Mount Pleasant Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina and you're wondering whether you can put it on Airbnb or Vrbo in 2026? Well, the good news is that short-term rentals are legal here, and the town has run a formal permit system since 2020. The catch, and it's a real one, is that Mount Pleasant capped the whole program at 400 permits town-wide, that cap has been full for a couple of years now, and the town isn't accepting new applications. If you don't already hold a permit, your only way in is a waitlist.

That matters more here than in most South Carolina cities, because Mount Pleasant sits just across the harbor from Charleston, in Charleston County, and it runs its own zoning and business-licensing code separate from both the city of Charleston and the unincorporated county. None of Charleston's peninsula rules or Charleston County's rules for unincorporated land apply inside Mount Pleasant town limits. What applies is Chapter 156 of the town's own Code of Ordinances, and that chapter is what this guide walks through: who can still get a permit, what it costs, the taxes that stack on top, how hard the town enforces its rules, and who to call when you get stuck.

Every figure below comes from the Town of Mount Pleasant's own site and ordinance text, the South Carolina Department of Revenue, or Airbnb's own tax-collection pages, checked in July 2026, and I say so wherever something is still moving. Assuming a Mount Pleasant property doesn't pencil out under this cap, it's worth running the numbers on a nearby market through BNBCalc before you commit to anything.

What are short term rental (Airbnb, VRBO) regulations in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina?

The short version: short-term rentals are legal in Mount Pleasant, but the number of them is fixed. Town Code § 156.340 defines a short-term rental as any rental of a residential dwelling, or part of one, for fewer than 30 consecutive days, and subsection (C) sets a hard ceiling: "at no time shall the maximum number of STR dwellings exceed more than 400." That cap didn't start as a round number. The original 2019 ordinance, Ord. 19048, capped permits at 1% of the town's total dwelling units, which worked out to roughly 437 in practice. A 2021 amendment tightened that into a flat 400, and the town has been at or near that ceiling ever since.

Getting a permit requires two things layered on top of each other: an annual STR permit from the Planning, Land Use, and Neighborhoods Department, and a business license that can only be issued once the permit is approved. The town covers three flavors of rental under one system: renting an entire house, renting an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) while the owner lives in the main house, and renting up to six bedrooms bed-and-breakfast style while the owner lives on site. A duplex needs a separate permit for each unit. All of it runs through the official Short-Term Rentals page, which is also where the town posts the current waitlist status.

South Carolina itself doesn't preempt any of this. There's still no statewide law forcing a city to allow short-term rentals or capping how a town regulates them, so Mount Pleasant's 400-permit ceiling sits entirely within its own authority. Our South Carolina statewide guide covers that legislative picture in more depth, including two competing bills sitting in committee right now that would push the state in opposite directions on local control.

Starting a Short Term Rental Business in Mount Pleasant

Since the cap is the whole story here, it's worth being blunt about what starting a new STR business in Mount Pleasant looks like in 2026: for most people, it doesn't happen, at least not right away. The town's own page confirms the 2026 renewal window is already closed, current 2025 permit holders keep operating through December 31, 2025, and any permits that come open next go first to approved renewals and only then to whoever is on the waitlist. Joining that waitlist means emailing [email protected] with your property address, your name and contact details, and which type of rental you want (whole house, ADU, or bedrooms), and then waiting for a slot to open.

Here's the part that trips up buyers specifically: an STR permit does not transfer when a property sells. Buying a house that's currently operating as a licensed Airbnb doesn't come with the license attached. The new owner has to submit a fresh application, pay the fee again, and get approved based on whatever availability exists under the cap at that moment, which right now is close to none. The one thing that does carry over automatically is a duty to honor already-booked reservations for 90 days after closing, under South Carolina's Vacation Rental Act, § 27-50-210, and the town has to be notified of those dates. So don't assume a "licensed STR" listing is a guaranteed business. Confirm with the seller, and ideally with the town, whether the permit realistically survives the sale before you factor Airbnb income into your offer.

If a permit isn't in reach, the more honest play is either the waitlist, or pivoting the property toward the 30-plus-night furnished rental market instead, which sits entirely outside this permit system since it no longer counts as a "short-term rental" under § 156.340's own definition. Compare that against a market where the door is still open. Nearby North Charleston runs its own, separate ordinance with more room to operate, and it's worth reading before you assume the whole Charleston metro works like Mount Pleasant does.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Mount Pleasant

Assuming you're either renewing an existing permit or you've made it off the waitlist, the application itself asks for a specific set of facts about the property rather than just your name and address. Per § 156.341(B), you'll need to provide the rental type (whole house, up to six bedrooms, or ADU), the total number of individual rental units on the parcel, the number of bedrooms, the number of on-site parking spaces plus a photo of them, and the maximum overnight occupancy you're claiming. You also have to name a local agent who can physically reach the property within 60 minutes in an emergency; if you don't designate one, you become that agent by default, which matters if you don't actually live nearby.

