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

Do you own a place in Richmond Hill and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that you can, and the city still won't make you buy a licence or register with anybody first. The awkward part is that the answer changed in late 2025, so most of what you'll find written about this city online is now out of date.

Richmond Hill sits in York Region, just north of Toronto, and for years it was the Greater Toronto Area municipality with almost no short-term rental rules at all. That ended on September 24, 2025, when Council passed Comprehensive Zoning By-law 93-25. Under Section 3.10 of that by-law, a short-term accommodation is only permitted in a dwelling unit or accessory residential unit that's the operator's own principal residence. So a spare room in the house you live in is fine. The condo you bought to run full time on Airbnb is not.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly in 2026: which zones allow it, why there's still no licence to apply for, the two layers of tax that attach to a stay, how a city enforces a rule that's barely a year old, and who to call when you get stuck on something. Every figure below comes from Richmond Hill's or Ontario's own pages, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving through the Ontario Land Tribunal I've flagged it. Before you commit to any of this, run the property through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Richmond Hill

That principal-residence line decides the whole business case here, so it's worth being precise about where it falls.

Section 11.0 of the by-law defines a short-term accommodation as all or part of a dwelling unit used for sleeping accommodation "for any rental period that is less than 28 consecutive days".

Then it adds the condition that does the real work. It's permitted only where the rental operator "resides within the principal residence on the same property" as the unit being rented.

Twenty-eight days, mind you, not thirty. Just make sure you count the nights properly, because a 27-night booking is a short-term accommodation and a 28-night booking isn't one at all.

Section 3.10 then attaches four conditions, and each of them closes a door that used to be open:

• The unit has to be designated as a principal residence of the rental operator. Not the building, not the neighbourhood. That specific lot.
• A short-term accommodation can't be a bed and breakfast use, which the city treats as a separate thing entirely.
• It must be operated in a manner that does not constitute a commercial use. The by-law doesn't define where that line sits, and I couldn't find an interpretation bulletin for it, so treat it as a judgement call an officer gets to make.
• One operator may run a maximum of two separate short-term accommodations inside the same dwelling unit or accessory residential unit. Two rooms, in other words, not five.

Zoning narrows it further. Table 5.1A in Section 5.0 permits short-term accommodation in the N1, N2, N3, N4, NS1, NS2, NT1, NT2 and NMU zones, which covers most detached, semi-detached and townhouse neighbourhoods plus the mixed-use ones.

It's blank in three: N, NLC, and NA. That last one matters, because NA is the zone that carries the apartment dwelling permission, so a standalone apartment building outside NMU isn't somewhere the by-law allows this at all.

Unfortunately for anyone who bought here on the old understanding, the absentee model is finished. There's no permit that unlocks it, no corporate structure that gets around it, and no fee that buys the right, because this is a zoning question rather than a licensing one. What's left is a room in your own home, or a basement or garden suite on the property you live on, which means the revenue to model is a room rather than a unit.

One live caveat before you plan around any of it. By-law 93-25 was appealed to the Ontario Land Tribunal under file OLT-25-000843, and on July 2, 2026 the Tribunal issued a Decision and Order granting only partial approval, with some lands still under active appeal. The city publishes a map of those lands on its Zone Richmond Hill page. Do check your own address against it, or email the Building Division, before you assume which by-law governs your lot.

For a sense of what got regulated, the city's own Short Term and Shared Accommodation Technical Paper counted roughly 750 short-term accommodations registered here in the first quarter of 2020, falling to 582 in the second. It put the typical rate at $74 a night, with an average stay of 5.5 nights.

Those are 2020 numbers and I'd treat them as history rather than a benchmark. The consultants' explanation for that unusually long average stay is still telling, though: people visiting relatives.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Richmond Hill

Since the zoning does all the heavy lifting here, the next question is still what you have to file with the city. The answer is nothing.

Richmond Hill issues no short-term rental licence, permit or registration. Going through the city's own business licence list, I count taxi plates, refreshment vehicles, tobacco sales, secondhand goods, adult entertainment, billiard halls, bowling alleys, arcades, pet stores, kennels, horse riding establishments and newspaper boxes. Nothing on that list touches lodging or rental accommodation. Where a licence is required for something else you're doing, the city issues it within 5 business days of a complete application.

