Wayne County, Michigan Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Wayne County, Michigan and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that the county itself isn't going to stop you, because Wayne County doesn't regulate short-term rentals at all. There's no county permit to chase, no county registry to join, and no county lodging tax coming off your guests' nightly rate. Whether your listing is legal gets decided one level down, by whichever of the county's 43 local governments your front door happens to sit in.

Unfortunately, that's also where this stops being a simple yes. Two Wayne County cities closed their neighborhoods inside six months of each other: Dearborn pushed short-term rentals out of every residential district effective January 1, 2026, and Dearborn Heights banned them outright in December 2025 with a $5,000 fine attached to each violation. Both cities are defending those ordinances in federal court right now. Detroit is the strangest case of the three, since after two rounds of drafting the city still has no short-term rental license to apply for, which cuts both ways depending on how much ambiguity you can stomach.

So let's walk through what it takes to do this properly in 2026: which addresses get you a yes, what a certificate costs where one exists, the layers of tax that attach to a nightly stay, how hard any of it gets enforced, and who to call when the answer isn't obvious. Every figure below comes from Wayne County's, Detroit's, Dearborn's, Dearborn Heights' or Michigan's own documents, and where a page wouldn't open for me I've said so rather than filling the gap. Before you buy anything on the strength of a nightly rate, though, run the property through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Wayne County

Since the address does all the work here, it's worth understanding why the county has so little to say about it, because the answer isn't that Wayne County chose to stay out of the way. Michigan never handed it the tools. The Michigan Zoning Enabling Act (2006 PA 110) does give a county a zoning jurisdiction, though a thin one, since it reaches only the land "outside the limits of incorporated cities and villages." The same section then narrows it again, because a county's zoning jurisdiction "does not include the areas subject to a township zoning ordinance."

Put a map next to that definition and the rest explains itself. Wayne County's own citizen's guide to county government counts 34 cities and nine townships across 622 square miles, and every one of them zones its own land. So there's nothing left for the county to zone.

Money is the other lever a Michigan county usually has, and Wayne is locked out of that one too. The accommodations tax funding Kent County's and Genesee County's tourism budgets comes from MCL 141.862, which opens that door only to "a county that has a population of less than 600,000." Wayne is roughly three times that size, so the statute rules it out before anyone gets to vote on it. Your guests won't be paying a county room tax here.

There's no county form to fill in either.

That leaves 43 separate answers, and they fall into three shapes, of which Dearborn Heights is the harshest. The city adopted Ordinance No. H-25-02 on December 9, 2025, and it took effect on publication two days later. The new Section 36-81 makes it unlawful to rent any dwelling unit "in whole or in part for compensation" for 29 consecutive days or less, 27 in February, while hotels, motels, bed-and-breakfasts and rooming houses keep the permissions they already had. Being similar to one of those uses is expressly not enough. Even a homestay where you sleep in the house throughout the visit is prohibited.

So unfortunately, for anyone reading this who owns in Dearborn Heights, there's no version of this business left.

Dearborn took the second shape, which is confinement rather than prohibition. The city's July 2025 zoning amendment, Ordinance 25-1845 in the council's Committee of the Whole packet, pulls short-term rentals out of every residential district and permits them only in specific East Downtown zoning districts and in the West Downtown frontages other than Mixed Residential. One unit per parcel is the cap, unless you win a Special Land Use approval. A companion ordinance, 25-1847, builds the registration and compliance side around it.

Both took effect on January 1, 2026, a date the city's Planning and Zoning Manager confirmed on the record in the August 11, 2025 Planning Commission minutes while asking the commission to widen the permitted districts. That widening was recommended 7-0 for the BB and BC commercial districts with BA struck out. Do treat it as a recommendation rather than settled law, though, until the council acts on it.

Detroit is the third shape, and it's the one that confuses people most. The city has drafted a short-term rental ordinance twice, in 2019 and again in January 2024, and neither draft became law. Look at what the 2024 version, written by the Legislative Policy Division at Council Member Angela Whitfield-Calloway's request, actually asks the council to do. It proposes to add Sections 8-15-100.1 through 8-15-100.13 to the city code, and you don't add a subdivision that already exists.