On top of the factual details, the application requires a set of signed certifications: that you've read the town and state rules on noise, trash, parking, alcohol, animals, litter and golf carts, that you'll post a summary of those rules inside the unit, that you understand penalties can follow tenant violations, and that the property complies with fire and building codes. You'll also certify that nothing in your neighborhood's covenants or restrictions bars short-term rentals, because Mount Pleasant defers to HOA documents here: § 156.343(B) prohibits STR use outright in any neighborhood whose enforceable covenants say no, and it's on you to check that before you apply, not after. Do check your HOA paperwork first, since a permit approved in error over a covenant conflict doesn't protect you from your own neighborhood association.

Short Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Mount Pleasant

Once the application itself is in order, there's still the fees and the calendar to deal with, and that's where most operators get tripped up. Mount Pleasant charges a non-refundable application fee of $250 for a part-time rental (15 to 72 nights a year) and $500 for a full-time rental (more than 72 nights a year), and the permit has to be renewed annually rather than issued once and forgotten. Current operators reapply in a defined window, November 15 through December 15, and pay any outstanding fees at the same time; miss that window and you're treated as a brand-new applicant, competing for whatever's left under the cap rather than renewing automatically. Apply late as a returning operator and a $100 fee gets added on top.

That renewal window is exactly why the cap stays full year after year: nearly everyone who already holds a permit has every incentive to renew on time, so almost nothing opens up for the waitlist. If you were operating illegally the year before and then try to apply, you'll owe a $500 penalty fee in addition to the standard fees, which is the town's way of making sure the cap doesn't quietly get gamed by unpermitted hosts hoping to backfill into it later.

Losing a permit is a graduated process, not an instant one. A first and second violation draw written warnings, a third draws a $500 fine plus another warning, and a fourth inside a rolling one-year period triggers revocation of both the STR permit and the business license. Some violations skip straight to immediate revocation, though: building code problems, no business license on file, using the property in a way the permit doesn't cover, or advertising without the town-issued permit and license numbers displayed. Once a permit is revoked, or you're convicted of operating without one, you can't reapply for that same property for a full year. Keep in mind that with the cap this tight, losing your slot could mean losing it for good, since there's no guarantee a spot opens back up when your ban ends.

Required Documents for Mount Pleasant Short Term Rentals

Since a rejected or incomplete application can cost you a spot under a cap this tight, it's worth assembling everything before you submit rather than after. The town's application requires a Certificate of Occupancy for the dwelling itself, and a separate one for any accessory dwelling unit you're also renting; without it, § 156.343(A) bars the structure from STR use outright. You'll also need a copy of general liability insurance (the ordinance doesn't specify a minimum coverage amount, so confirm what your carrier and your lender consider adequate), and a copy of your neighborhood's covenants and restrictions, which the town can request on demand even though you don't have to submit it upfront.

Beyond those, expect to provide:

• The signed property-owner affidavit certifying fire and building code compliance and awareness of the noise, trash, parking, alcohol, animal, litter, and golf-cart rules.
• Names, addresses, and phone numbers for every owner and the designated local agent.
• A photo of your designated on-site parking spaces, since at least one additional off-street space beyond what the primary residence already requires has to be set aside for STR guests.
• Proof that business license fees for any permits held the previous year are paid up, since a new permit won't issue over an unpaid balance.
• Charleston County accommodations-tax account statements, if the town asks to see them, since it reserves the right to audit any STR during the permit period.

Remember that this is a paperwork-first system: § 156.341(A)(2) gives an incomplete application five days to be fixed before it's denied outright, so don't wait until the last week of the November-to-December renewal window to start gathering documents.

Mount Pleasant Short Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you're through the permit process and are able to start hosting, there's still tax to work out, and Mount Pleasant stacks three separate layers on top of each other. South Carolina's own accommodations tax runs 7% total under S.C. Code § 12-36-920: a 5% state sales tax component plus a 2% state accommodations tax component, both charged on the gross rental price. Charleston County adds its own local accommodations tax on top of that, and Mount Pleasant layers on a municipal accommodations fee of its own. Airbnb's own tax-collection page states that it collects and remits a 1% Mount Pleasant Accommodations Fee for stays of 30 nights or fewer, and separately a 2% Charleston County local accommodations tax for stays of 29 nights or fewer, which puts the fully stacked rate at roughly 10% before any platform service fees.