That was a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. The 2022 technical paper recommended a zoning approach and said so plainly, noting that "an in-depth review of licensing and registration approaches is beyond the scope of this discussion paper". It said this even while listing Toronto, Vaughan, Oshawa and Niagara-on-the-Lake as municipalities that had gone the licensing route.

No licence still leaves you with three things to get right, though, and none of them are optional.

Zoning confirmation. You're the one certifying that your property qualifies, and nobody at the city checks it up front. Request it in writing through the Building Division's zoning information form so you have something on file.

A building permit, if the space is a suite. Renting your basement or a garden suite short-term only works if the suite itself is legal. Richmond Hill permits Additional Residential Units under By-law 143-24, passed December 11, 2024, allowing up to three ARUs on a lot as long as the property doesn't exceed four dwelling units total. Each one needs a building permit with drawings stamped by a qualified professional, and a separate electrical permit from the Electrical Safety Authority.

Fire safety. Richmond Hill Fire and Emergency Services asks for working smoke alarms on every floor and outside every sleeping area. That matters more than it sounds once the person sleeping in your basement has never been in the house before.

Keep in mind too that Section 1.0 of By-law 93-25 says the zoning by-law "does not relieve from complying with the requirements of any other By-law or standards of the City of Richmond Hill". Your condo declaration or your lease can still forbid this even where the city permits it, and neither the city nor the platform will referee that fight for you.

Richmond Hill Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your property clears the zoning and you're able to start hosting, there's still tax to deal with, and it stacks differently here than it does in most Ontario tourist towns.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
GST/HST on the stay	13%	The host if GST/HST registered, otherwise the booking platform
Municipal accommodation tax	none in Richmond Hill	n/a
Income tax on rental profit	your marginal rate	Canada Revenue Agency, self-assessed

The HST applies to accommodation occupied for less than one month costing more than $20 a night, which describes essentially every Airbnb booking. Who collects it depends on your own status. A GST/HST-registered host charges and remits it themselves, including on platform bookings, whereas an unregistered host has the platform operator collect and remit instead. Registration is generally required once you pass $30,000 in taxable supplies over twelve months.

On the municipal side, Richmond Hill has never imposed an accommodation tax. Ontario municipalities can levy one under O. Reg. 435/17, and plenty of them charge 4%, yet going through Richmond Hill's tax fees and charges I found only the capital asset sustainability levy and a list of administrative fees like the $102 tax certificate. No accommodation tax appears anywhere on the city's tax or by-law pages. That's a negative finding rather than a promise from the city, so watch out for it changing if the market grows.

Ottawa is where this quietly got more expensive, though. Section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies expense deductions for a "non-compliant short-term rental", meaning one operating where short-term rentals aren't permitted, or one that fails a registration, licensing or permit requirement. The denied share is your expenses multiplied by non-compliant days divided by total short-term rental days, and it has applied to tax years after 2023.

Before September 2025 there was nothing in Richmond Hill to fail. Now there is.

So an absentee whole-home listing in an N1 neighbourhood isn't merely a zoning problem you might get away with. It's a listing whose mortgage interest, utilities, cleaning and management fees stop being deductible, on a rule the CRA administers rather than the city. Remember as well that under Part XX of the Income Tax Act, platforms report host and property data straight to the CRA, so the days of this being invisible are behind us.

Canada Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That federal deduction rule is one of only two levers Ottawa actually pulls here, which is why Richmond Hill's answer looks nothing like Vancouver's.

There is no national short-term rental statute in Canada. Nothing in federal law registers, licenses or caps a short-term rental, and regulation devolves twice over: provinces may set a registration regime, and municipalities set the operative rules on zoning, night limits and enforcement.

Ontario declined the first of those. There's no provincial registry and no provincial STR statute, so licensing sits with municipalities under Part IV of the Municipal Act, 2001. The one province-wide instrument is the transient accommodation tax regulation above, which sets no maximum rate and leaves the scope to each city.

That's a genuinely different regime from the ones hosts read about elsewhere. British Columbia runs a provincial registry with a principal-residence requirement in most communities over 10,000 people, and registration there costs $100 a year where the host lives on site and $450 where they don't. Quebec requires a CITQ registration certificate, and a platform that displays a listing without a valid number faces fines. Nova Scotia registers everything let for 28 days or less and can fine an unregistered operator up to $100,000 for each year.

Richmond Hill hosts face none of that paperwork. What they face instead is a zoning rule with the same practical effect as British Columbia's, arrived at from the opposite direction.

