Toronto Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Toronto and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is, you can, and Ontario's biggest city has kept the door open wider than most people assume. The catch is that you can only run one, and only out of the home you live in.

That's the principal residence rule, and it sits at the heart of Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 547, the bylaw that's governed every Airbnb and Vrbo listing in the city since November 2019. Rent the whole unit out while you're away and you're capped at 180 nights a year. Rent a spare room while you still live there and there's no cap on nights at all, only a limit on how many bedrooms you can offer. Either way, you register with the City itself, not the platform alone, and the tax math changed mid-2026: the temporary accommodation tax that helped fund Toronto's stretch as a FIFA World Cup host city rolled back down on August 1.

So let's walk through what that means for you in 2026: what Chapter 547 requires, what registration costs, the taxes that stack on top, how hard the City enforces this, and who to call when something doesn't match up. Every rule and figure below comes from Toronto's own bylaws and its short-term rental pages, checked in July 2026. If you're comparing a Toronto property against other cities before you commit, run the numbers through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Toronto, Ontario?

Before you run any numbers, it helps to know exactly what's legal here, and Toronto is more precise about it than most North American cities. Short-term rentals are permitted, but only under Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 547, Licensing and Registration of Short-Term Rentals, which defines one as all or part of a dwelling unit rented for less than 28 consecutive days in exchange for payment. Bed and breakfasts count. Hotels, motels, and dwellings run as student residences by a public or non-profit school don't.

Council adopted Chapter 547 on May 24, 2018, though it didn't take effect until November 18, 2019, once the companion zoning by-laws that allowed short-term rentals as a land use in residential zones across the city came into force. A group of landlords fought that framework at the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal, which upheld it as a reasonable balance between housing supply, housing variety, and the tourism economy. They tried again at Ontario's Divisional Court in 2020 and were refused leave to appeal, so the framework has stood, largely unchanged in shape, ever since.

What has changed is the detail, and most of it landed through By-law 503-2024, rolled out in three stages between June 2024 and January 2025. Two rules matter most for anyone reading this in 2026. First, you can only register your principal residence, meaning the one home where you actually live, and you're deemed to have only one at a time. Second, you have to pick between renting the entire unit, capped at 180 nights a year, or renting out rooms while you stay there, unlimited nights but capped at three bedrooms. You commit to one or the other at registration and can't switch until you renew.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Toronto

Since you're locked into that choice for a full year, it's worth thinking through which one fits your situation before you apply. Unfortunately for most people who came here hoping to run a straightforward investment listing, that particular model doesn't work in Toronto. You can't buy a second condo, furnish it, and run it as a full-time Airbnb, because the property has to be the one place you live, and you can only have one principal residence under the bylaw. That single rule closes off the classic buy-one-unit-per-neighbourhood portfolio play before you get anywhere near registration.

What's left still works, though at a smaller scale than most investors picture. Own or rent the home you live in, and you can list the entire place while you travel, up to 180 nights a year. Or rent spare bedrooms indefinitely while you stay put, up to three bedrooms and always one fewer than your total bedroom count. Laneway suites, garden suites, and secondary suites qualify too, but only the one you live in yourself. You can't live in the main house and short-term rent the laneway suite behind it, or the other way around. Before you commit to either shape, it's worth running the numbers through BNBCalc to see whether a 180-night ceiling still pencils out for that specific property.

A few situations close the door before you even start. Multi-tenant house operators, what used to be called rooming houses, can't register a short-term rental at that same property. Condo corporations can and often do ban short-term rentals outright in their own bylaws, so make sure you check yours before you plan around a unit you don't fully control. And if you rent rather than own, the City doesn't require your landlord's written consent, though your lease might, and a landlord who disagrees can still take you to the Landlord and Tenant Board. Read your lease first, since that's a cheaper afternoon than a dispute later.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Toronto

Assuming your lease and your condo board are both fine with it, registration is where the City gets directly involved, and it runs through Municipal Licensing and Standards rather than through Airbnb or Vrbo. You apply online, and the fee is $390 as of July 2026, whether it's your first registration or a straight renewal, and it's non-refundable either way. Toronto only takes credit cards for it: Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.

To register, you need to be at least 18, a natural person (companies can't register), and the person who lives in the unit full time. Municipal Licensing and Standards will refuse or revoke a registration where:

• You've been convicted in the past five years under the bylaws covering short-term rentals, property standards, noise, or turfgrass and prohibited plants, or under a zoning by-law
• You have an outstanding order under the Fire Code, Building Code, or one of those same bylaws
• You owe overdue bylaw fines without a payment plan or court extension
• You're a licensed multi-tenant house operator applying for that same property
• Another registration already exists for that exact dwelling unit and you're not the one who's held it longest

Get denied, or have a registration revoked, and you're locked out for 12 months. Cancel or lose a registration at a specific address, and that address itself can't be re-registered by anyone for a year. A bad outcome doesn't only cost the fee. It can cost the property's eligibility too.