Tax or fee	Rate	Collected by
SC state sales tax	5%	SC Dept. of Revenue (Airbnb/Vrbo collect automatically as marketplace facilitators)
SC state accommodations tax	2%	SC Dept. of Revenue (collected automatically)
Charleston County local accommodations tax	2%	Charleston County (Airbnb states it collects this automatically; confirm for other platforms)
Mount Pleasant municipal accommodations fee	1%	Town of Mount Pleasant (Airbnb states it collects this automatically)
Combined	~10%	Split across state, county and town

If a guest books directly with you rather than through a marketplace facilitator, that automatic collection disappears, and you become responsible for registering and remitting yourself. That means holding a Retail License from SCDOR, issued as an Accommodations Tax License for $50, non-refundable, applied for on MyDORWAY. Two carve-outs apply: hosts who rent exclusively through a marketplace facilitator don't need this license at all, and a host renting a room for no more than one week per calendar quarter still has to file and pay annually even though they're exempt from collecting per booking.

The business license fee sits apart from all of this. It's based on gross receipts rather than a flat percentage of rent, and Mount Pleasant's Business License Division states it's due before you start operating, and annually by April 30 for most businesses, though your STR license specifically tends to track the STR permit's own November-to-December renewal cycle since one can't issue without the other. Watch out for treating these as one payment. They're two separate obligations to two different town offices, even though both eventually route through the same STR file.

Mount Pleasant-wide Short Term Rental Rules

Beyond the tax stack, a handful of operating rules apply to every permitted STR regardless of type. Occupancy is capped by a formula rather than a flat number: two guests per bedroom, plus two additional people for a whole-house rental, so a two-bedroom home tops out at six overnight guests. An ADU is different and stricter: three occupants maximum, regardless of how many bedrooms it has. Parking follows a simpler rule, at least one additional off-street space beyond what the principal residence already requires, and you have to disclose the maximum number of guest vehicles allowed in your advertising as well as directly to guests before they book.

A few outright prohibitions matter more than the rest. Multi-family dwellings can't be used as STRs at all, full stop, under § 156.343(C). Neighborhoods whose covenants ban short-term rentals stay banned regardless of what the town permits, since the ordinance defers to those documents rather than overriding them. And hosting an event, wedding, or party that exceeds your permitted occupancy is its own violation, separate from any occupancy overage during an ordinary stay. Your permit number and business license number have to appear in every online advertisement, inside the ad description itself rather than buried in photos, and both numbers plus your maximum occupancy have to be posted prominently inside the rental unit during every stay. Make sure your listing text gets updated whenever either number changes, since a mismatch is one of the grounds the town can use for immediate revocation.

Does Mount Pleasant Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how tight the permit cap already is, it's worth knowing whether the town actually chases down the people operating outside it, and the answer is a genuine yes, even if the paper trail of citations looks thin. Since around 2021, Mount Pleasant has used a monitoring platform called Rentalscape, built by Deckard Technologies, to cross-reference listings across Airbnb, Vrbo and other sites against its own permit database. According to Deckard's own case study of the program, compliance rose from roughly 20% to somewhere between 95% and 100% over about four years, a claim worth reading as the vendor's own marketing figure rather than an independently audited number, since Deckard is the company selling the software.

The citation numbers tell a more restrained story. As of January 2024, Live 5 News reported that since 2021 the town had issued only eight citations across six properties, totaling $5,292.50 in fines, a fraction of neighboring Charleston's $652,099 collected since 2018 across 665 active permits. Mayor Will Haynie's response at the time was that citations get written "when somebody refuses to comply," and that the citation count alone doesn't capture how many operators get brought into line through a warning before it ever reaches that stage. Take that with a grain of salt either way, since it's exactly the kind of claim a town has an incentive to make sound better than the raw numbers do.

Enforcement here isn't just local, either. Mount Pleasant is one of 15 South Carolina communities, alongside Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head Island, Beaufort County and others, that sued Airbnb and Vrbo in 2021 over allegedly under-remitting local accommodations tax and business license fees on their behalf. That case settled for $60 million in February 2025 across the participating communities, which tells you the state's platforms haven't always gotten this right even when they claim to collect automatically. A public STR portal also lists every permitted address and permit number, so a neighbor can check whether a listing is legitimate before ever filing a complaint through the town's OPAL online system or calling the Planning Department directly.

How to Start a Short Term Rental Business in Mount Pleasant

Given everything above, the order you do these in matters, since the early steps decide whether the later ones are worth bothering with.

1. Check the current cap and waitlist status first. Visit the official Short-Term Rentals page before you do anything else. If the cap is full, as it has been through 2026, the waitlist is your only route in.
2. Email [email protected] to join the waitlist, if you're a new applicant, including the property address, your contact details, and the rental type you want.
3. Check your HOA covenants and restrictions. If your neighborhood's documents prohibit short-term rentals, no town permit will override that.
4. Confirm your Certificate of Occupancy is current for the main dwelling and any ADU, since this is a hard prerequisite the town won't waive.
5. Line up general liability insurance and a local agent who can respond within 60 minutes, and gather the parking photo and owner/agent contact details the application requires.
6. Submit during the correct window. Existing operators reapply November 15 through December 15; new waitlist applicants get considered starting January 1 if slots remain.
7. Get your business license once your STR permit is approved, since one can't be issued without the other.
8. Register for state and local tax where needed. If you'll take any bookings outside a marketplace facilitator, apply for SCDOR's $50 Retail/Accommodations License on MyDORWAY.
9. Post your permit number, business license number, and maximum occupancy inside the unit, and add both numbers to every online listing before you take a single booking.