The city was still calling it "the proposed Short-Term Rental Ordinance" when it co-hosted a virtual town hall with Airbnb on October 8, 2025, so renting a whole house by the night in Detroit isn't licensed, and it isn't banned either. Be clear-eyed about that, though.

Operating inside a gap is a bet on the gap staying open.

Everywhere else in the county, silence is the normal condition, and silence is not the same thing as permission. Canton Charter Township is the useful illustration, since its Permitted Land Use Matrix lists hotels, motels and bed and breakfast establishments as recognized uses, while the phrase "short-term rental" appears nowhere in the document at all.

So the live question in a township like that isn't whether you're breaking a short-term rental rule, because there isn't one to break. It's how the zoning administrator reads a nightly rental when a neighbor finally complains, and that reading can change with the administrator. Do check your deed restrictions and any condominium bylaws while you're at it, since a private covenant binds you whatever the township thinks. A Dearborn resident made exactly that point on the record in 2025, reminding the Planning Commission that many condominium agreements already forbid the use.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Wayne County

Given that patchwork, "what's the license" turns into four different questions depending on which side of a city line you're standing on. There's no county license anywhere in the picture, so everything below is issued locally.

Where	Short-term rentals allowed?	What you apply for	Cost
Dearborn	Downtown districts only, none residential	STR certificate, 3 years	$750, non-refundable
Dearborn Heights	No, citywide prohibition	Nothing to apply for	n/a
Detroit	No STR ordinance adopted	Rental registration + Certificate of Compliance	Registration free
Livonia	No STR-specific rule	Rental license, renewed annually	$105 single family

Dearborn writes its requirements down more precisely than anywhere else in the county, so it's the useful worked example even if you're buying in Wyandotte or Redford. The certificate carries a non-refundable application fee of $750, up from the $300 the first draft carried, and it runs for three years from issuance. It can't be transferred or assigned, and it dies the moment the property is sold, so a buyer inherits the house and not the permission. Approval also turns on a pre-issuance inspection and on your being current on every property tax, utility bill, fee and special assessment you owe the city, whether or not those debts relate to the rental itself.

Then there's the local-agent rule, which is what quietly rules out remote ownership, because Dearborn makes every short-term rental name an agent who lives within 20 miles of the city and stays reachable around the clock, ready to be there within 30 minutes of a complaint about the property or its guests. You can be your own agent as long as you keep living inside that radius, and for an owner-occupied homestay you have to. Buying from out of state? That's a standing cost you need in the model before you close.

Detroit's requirement is a different animal, because it isn't short-term rental licensing at all. The city's own landlord guide sets out the rental ordinance at Detroit City Code Sec. 8-15-81, in force since 1984 and sharpened in October 2017, and it reaches any rental property that isn't an owner-occupied single-family home. The Certificate of Rental Registration is free, while the Certificate of Compliance behind it takes an inspection less than a year old, completed repairs, a re-inspection and no unpaid inspection fees, and a residential certificate then runs three years. The Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, BSEED for short, is supposed to inspect rental property at least once a year regardless. And when you look at what BSEED actually issues, the absence is striking: its business licensing page lists 28 categories including hotels, public lodging houses and rooming houses, and no short-term rental license among them.

Livonia is the fourth pattern, and probably the most common one across the county's suburbs. It never adopted a short-term rental ordinance, so nightly rentals fall inside the ordinary rental licensing code instead. The city's rental license checklist prices a single-family certificate at $105.00, made up of a $45 license fee and a $60 inspection fee, with a two-family at $145.00. Its rental guide then requires renewal annually or at title transfer, and an inspection annually, at change of tenants, or at change of ownership, whichever comes first. Read that last clause with a nightly calendar in mind, because "change of tenants" is a phrase written for twelve-month leases.

Required Documents for Wayne County Short-Term Rentals

Since that $750 in Dearborn doesn't come back if you're refused, it's worth assembling the file properly before you pay anything. The list below follows Dearborn's application, which is the most demanding in the county, and most of it transfers to any Wayne County city that adopts a scheme later.