Once you're approved, the registration runs for one year from that date, and you can renew up to 30 days early. Miss the renewal date and the late fees stack fast. They run $11.27 for the first 30 days late, $83.18 at 31 to 60 days, and $160.69 at 61 to 90 days. After 90 days the registration is cancelled outright and you're starting over from scratch. The City can also revoke a registration at any time on reasonable grounds, and since June 30, 2024, you only get 10 days to respond to that notice, down from the 40 days operators used to have.

Companies work on a separate track entirely. Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and anyone else brokering short-term rental bookings online for a fee need their own company licence from the City, and it isn't cheap: $10,816 a year plus $1.62 for every night booked through the platform. In exchange, the City expects those companies to verify every operator's registration number against its own register before advertising anything, remove a non-compliant ad within 24 hours of being asked, and cancel any bookings tied to a listing it takes down. That's the mechanism that keeps registration meaningful. If the platforms won't enforce it, no individual host bothers either.

Required Documents for Toronto Short-Term Rentals

None of that platform-side enforcement matters if your own paperwork doesn't hold up first, so it's worth getting the document list right before you apply. Every application starts with one piece of government ID: an Ontario driver's licence or an Ontario Photo Card, nothing else qualifies, and the address on it has to match what you're registering. Since September 30, 2024, that's no longer enough on its own. You also need at least two more documents from different categories that back up the same address:

• a utility bill
• a lease or purchase agreement
• vehicle insurance or registration
• a Notice of Assessment
• a bank statement
• a CPP or OAS statement
• payroll documentation
• a current licence, permit, or certificate from another government body

Two utility bills don't count, since that's the same category twice; you need two different kinds of proof.

Beyond identity, the application asks for the address and description of the unit, whether you're going entire-unit or partial-unit, the type of building, and a 24/7 emergency contact whose name and phone number differ from your own. Keep in mind that this contact has to know they've been listed and understand what the role means, because if a guest can't reach you during a stay, they're the one the City expects to be reachable instead.

Municipal Licensing and Standards can also call you in for an in-person interview, and once you're registered, expect an annual compliance inspection where you have to be personally present. City staff walk the interior and exterior and review your documents again, and if they ask for something you haven't got, you get 10 days to produce it before the registration is at risk. Be aware that this isn't a formality: it's the same review that catches operators whose "principal residence" turns out to be a unit they barely use.

Toronto Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your paperwork and your actual living situation line up, the next hurdle is money, and three different tax authorities want a share of it. Start with the one the City runs directly: the Municipal Accommodation Tax, authorized under Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 758. The standard rate is 6% of the rental price, but Toronto raised it temporarily to 8.5% from June 1, 2025 through July 31, 2026 under By-law 1259-2024. The City's own tax page doesn't spell out why, though several outlets connected the timing to Toronto's costs as a 2026 FIFA World Cup host city. That increase has already expired: the rate reverted to 6% on August 1, 2026, and every registered operator collects at the lower rate from that date forward. MAT only applies to stays under 28 consecutive days, which lines up with the definition of a short-term rental in the first place, so a 28-night-plus booking owes none of it.

On top of that sits HST, Ontario's 13% harmonized sales tax (5% federal GST plus an 8% provincial share), and the City's own MAT page is specific that HST applies to the MAT amount itself, not only to the base rent. If your short-term rental income clears $30,000 in a single calendar quarter or across four consecutive quarters, the Canada Revenue Agency requires you to register for GST/HST within 29 days, the same threshold that applies to any small business in Canada, not something Toronto invented. Since 2024, there's also a federal rule that bites specifically at non-compliant hosts. Under section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act, added by legislation that received royal assent in June 2024, the CRA denies your expense deductions for any day your short-term rental wasn't registered and compliant with Chapter 547. Get caught unregistered for half the year and you lose the deductions for that half, on top of whatever municipal fine you're already facing.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
Municipal Accommodation Tax (MAT)	6% (was 8.5% from June 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026)	City of Toronto
HST	13% (5% federal, 8% Ontario), charged on the MAT amount too	Canada Revenue Agency
Federal income tax	Ordinary rates; deductions denied for non-compliant days under s.67.7	Canada Revenue Agency

Filing the MAT doesn't disappear because a platform collects it for you. Airbnb can sign a Voluntary Collection Agreement with the City and remit MAT on your behalf, but you still have to file a MAT report every quarter yourself, even in a quarter with zero bookings. Reports are due within 30 days of quarter end: April 30, July 30, October 30, and January 30. Miss a payment and interest runs at 1.25% a month from the day after it's due, climbing to 15% a year once you're in default, and the City can use unpaid MAT as grounds to revoke your registration or refuse a renewal. Don't skip a quarter because the number is zero; the filing obligation and the payment obligation are two separate things.

