears the primary-residence and zoning tests covered earlier, the sequence below is the order that saves you money, since a few of these steps are the ones that make the rest worth doing at all.

1. Confirm you qualify before spending anything. You (or your immediate family, or a tenant with written owner authorization) have to live in the home, it has to sit in an RS or RM zone or an eligible Specific Plan, and it can't be an ADU or a commercial/industrial parcel.
2. Check your HOA and lease terms. An HOA can ban short-term rentals outright under state law, and the city requires written HOA approval as part of the application if one governs your property.
3. Gather your primary-residence proof. Two of four documents in your name: DMV registration, driver's license, voter registration, or a tax document.
4. Apply for your business license and TOT registration certificate before or alongside the AUP application, since both are required documents for it.
5. File the AUP with Planning, including your site plan, floor plan, parking diagram, fee schedule, photographs, and emergency contact information, along with the $950 fee.
6. Pass the Building & Safety inspection, scheduled within 30 days of your application.
7. Post your permit and house rules inside the unit, and add your permit number, a street-view photo, and your maximum occupancy to every listing.
8. Set up your quarterly TOT filing, and confirm directly with your booking platform whether it's collecting the tax for Upland listings rather than assuming it is.
9. Diarize your two-year renewal date. File at least 30 days before expiration, and keep in mind that a third violation, or a single TOT violation, can end the permit early regardless of that date.

Who to Contact in Upland About Short Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever step in that list you get stuck on, the good news is that Upland splits the work across a small number of city divisions rather than scattering it across a dozen agencies.

Zoning, eligibility and the AUP application

The Development Services Department, Planning Division handles the AUP itself, from zoning eligibility questions through the actual application and its renewal.

• Address: 460 N. Euclid Avenue, Upland, CA 91786
• Phone: (909) 931-4130
• Email: [email protected]

Transient occupancy tax

The Finance Division handles TOT registration and quarterly reporting.

• Phone: (909) 931-4150

Building inspection

Building & Safety schedules and conducts the property inspection required before an AUP is granted or renewed.

• Phone: (909) 931-4110

Business license

The city's licensing partner HDL issues and renews the business license every short-term rental host needs.

• Phone: (909) 348-0460
• Online: upland.hdlgov.com

General city information

Upland City Hall can route you if you're not sure which division owns your question.

• Phone: (909) 931-4100
• Hours: Monday through Thursday, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (closed Friday through Sunday)

What do Airbnb Hosts in Upland on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think About Local Regulations?

Given how small and specific Upland's market is, host discussion of this particular city runs thin compared to the bigger California metros. What follows is a read of the recurring pattern across California suburbs that run the same primary-residence model, rather than a survey of Upland threads specifically, so weigh it accordingly.

• Investors chasing a pure nightly-rental play tend to skip cities like Upland entirely. On BiggerPockets, the general advice for someone eyeing a Southern California suburb with a primary-residence-only ordinance is to check that requirement first, because it rules out the classic buy-and-list strategy before a single number gets modeled.
• Existing homeowners describe the AUP process as detailed but navigable. The recurring friction point in comparable California cities isn't the rules themselves so much as gathering the right paperwork on the first attempt: matching primary-residence documents, getting an HOA sign-off before filing, or scheduling the inspection early enough not to hold up the renewal.
• The un-hosted 120-day cap gets noticed by anyone doing the math. A host who travels frequently or splits time between two properties runs into that limit faster than expected, since it counts every un-hosted night in a calendar year at the same address, not just across a single trip.
• The core complaint, where it does show up, is the primary-residence rule itself. Hosts who'd rather run this the way many other CA cities allow, buying a separate unit purely for nightly rental, run into the same wall Upland draws for everyone: that model isn't licensed here, however the numbers pencil out.

If you're comparing Upland against markets with a looser ownership structure, California's Central Valley cities generally run different rules. Our Stanislaus County guide and San Joaquin County guide are worth a look if an absentee-owner model is what you want to run, and BNBCalc's California market data is the fastest way to compare what different cities in the state actually earn before you commit to any one of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Upland, California in 2026?

Yes, but only as a primary-residence rental. You (or an immediate family member, or a tenant with the owner's written authorization) have to live in the dwelling yourself, and the property has to sit in an eligible residential zone. An Administrative Use Permit from the city's Planning Division is required before you can operate. Non-owner-occupied "vacation rentals" are explicitly prohibited under city code, regardless of what permit or fee you'd offer to pay.

How much does an Upland short-term rental permit cost?

The Administrative Use Permit filing fee is $950, set by City Council resolution and effective July 1, 2025. It's nonrefundable whether or not the city approves your application, so check your eligibility (primary residence, zoning, HOA rules) before filing. Once granted, the permit is valid for two years and must be renewed at least 30 days before it expires, with the fee paid again at whatever rate applies at renewal.

What taxes do you pay on an Upland short-term rental?

The main one is the city's 10% Transient Occupancy Tax, filed quarterly with the Finance Division even in a period where no tax is owed. You'll also need a standard business license through the city's partner HDL. Don't assume your booking platform is collecting the TOT automatically. Airbnb's own published collection list currently excludes Upland from its automatic California remittance, so confirm the status on your own listings directly.

What happens if you operate a short-term rental in Upland without a permit?

Operating without a valid Administrative Use Permit, business license, and TOT certificate is prohibited outright, and the city treats a violation of the ordinance as a public nuisance, enforceable through administrative citations or prosecution as a misdemeanor. Each day a violation continues counts as a separate violation. For a host who already holds a permit, a third violation of any kind, or even a single violation tied to the transient occupancy tax, is grounds for revocation, followed by a mandatory one-year wait before reapplying.

Can you rent out an ADU as a short-term rental in Upland?

No. Upland's ordinance bans using an accessory dwelling unit as a short-term rental outright, regardless of whether the main house on the same lot is your primary residence. That's stricter than the statewide rule, which only requires ADUs approved under the state's density-bonus framework to be rented for 30 days or more. In Upland, an ADU isn't eligible for a short-term rental permit at all.

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