• Proof that you own it. Applications go to owners, and the certificate names the owner, not a lessee, tenant or manager.
• The address, the dwelling type, and which kind of short-term rental it is, meaning non-owner-occupied, owner-occupied homestay, or owner-occupied off-site.
• A sworn principal-residence statement for either owner-occupied type, affirming the home stays your principal residence for the life of the certificate.
• Bedroom and parking counts, with off-street spaces reserved for your guests. A garage space or an improved driveway counts; the street doesn't.
• Your local agent's details and signature, with that 20-mile residency and the 30-minute response promise.
• Safety certifications, covering a working smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector in every bedroom, a working fire extinguisher, and a commitment to check all of it every 90 days.
• Proof of liability insurance written to cover short-term rental use, which is not what a standard homeowner's policy does.
• A clean-hands statement, certifying the property breaks no city, state or federal housing law and that you owe the city nothing in taxes, assessments or fines.
• Consent to inspection, since a refused inspection is grounds for withholding or revoking the certificate outright.

In Detroit the paperwork is thinner but the trap is different, because you're feeding the rental registration system rather than an STR system. Registering with BSEED needs the rental registration form, an inspection by an authorized third-party company or by BSEED itself, a lead clearance on anything built before 1978, and no outstanding BSEED fees or blight violation notices. Keep in mind that the lead inspection isn't a one-off in a property that fails it, since a risk assessment has to be repeated each time a new occupant moves in, and a nightly rental produces a lot of new occupants.

Wayne County Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your address clears all that and you're able to start taking bookings, there's still tax to sort out, and it's a shorter list here than in most Michigan counties. Wayne collects nothing from your guests at all.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
State use tax on lodging	6%	Michigan Department of Treasury
County accommodations tax	none available	not levied
Detroit city income tax, residents	2.4%	Michigan Treasury, for Detroit
Detroit city income tax, non-residents	1.2%	Michigan Treasury, for Detroit
Detroit city corporate income tax	2.00%	Michigan Treasury, for Detroit

The state layer is the one nobody escapes. Michigan puts short-term lodging under the Use Tax Act rather than the Sales Tax Act, so MCL 205.93a applies the 6% use tax to rooms and lodging furnished to the public for stays of 30 days or less. A room rented continuously for more than a month to the same tenant falls outside it. Registration runs through Michigan Treasury Online and costs nothing, and Treasury assigns your filing frequency once the account exists.

Who hands that 6% over depends entirely on where the booking came from. Airbnb collects it and pays it across automatically, and its Michigan tax page shows exactly three Michigan line items: the 6% state use tax, a 5% accommodation tax in Genesee County, and an 8% hotel-motel tax in Kent County. There's no Wayne County line at all, which lines up with what MCL 141.862 already told us. Vrbo doesn't collect anywhere in Michigan, though, so make sure you register with Treasury yourself before your first Vrbo or direct booking, rather than discovering the obligation a year of stays later.

There's one county-level charge I couldn't pin down, and I'd rather flag it than guess. 1991 PA 180 lets a charter county levy a voter-approved excise tax of up to 1% of gross receipts on "providing accommodations for dwelling, lodging, or sleeping purposes ... to transient guests," and it defines a transient guest as anyone staying less than 30 consecutive days. The act reaches counties of 1,500,000 people or more, which describes Wayne exactly, and nothing in that language carves out a house. Whether Wayne County's own ordinance under the act touches individually owned short-term rentals or only conventional hotels, I couldn't say, because the county's code sits behind a JavaScript-only viewer and waynecountymi.gov refused every automated request I made in August 2026. Operating at scale? Put the question to the Wayne County Treasurer in writing and keep the reply.

Then there's the local income tax, which surprises out-of-state buyers more than anything else on this page. Michigan Treasury's own list of cities that impose an income tax includes three inside Wayne County: Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park. Detroit's rates, published by the city's Office of the Treasury, have sat at 2.4% for resident individuals, 1.2% for non-residents and 2.00% for corporations since 2013, and rental profit from a Detroit property falls inside that base whether or not you live in the city. Individual returns for 2015 onward go to the State of Michigan rather than to Detroit.

Michigan Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

None of those tax layers change if you cross a county line, and neither does the deeper reason Wayne County's map looks the way it does. Michigan has no statewide preemption statute for short-term rentals, so a city, township or village keeps full home-rule authority to zone, license, cap or prohibit them, and the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act contains no short-term rental provision to constrain that. Dearborn Heights can ban the use citywide for the same reason a township down the road can ignore it completely.