Ontario Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Zoom out from Toronto's own bylaw and MAT schedule, and the rest of the framework comes from two levels above the city: the province and the federal government. Ontario itself doesn't run a single province-wide short-term rental law the way British Columbia does with its principal-residence requirement, or Quebec does with its CITQ registration system. Instead, the province hands regulatory authority down to municipalities, either through the general Municipal Act, 2001, or, in Toronto's specific case, through the City of Toronto Act, 2006, which is the actual legal basis Chapter 547 cites for its own authority. That means the rules differ if you own property outside Toronto's borders in Mississauga, Vaughan, or Markham; each municipality writes and enforces its own bylaw.

What Ontario does set, province-wide, are the baseline safety and rights standards that every municipal bylaw builds on top of. The Ontario Fire Code is why Chapter 547 requires an exit diagram in every short-term rental. The Ontario Human Rights Code is why the bylaw bars discrimination and requires you to accommodate a guest's service animal, language Toronto copied directly into its own bylaw text. And the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 is why your guests aren't tenants in the legal sense at all. Section 5(a) exempts "living accommodation intended to be provided to the travelling or vacationing public" in a hotel, motel, tourist home, bed and breakfast, or vacation home from the Act entirely. That keeps a two-night Airbnb guest out of the Landlord and Tenant Board's jurisdiction, the same board a long-term tenant of yours could otherwise drag you in front of.

Remember that federal law sits above all of it regardless of which Ontario municipality you're in. The HST, the $30,000 GST/HST registration threshold, and the Income Tax Act's deduction-denial rule for non-compliant hosts apply the same way whether you're hosting in Toronto or Thunder Bay.

Does Toronto Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

None of that federal or provincial law does the day-to-day policing, though. That job sits with Toronto's own Municipal Licensing and Standards division. And yes, it enforces this actively rather than treating Chapter 547 as a formality.

Most enforcement starts the way it does everywhere. A neighbour calls 311 about noise, garbage, or a listing that clearly isn't anyone's home, and the complaint gets routed to a Bylaw Enforcement Officer who investigates, educates, or cites depending on what they find. What sets Toronto apart is that the City doesn't rely on complaints alone. The Executive Director of Municipal Licensing and Standards holds standing audit authority. That means examining an operator's or a company's books and records, entering premises, and requiring answers under oath. Every registered operator also faces an annual compliance inspection, in person, no exceptions. That inspection routine only started in January 2025, so a lot of the enforcement muscle here is new since the last time this framework was written up.

The penalties back that up with real numbers rather than vague deterrence.

Violation	Fine
Incomplete or late transaction records	$300
Missing emergency contact, 911 info, or exit diagram	$400
Discrimination, or refusing a guest's service animal	$500
Entire-unit rental past 180 nights, or no proof of principal residence	$700
Operating, advertising, or facilitating an unregistered rental, or one that isn't a principal residence	$1,000

Get convicted in court instead of handed one of those set fines, and the maximum jumps to $100,000, plus a special fine a judge can set specifically to erase whatever profit you made from breaking the rules, plus up to $10,000 for every day the violation continues. Corporate officers and directors are personally on the hook for that same $100,000 ceiling, so hiding behind a numbered company doesn't help.

Platforms carry exposure too, and that's what makes registration stick. A licensed company that fails to verify a registration number, or that keeps advertising a delisted rental, risks its own $10,816-a-year licence and faces that same $100,000 general penalty. That's a lot more than any individual host's $1,000 fine. It's exactly why Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com pull non-compliant listings within 24 hours of a City request rather than fight it in court.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Toronto

Knowing the platforms won't fight for you is exactly why it pays to get your own side of it right from day one, and roughly in this order.

1. Confirm the property is your principal residence, and check whether your condo corporation's own bylaws already ban short-term rentals before you spend a dollar on the process.
2. Decide entire-unit or partial-unit now, since you're locked into that choice until your first renewal.
3. Gather your Ontario driver's licence or Photo Card, plus two more documents from different categories proving you live there, and line up a 24/7 emergency contact who isn't you.
4. Apply and pay the $390 fee through the City's registration portal, expecting a review period and possibly an in-person interview.
5. Once approved, add your registration number to every listing, invoice, and receipt, matched exactly to what's on file with the City.
6. Post the exit diagram and emergency and 911 information physically inside the unit before your first guest arrives, and test your smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.
7. Register for GST/HST once you expect to clear $30,000 in a year, and start your MAT filing habit from the very first quarter, even a $0 one.
8. Diarize your renewal date and your annual compliance inspection, since missing either one puts the whole registration at risk.

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

Diarizing those dates only helps if you also know who to call when a date or a document doesn't work out the way you expected.