Does Richmond Hill Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

A rule arrived at that way still has to be enforced, of course, and honestly nobody knows yet how hard Richmond Hill intends to push. I'd rather say so than invent a track record for a provision less than a year old.

What can be said is how enforcement will arrive when it does. Richmond Hill runs complaint-driven municipal law enforcement, not patrols. A neighbour emails [email protected] or calls 905-771-0198, an officer opens a file, and the city's by-law page sets one condition on that: anonymous requests will not be investigated. The complainant has to give their name, address and contact details, which raises the bar a little compared with a city that takes tip-line calls.

Three older by-laws will usually reach a badly run listing before the zoning one does, since they're familiar to officers and easy to prove. Noise By-law 43-20 covers the parties. Property Standards By-law 62-24, in force since June 5, 2024, covers the garbage and the yard. It works by order: the owner gets a list of deficiencies and a deadline, and once that deadline passes the city can do the work itself and bill it through your property taxes. Parking Control By-law 402-89 covers the cars on the lawn.

The zoning fines are the ones with teeth, though, because Section 1.10 of By-law 93-25 hands the penalty question straight to the province. Under section 67 of the Planning Act, contravening a by-law passed under section 34 exposes an individual to a fine of not more than $25,000 on a first conviction, and not more than $10,000 for each day the contravention continues after that. For a corporation the numbers double to $50,000 and $25,000 a day.

That second half is the part that hurts. It's not a one-time fine, it accrues daily, and that's exactly where owners who decide to ride it out get badly hurt.

Two more details worth knowing. Section 67 also lets the convicting court make an order prohibiting the offence from continuing or repeating, which is a shutdown rather than a cost. And under section 67.1, where the municipality brings the prosecution, the proceeds of the fine are paid to the treasurer of the municipality. Richmond Hill keeps what it collects.

Whether the city will actually prosecute is the open question. I found no charges, convictions or fines issued under Section 3.10 as of July 2026, which is unsurprising given how new it is and how much of the by-law is still before the Tribunal.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Richmond Hill

Since almost none of that risk reaches someone hosting out of their own home, the order of the steps below still matters more than it looks. The early ones tell you whether the later ones are worth the effort.

1. Answer the principal-residence question honestly. You have to live on the property. Assuming you don't, stop here, because no later step fixes it and the federal deduction rule punishes carrying on anyway.
2. Confirm your zone and your address. Check whether your lot is one of the ones still under appeal at the Ontario Land Tribunal, then confirm your zone permits short-term accommodation. Email [email protected] or file the Request for Zoning By-law Information form.
3. Read your condo declaration, lease or subdivision agreement. The city permitting a use doesn't override a private agreement that forbids it.
4. Legalise the space, if it's a suite. A basement or garden suite needs a building permit under By-law 143-24 and an Electrical Safety Authority permit before it houses anybody, guest or tenant.
5. Decide how many rooms. Two separate short-term accommodations per dwelling unit is the ceiling, so plan the layout around that number rather than hoping for a third.
6. Fit the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, on every floor and outside every sleeping area, then walk the exits the way a guest who arrived at midnight would.
7. Sort out HST before your first booking. Below $30,000 in taxable supplies over twelve months the platform handles it. Above that, register and collect it yourself.
8. Keep the paperwork for the CRA. Platforms report your bookings under Part XX, so your return needs to match what Airbnb already filed.
9. Set the house rules that keep you off the complaint list. Quiet hours, guest counts and parking are what neighbours phone in about, and a named complainant is all it takes to open a file.

Who to Contact in Richmond Hill about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, four city contacts cover almost all of it, and picking the right one saves an irritating amount of time on hold.

Zoning, permitted uses and whether your lot qualifies

The Building Division answers zoning questions about a specific property, which is where the principal-residence and permitted-zone questions belong.

• Email: [email protected]
• Form: the Request for Zoning By-law Information form at forms.richmondhill.ca
• General planning and by-law interpretation: [email protected]
• Address: Richmond Hill Municipal Offices, 225 East Beaver Creek Road, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 3P4

Building permits for a basement, garden or laneway suite

Building Services handles Additional Residential Unit permits, drawings and inspections.

• Permits: [email protected], 905-771-8810
• Inspections: [email protected], 905-771-5465

Complaints, and the line a neighbour would call about you

Municipal Law Enforcement takes noise, property standards, parking and zoning complaints. Worth knowing in both directions, this one.