The legislature has tried to change that and hasn't managed it. House Bill 4722 of 2021 set out to classify short-term rentals as a residential use permitted in every residential zone and to bar outright bans, while leaving noise, parking and unit caps to local government. It passed the House 55-48 in October 2021, never got a Senate vote, and died with the session. No equivalent zoning-preemption bill has been enacted since, which is why a 2026 investor in Michigan is still buying one municipality's politics rather than a state framework.

There's also no statewide registry, no state short-term rental license, and no state agency you register a listing with, so the use tax account is the only state-level registration a host needs. Watch out for the pending tie-barred package of House Bills 5138, 5139 and 5140, though. Introduced on October 28, 2025 and referred to the House Economic Competitiveness Committee, the package would let a local government put a voter-approved lodging tax on the ballot. It imposes no tax by itself, and as of my last check it hadn't cleared committee, so nothing in it is law yet.

If you're comparing Wayne against its neighbors rather than deciding within it, the Michigan statewide guide sets out the whole framework, while the Oakland County guide and the Macomb County guide cover the other two metro Detroit counties, where the same state silence produces a completely different set of local answers. The Southfield guide is the closest read across the Wayne County line if a Detroit address stops working for you.

Does Wayne County Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

The county doesn't enforce anything, which follows from having no ordinance to enforce, so the honest question is how hard your particular city pushes. And the answer got a lot less comfortable in 2026.

Dearborn Heights wrote the most aggressive enforcement machinery in the county into Section 36-81 itself. Renting a short-term rental unit is a municipal civil infraction carrying a $5,000 fine, operating a short-term rental business carries another $5,000, and merely advertising one carries $1,000. On top of that, the ordinance creates a rebuttable presumption that the owner authorized the listing whenever a posting appeared on a hosting platform within the 60 days before the citation. So the city can build its case from a screenshot, rather than catching guests in the driveway.

The notice provisions show real intent, since Dearborn Heights has to write to the owners of every non-homesteaded property in its R1 single-family districts about the prohibition, and bolt an acknowledgment onto certificate-of-occupancy applications in R1 and RM districts, spelling out that the $5,000 applies for each day the violation continues. So don't forget that daily multiplier when you're pricing the risk, because it's what turns a fine into a foreclosure.

Detroit enforces through the blight system rather than a licensing one, and it's more responsive than its reputation suggests. Complaints come in through the Improve Detroit app, an inspector visits, and a warning notice gives you 48 hours before a re-inspection that can turn into tickets. Those tickets are payable to the Department of Appeals and Hearings, the city's "Blight Court," which runs roughly 25,000 hearings a year on quality-of-life violations, and a ticket carries a $134 posting fee on top of the fine. Not showing up gets you found responsible by default plus $30 in court fees. None of that touches short-term rental status directly, mind you. It touches whether your property is registered, inspected and lead-clear, which is a different way of losing the same argument.

The bigger enforcement story in Wayne County right now is playing out in federal court, and it's worth watching whichever city you're in, because there are two cases and they're aimed at the two toughest ordinances. Owners took Dearborn to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on January 8, 2026, and according to CBS News Detroit, the six individuals and six LLCs behind the case argue the ordinance would "effectively ban the use of all plaintiff's properties as short-term rentals," while the city itself wouldn't comment on pending litigation.

Six weeks later, on February 17, 2026, a second group sued Dearborn Heights in the same court over H-25-02, pleading due process, both per se and regulatory takings, two counts under the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act, and impairment of existing Airbnb contracts. One plaintiff appears in both suits.

Neither case has produced a ruling I could verify, so don't plan around either of them. A complaint is an argument, not a rule. The ordinances stay in force while the argument runs.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Wayne County

Assuming you've read all that and still like the numbers, the order of the steps below matters more than it looks, since the early ones tell you whether the later ones are worth paying for.