Registration, renewals, and compliance

Municipal Licensing and Standards, through its Rental Standards Services team, issues every registration and enforces Chapter 547 directly.

• Address: 433 Eastern Ave., Building B, 2nd Floor, Toronto, ON M4M 1B7
• Email: [email protected]
• Compliance email: [email protected]
• Phone: 416-395-6600
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Apply, renew, or check status: the City's short-term rental registration portal

Municipal Accommodation Tax

Questions about filing or paying MAT go to a separate inbox from the registration team.

• Email: [email protected]
• Filing: the City's online MAT reporting system, quarterly, even in a $0 quarter

Noise, safety, and suspected illegal listings

Anyone, including a neighbour, can report a suspected unregistered or non-compliant short-term rental through 311.

• Phone: 311, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Online: toronto.ca/311, or the 311 Toronto app

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

That same 311 line cuts both ways, and it's a big part of why host sentiment here reads differently than it does in cities with looser enforcement. I couldn't load Reddit directly while researching this, since it blocks automated access, so nothing below is a specific thread I read. I didn't find a BiggerPockets thread dedicated to Toronto's bylaw either, only general discussion of principal-residence rules in other cities. What follows is my read of the recurring, well-documented themes from the legal and news coverage of the tribunal fight and the bylaw's rollout, not a forum survey, so weigh it accordingly.

• Pure investors mostly moved on. The principal-residence rule eliminates the classic buy-and-list model outright, and the landlords who fought it all the way to the Divisional Court lost. Anyone still hunting for a Toronto condo to run as a full-time, nightly-rate Airbnb is chasing a strategy the City closed off in 2019 and has only tightened since.
• Genuine home-sharers describe a process that's bureaucratic but survivable. The friction people report clusters around documentation, getting two acceptable proof-of-residence categories, matching a listing exactly to what's on file, rather than around the underlying rules themselves.
• Condo owners get caught out by a second layer they didn't expect. The City's own registration doesn't override a condo corporation's separate ban, and that mismatch, legal with the City, illegal under your own condo bylaws, shows up constantly in commentary about the rollout.
• Nobody serious argues Toronto looks the other way anymore. Between the annual inspections, the platform-side verification requirement, and set fines that scale with the offence, the debate has moved from whether the City will catch you to whether the principal-residence limit is the right policy, which is a different argument entirely.

If you're weighing a Toronto property against markets with fewer restrictions, it helps to see the real numbers side by side before you decide anything. BNBCalc's Toronto market data breaks down occupancy and revenue at the neighbourhood level, which is a useful gut check before you commit to the registration process above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Toronto in 2026?

Yes, but only from your principal residence, the one home where you live. Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 547 lets you rent the entire unit for up to 180 nights a year, or rent spare bedrooms with no night limit, but you can't buy a separate property purely to run as a full-time Airbnb. You have to register with the City through Municipal Licensing and Standards, pay a $390 fee, and get an approved registration number before you can legally advertise or accept bookings anywhere.

How much does it cost to register a short-term rental in Toronto?

Registration costs $390, and renewal costs the same $390 each year, both non-refundable regardless of the outcome. Miss your renewal date and late fees apply on a sliding scale. They start at $11.27 for the first 30 days late, rise to $83.18, then $160.69, and after 90 days the registration is cancelled outright and you have to reapply from scratch at full cost. Platforms that broker your bookings pay separately: a company licence costs $10,816 a year plus $1.62 per night booked.

What is the Municipal Accommodation Tax rate for Toronto short-term rentals?

The standard rate is 6% of the rental price, though it was temporarily raised to 8.5% from June 1, 2025 through July 31, 2026, a period tied by several outlets to Toronto's costs as a 2026 FIFA World Cup host city. That temporary rate has already expired: operators collect 6% again as of August 1, 2026. The tax applies only to stays under 28 consecutive days, and Ontario's 13% HST applies on top of the MAT amount itself, not only on the base rent.

Can you rent out an entire home in Toronto on Airbnb?

Yes, but only if it's your principal residence, and only for up to 180 nights in a calendar year. You register as an entire-unit operator, which locks you out of also renting rooms separately until your next renewal, and the 180-night cap applies whether the nights come from entire-unit bookings or a mix of entire-unit and partial-unit use in the same year. There's no version of the rule that allows unlimited entire-unit rental of any Toronto property, principal residence or not.

What happens if you operate a short-term rental in Toronto without registering?

You're committing an offence under Chapter 547. A court conviction can carry a fine up to $100,000, plus a special fine set to remove any profit you made, plus up to $10,000 for each day the violation continues. Beyond the fine, an unregistered listing usually can't survive on a platform anyway, since licensed companies must verify your registration number before advertising it and remove it within 24 hours of a City request. Since 2024, federal tax law also denies your expense deductions for any non-compliant period.

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