• Phone: 905-771-0198
• Email: [email protected]
• After hours, urgent only: 905-771-5458
• Remember: the city will not investigate an anonymous request

Business licensing and everything else

The Business Licensing Clerk confirms whether anything you're doing needs a licence, and the main switchboard routes the rest.

• Business licensing: [email protected], 905-771-8840
• Main line: 905-771-8800, or [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Fire and Emergency Services: 905-883-5444

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

Those complaint lines explain a lot about how this city ended up where it did, because the pressure to regulate came from neighbours rather than from planners.

A note on sourcing first. Reddit blocks automated access and its platform terms don't permit the commercial use a survey would need, so nothing below is a quotation from a thread, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I can point to is better anyway, because Richmond Hill asked its own residents directly and published the answers.

The city's What We Heard report covers a survey of 262 residents run through October and November 2020, and the split is stark:

• 55.6% said short-term accommodations should not be permitted in Richmond Hill at all. Only 44.4% said they should.
• 83.14% of respondents neither rent nor plan to rent part of their home this way, so the majority voting on this had no income riding on the outcome.
• 52.36% said their objections would be mitigated if the owner or tenant had to live in the house. That single number is, near enough, where Section 3.10 came from.
• Among those hosting or planning to, the top three reasons were paying the mortgage, extra income, and making use of spare bedrooms. Nobody described a portfolio.

The letters residents sent to staff sharpen it further. Ranked by how often they came up: safety concerns about unknown neighbours, lack of community integration, noise, garbage, loss of affordable housing, partying, parking and traffic. Read the list and the by-law almost writes itself.

Among hosts, the comparison that keeps coming up is with Toronto, where the city's own consultants noted back in 2022 that the platform has to be licensed and the operator has to register. Richmond Hill looked wonderfully simple next to that, which is where the old refrain about it being the easy one in York Region came from. Anyone still repeating that line is working from a pre-September-2025 picture.

Assuming you're weighing this against somewhere the whole unit can legally be listed, the Canada short-term rental market rankings put that revenue gap in front of you before you spend anything, and BNBCalc will model the room-only version against the mortgage.

A market with no licence and no registry isn't the same thing as a market with no rules, though, and that's the trap this particular city sets for anyone who reads a 2023 blog post and stops there. Council spent five years studying the question, and what it landed on was a rule about who sleeps in the house. Wherever you're buying, that's the question to answer before you sign anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Richmond Hill in 2026?

Yes, but only in a home you live in. Comprehensive Zoning By-law 93-25, passed by Richmond Hill Council in September 2025, permits a short-term accommodation of less than 28 consecutive days only where the rental operator's principal residence is on the same property. A spare room, or a legal basement or garden suite on the lot you live on, qualifies. An investment property you don't live at does not, and no licence or permit changes that.

Does Richmond Hill require a short-term rental licence or registration?

No. Richmond Hill issues no short-term rental licence, permit or registration, and charges no application fee. Its business licence categories cover taxis, refreshment vehicles, tobacco, secondhand goods, kennels and similar trades, with nothing for lodging or rental accommodation. The city regulates short-term rentals through zoning instead, which means compliance is your responsibility to establish rather than something the city grants you in advance.

What taxes apply to a short-term rental in Richmond Hill?

Two. HST at 13% applies to accommodation of less than one month costing more than $20 a night, collected by the host where the host is GST/HST registered and by the booking platform where they are not. Registration is generally required above $30,000 in taxable supplies over twelve months. Rental profit is ordinary taxable income. Richmond Hill imposes no municipal accommodation tax, unlike many Ontario municipalities that charge 4%.

What are the penalties for an illegal short-term rental in Richmond Hill?

By-law 93-25 hands the penalty question to the Planning Act, which exposes an individual to a fine of up to $25,000 on a first conviction and up to $10,000 for every day the contravention continues after that. A corporation faces $50,000 and $25,000 a day. The court may also order the use to stop. Separately, federal Income Tax Act section 67.7 denies expense deductions for a non-compliant short-term rental, calculated by the share of non-compliant days.

How many rooms can one host rent short-term in Richmond Hill?

Two. Section 3.10 of By-law 93-25 lets a rental operator run a maximum of two separate short-term accommodations within the same dwelling unit or the same accessory residential unit. The unit also has to be the operator's principal residence, it cannot be a bed and breakfast use, and it must be operated in a way that does not constitute a commercial use, a phrase the by-law leaves undefined.

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