1. Pin down the municipality before anything else. Not the mailing address, the jurisdiction. Postal addresses in this county cross city lines constantly, and a Dearborn mailing address on a Dearborn Heights parcel is the difference between a $750 certificate and a $5,000 fine.
2. Call that city's planning or zoning office and ask the question directly. Ask whether short-term rentals are a permitted use in your zoning district, and get the answer in writing if you can. In a township with no ordinance, ask how the administrator currently interprets a nightly rental.
3. Read the deed restrictions and any condominium or association bylaws. A private covenant binds you no matter what the city allows, and plenty of Wayne County condominium documents already prohibit the use.
4. Where a certificate exists, budget for it honestly. Dearborn's $750 is non-refundable, expires in three years, and dies with the sale of the house.
5. Line up a local agent inside the radius. Twenty miles from Dearborn, available around the clock, able to be physically present within 30 minutes. Remember that this is a recurring cost, not a form field.
6. Get the rental registration or license the ordinary way. Detroit's Certificate of Rental Registration and Certificate of Compliance, Livonia's annual rental license, whatever your city calls its general rental scheme. Nightly rentals sit inside those schemes in most of the county.
7. Fit the safety kit and document it. Smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors in every bedroom, a fire extinguisher, a 90-day check routine you can actually evidence.
8. Buy insurance written for short-term rental use and keep the certificate with the application file, because a homeowner's policy generally won't answer for a paying guest.
9. Register for the 6% use tax through Michigan Treasury Online before your first booking, then confirm which of your platforms is remitting it and which is leaving it to you.
10. Diarize the political calendar. Detroit's ordinance has been proposed twice and could pass in any council session, and Dearborn's permitted districts were still being revised in late 2025.

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

Working through that list, you'll notice the county government never appears, and that's the single most useful thing to know before you pick up the phone. Wayne County has no short-term rental office, no permit desk and no answer for you. Call your city.

Detroit

Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department (BSEED), Property Maintenance Division handles rental registration, inspections and the Certificate of Compliance, and it's the division that tickets a property operating without one.

• Address: Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, 2 Woodward Avenue, Suite 412, Detroit, MI 48226
• Phone: (313) 628-2451
• Email: [email protected]
• Tenant-requested inspections: (313) 224-2733, at no cost to the tenant

For business licensing questions, including whether any category applies to you, BSEED's Business License and Trade Permits line is (313) 224-3179. Anything about zoning or land use, though, belongs to the City Planning Commission at 208 Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, on (313) 224-6225 or [email protected]. That's also the body that reviewed both draft short-term rental ordinances, so it's the place to ask where the current one stands.

Dearborn

Dearborn's Department of Economic Development administers the short-term rental certificate alongside the city's rental registration program.

• Address: 16901 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI 48126
• Phone: 311 within the city, or (313) 943-2150
• Email: [email protected] for rental registration
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

I could not find a dedicated public application page for the short-term rental certificate on dearborn.gov as of August 2026, so the general rental contacts above are the route in.

Dearborn Heights

There's nothing to apply for, so the useful contact is the office that enforces Section 36-81 and issues the certificates of occupancy that now carry the short-term rental acknowledgment. The city's Executive Department is responsible for the notice and acknowledgment program under the ordinance, and the ordinance text is published in full on the city's own document center.

Wayne County offices

If you do need the county for something adjacent, its own citizen's guide gives the addresses. The Treasurer sits on the 5th floor of 400 Monroe Street in Detroit, the Register of Deeds, where you'd confirm a deed restriction, is on the 7th floor of the same building, and mail for a County Commissioner goes to 500 Griswold Street, 7th Floor, Detroit, MI 48226. The county's own department pages on waynecountymi.gov wouldn't load for me through any automated route in August 2026, so I'm not publishing phone numbers or office hours I couldn't verify on the page itself.

State tax

Use tax registration, filing and rate questions go to the Michigan Department of Treasury through Michigan Treasury Online, which is also where you'll file once the account exists. Detroit income tax assistance runs on (313) 224-3560, while individual Detroit returns for 2015 and later are handled by the State of Michigan on (517) 636-5829.

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

Since the county gives you no one to call and the cities disagree with each other, hosts here lean on each other more than in markets with a single clear rulebook. What follows is my read of the recurring themes in public discussion rather than any kind of survey. Reddit blocked automated access from my research environment entirely and BiggerPockets served me only its forum shell, so weigh this section accordingly and treat the sourced sections above as the load-bearing ones.