Who to Contact in Mount Pleasant About Short Term Rental Regulations and Zoning

Whichever step trips you up, a small handful of offices handle almost everything between them.

Short-Term Rental Permitting (Planning, Land Use, and Neighborhoods Department)

• Coordinator: Jane Yager-Baumrind
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: (843) 884-1229
• Address: 100 Ann Edwards Lane, Mount Pleasant, SC 29464

Business License Division

• Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
• Phone: (843) 849-2786
• Address: 100 Ann Edwards Lane, Mount Pleasant, SC 29464

Code Enforcement / neighbor complaints

• Online: OPAL public portal
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: (843) 884-1229

Town Hall general line, for anything that doesn't fit the above:

• Phone: (843) 884-8517
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 4:30pm

South Carolina Department of Revenue (state accommodations and sales tax, MyDORWAY registration)

• Phone: 803-898-5970
• Email: [email protected]

Charleston County administers its own local accommodations tax separately from the town and from SCDOR; if you're not booking exclusively through a marketplace facilitator, confirm your obligations directly with the county rather than assuming a platform has it covered.

What do Airbnb Hosts in Mount Pleasant Think About Local Regulations?

Going through the available coverage rather than any kind of formal survey, sentiment among Mount Pleasant hosts splits pretty cleanly along one line: whether you already hold a permit or not. Existing operators generally describe the renewal process as manageable, if unglamorous, an annual paperwork exercise with a fixed window and a fee that hasn't moved much in a few years. The frustration comes almost entirely from the other side of the cap. Prospective hosts who don't already hold a permit are, in practice, locked out of a legal path into the market entirely, and a waitlist with no published length or timeline isn't much comfort to someone who just bought a house expecting to run it as an Airbnb.

That frustration shows up in the town's own public record, too. Resident Cameron Swails told Live 5 News in January 2024 that he didn't see the town doing enough to change how the cap operates, arguing that short-term rentals had "priced people out of town," while Mayor Haynie pushed back that low citation counts don't mean low enforcement. Neither side is wrong exactly, they're just measuring different things: one is measuring housing pressure, the other is measuring paperwork compliance. If you're weighing a Mount Pleasant purchase against a market that isn't capped, our Charleston market page is worth pulling up for the surrounding area's actual revenue numbers before you decide whether fighting for a waitlist spot even makes sense.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina in 2026?

Only if you already hold one of the town's 400 permits, or you get one off the waitlist once a slot opens. Mount Pleasant capped its short-term rental program at 400 permits town-wide, that cap has been full, and new applications aren't currently being accepted outside the waitlist process. Buying a house that already has a permit doesn't guarantee you keep it, since permits don't transfer to a new owner and require a fresh application subject to the same cap.

How much does a short-term rental permit cost in Mount Pleasant?

The non-refundable application fee is $250 for a part-time rental (15 to 72 nights a year) or $500 for a full-time rental (more than 72 nights a year), renewed annually. A separate business license, based on gross receipts, is required on top and can only be issued after the STR permit is approved. Existing operators renew each year between November 15 and December 15; missing that window means reapplying as a new applicant instead.

Does a Mount Pleasant STR permit transfer when the property is sold?

No. The permit stays with the previous owner and does not automatically pass to a buyer. A new owner has to submit a fresh application and gets approved only "based on availability," which under the current 400-permit cap can mean no approval at all. The one obligation that does carry over is honoring any bookings already scheduled at closing, for 90 days, under South Carolina's Vacation Rental Act.

What taxes do short-term rental hosts pay in Mount Pleasant?

Roughly 10% combined: South Carolina's 7% state accommodations tax (5% sales plus 2% accommodations), Charleston County's 2% local accommodations tax, and Mount Pleasant's own 1% municipal accommodations fee. Airbnb states it collects and remits all three automatically on bookings made through its platform. Hosts taking direct bookings outside a marketplace facilitator need their own $50 SCDOR Accommodations Tax License and must remit these taxes themselves.

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

Penalties escalate with each violation: a first and second offense draw written warnings, a third draws a $500 fine, and a fourth triggers revocation of both the STR permit and business license. Certain violations, like missing building-code compliance or advertising without the required permit numbers, can trigger immediate revocation. Anyone convicted of operating without a permit is barred from reapplying for that property for one full year, with no guarantee a slot will be available under the cap when that ban ends.

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