The dominant theme, and the one I'd flag hardest, is how much bad information circulates about Detroit specifically. Several widely republished guides state that Detroit requires a $500 annual short-term rental license, caps hosting at 90 days a year and limits you to 10 guests. Going through the city's own documents, those numbers trace back to the 2019 City Planning Commission proposal, which was never adopted. That proposal did carry a 90-day cap, a 10-person maximum, a 1,000-foot spacing rule between listings and a $250 fee, and the $500 seems to have been invented somewhere in the retelling. So a host who budgets for a Detroit license goes looking for a form that doesn't exist, and a host who assumes a 90-day cap leaves a perfectly legal calendar unbooked.

The second theme is that Dearborn's ordinance landed on real operating businesses rather than on hypothetical ones. A Dearborn resident told the Planning Commission in August 2025 that four new short-term rentals had appeared in her neighborhood since the commission last discussed the subject, and the same meeting recorded owners pressing for wider permitted districts on the grounds that the original map was unusually narrow compared with other cities. That tension, existing operators against neighborhood associations, is exactly what both federal lawsuits are now arguing about.

The third theme is quieter and more practical. In the suburbs that never wrote a rule, hosts describe an enforcement posture that stays dormant until a neighbor complains, at which point the question becomes a zoning interpretation rather than a fine. Nobody I've read describes that as comfortable, and the honest reading is that a silent ordinance is a risk you carry rather than a permission you hold.

If you're weighing a Wayne County property against the rest of the state before you commit, it's worth seeing how the Michigan market performs outside metro Detroit, because a county where two cities have already closed and the largest has an ordinance sitting in a drawer isn't the only shape available to you here.

Rules like these arrive in clusters rather than one at a time, and a border between two cities is where you feel it. The lesson worth carrying out of this county is that the map matters more than the market. Two neighborhoods can look identical, draw the same guests at the same nightly rate, and sit on opposite sides of a line that decides whether the business is legal at all. Find out which side you're on before the money moves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Wayne County, Michigan in 2026?

In most of the county, yes, but the county itself has no say in it. Wayne County has no short-term rental ordinance, no registry and no permit, so the answer comes from your city or township. Dearborn Heights prohibits short-term rentals citywide under Ordinance H-25-02. Dearborn permits them only in specific downtown zoning districts, not in residential ones. Detroit has no adopted short-term rental ordinance at all, and most suburban communities say nothing about the use in their codes.

Does Wayne County charge a hotel or lodging tax on short-term rentals?

No county accommodations tax applies. Michigan's county lodging tax under MCL 141.862 is limited to counties with a population under 600,000, and Wayne County is far above that, which is why Kent County's 8% and Genesee County's 5% have no Wayne equivalent. Airbnb's Michigan tax page lists no Wayne County line item either. Michigan's 6% state use tax still applies to every stay of 30 days or less.

How much does a Dearborn short-term rental certificate cost?

The application fee is $750 and it's non-refundable, whether or not the certificate is granted. A granted certificate lasts three years from the date of issuance, can't be transferred or assigned, and terminates automatically when the property is sold. Approval also requires a passed inspection, proof of liability insurance, safety equipment certifications, and no outstanding taxes, fees or assessments owed to the city.

What happens if you run a short-term rental in Dearborn Heights anyway?

Section 36-81 makes it a municipal civil infraction with a $5,000 civil fine for renting the unit, a further $5,000 for operating a short-term rental business, and $1,000 for advertising one. The city's own notices state the fine applies for each day the violation continues. An advertisement or listing published within 60 days before the citation creates a rebuttable presumption that the owner authorized it, so the listing itself is enough to start the case.

Do you need a rental license to run a short-term rental in Detroit?

There's no short-term rental license in Detroit, since the city has never adopted the ordinance that would create one. The general rental ordinance still applies, though. Under Detroit City Code Sec. 8-15-81, any rental property other than an owner-occupied single-family home has to be registered with the Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department and hold a Certificate of Compliance, which takes an inspection, completed repairs, a lead clearance on pre-1978 housing, and no outstanding fees or blight tickets.

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