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

Do you own a place in Florida and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? You're allowed to, and state law is unusually firm about that. No Florida city or county can ban vacation rentals, and none of them can tell you how long a guest may stay or how often you may rent. That protection is written into Fla. Stat. 509.032(7)(b), and it binds every one of Florida's 67 counties and 400-plus municipalities.

The catch sits in the very next sentence of that statute. The protection doesn't apply to any local ordinance adopted on or before June 1, 2011. So Florida ended up with two kinds of town: the ones that were early to regulate and got to keep everything, and the ones that weren't and are now stuck with a narrow toolkit. Two houses eight miles apart can sit under completely different rules, and the difference has nothing to do with the neighborhood and everything to do with a date fifteen years ago.

So let's walk through what Florida actually requires of you in 2026: the statewide license from the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, the three layers of tax, what your city can and can't add on top, how any of it gets enforced, and exactly who to call. Every figure below comes from Florida's own statutes, agency pages and forms, checked as of July 2026. If you're still deciding whether a Florida property pencils at all, run it through BNBCalc before you start filing paperwork.

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

Before any of that paperwork, though, work out who's writing your rules. Florida regulates short-term rentals at two levels, and the relationship between them is the single most important thing to understand about this state.

The state level is fixed and applies everywhere. Fla. Stat. 509.032(7)(a) preempts the regulation of public lodging establishments to the state, covering sanitation standards, inspections and personnel training. A vacation rental is a public lodging establishment, so the licensing and safety side of your operation answers to Tallahassee rather than city hall, which is why every whole-home Florida rental needs the same state license regardless of address.

The local level is where things fracture. Paragraph (7)(b) says a local law "may not prohibit vacation rentals or regulate the duration or frequency of rental of vacation rentals," then adds the line that shapes the entire Florida market: "This paragraph does not apply to any local law, ordinance, or regulation adopted on or before June 1, 2011."

The history explains the shape. The Legislature first preempted vacation rental regulation in 2011 through Chapter 2011-119, Laws of Florida, which also stopped cities regulating rentals based on classification, use or occupancy, while grandfathering anything already on the books. Cities pushed back hard, and in 2014 the Legislature met them partway through Chapter 2014-71, leaving the current, narrower preemption in force from July 1, 2014.

That produces two kinds of city. One with a qualifying pre-2011 ordinance can still enforce a six-month minimum stay or confine rentals to certain zoning districts, and hosts genuinely cannot do much about it. One without can regulate noise, parking, trash, occupancy, life safety and registration, but cannot tell you a week-long booking is off limits. The Attorney General has closed the obvious workaround too: a 2016 advisory opinion concluded a municipality may not impose spacing or density rules that would effectively prevent eligible housing from being used as a vacation rental, while confirming that amending a pre-2011 ordinance doesn't destroy grandfather protection for the parts that get reenacted. None of this touches private parties, mind you. Your HOA or condo association plays by entirely different rules.

Plenty of 2026 write-ups claim the state has since taken vacation rental regulation over. It hasn't, and the detail matters because those articles describe rules you don't actually have to follow. CS/SB 280 would have preempted licensing to DBPR, capped local registration fees and made platforms display license numbers, and it did pass both chambers in March 2024. Governor DeSantis then vetoed it on June 27, 2024. Nothing has replaced it since. The 2025 session produced no vacation rental bill at all, and the only one to move in 2026 was SB 608, a pool safety measure, which got folded into CS/CS/SB 658, passed the Senate 37 to 0 in February and then died in the House on March 13. Another preemption attempt looks likely to me eventually. Nothing of the sort is law today.

So state law sets the ceiling and your city or county decides what you actually get. Our county guides for Miami-Dade, Broward, Orange and Osceola exist because those four markets run on very different local rules despite sharing one statute.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Florida

Wherever you land on that map, getting started means dealing with three institutions plus one private party, and keeping them separate in your head helps, because they don't talk to each other. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation issues the vacation rental license through its Division of Hotels and Restaurants. The Department of Revenue registers you for sales tax. Your county tax collector or comptroller usually collects the tourist development tax separately, and your city or county may want a business tax receipt, a local registration, or both. The fourth party is your HOA or condo association, which answers to none of the above and can be the one that kills the deal.

Start by working out whether you need the state license at all. The Division's test is refreshingly plain: you need a vacation rental license if you're renting the entire unit "more than three times in a calendar year for periods of less than 30 days or 1 calendar month, whichever is less, or if it's advertised or held out to the public as a place regularly rented to guests," per the DBPR guide to vacation rentals. Make sure you read the second half, since advertising alone triggers it and a slow first year won't save you.

Two exceptions matter. Renting a single room rather than the whole unit isn't a public lodging establishment and needs no DBPR license, though your city can still regulate it and you still owe the taxes. Property type counts too: Fla. Stat. 509.242(1)(c) defines a vacation rental as a condo or co-op unit, or a single-family through four-family house, so a five-unit building falls outside the definition and gets licensed as an apartment.

Before any of that, do the June 1, 2011 check on the specific address. It costs one phone call, and it's the only question that can invalidate an entire underwriting model. A property in an unincorporated county with no vacation rental ordinance is a fundamentally different asset from an identical house inside a city that got its rules on the books in 2009. Markets like Polk, Volusia and Brevard contain both kinds of municipality inside a single county line.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Florida

Local rules fracture like that, yet every Florida host deals with the same state license, so this part is uniform statewide. The Division of Hotels and Restaurants issues vacation rental licenses in two property classes crossed with three operator classes. The property classes are simple: Vacation Rental - Condominium covers a unit or group of units in a condominium or cooperative, and Vacation Rental - Dwelling covers a single-family house, a townhouse, or a unit or group of units in a duplex, triplex or quadruplex.

The operator classes decide how many properties one license can carry:

• Single covers one house or townhouse, or units inside a single building, owned and operated by the same person or entity. This is the ordinary owner-host license.
• Group is issued to a licensed agent and covers all units in a building or a single complex.
• Collective is issued to a licensed agent covering houses or units at separate locations. It caps at 75 units and every location has to sit in the same DBPR district.

A new application costs $50 plus a $10 Hospitality Education Program fee plus the license fee. The license fee for a single rental unit is $170 a year, or $90 at the half-year rate, rising to $180 for 2 to 25 units and up to $350 for 501 or more, with collective licenses at $150 plus $10 per unit. Renewals drop the application fee, so an ordinary one-property host pays $230 in year one and $180 every year after, all published on the DBPR vacation rental guide.

Now the piece that costs people real money through pure bad timing. Florida doesn't renew licenses on your anniversary. It renews them on a seven-district schedule:

District	Counties include	Annual renewal	Half-year fee begins
1 (Miami)	Dade, Monroe	October 1	April 1
2 (Ft. Lauderdale)	Broward, Martin, Palm Beach	December 1	June 1
3 (Tampa)	Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Polk, Hernando, Citrus, Sumter	February 1	August 1
4 (Orlando)	Orange, Osceola, Brevard, Volusia, Seminole, Lake, Indian River, St. Lucie	April 1	October 1
5 (Jacksonville)	Duval, St. Johns, Clay, Alachua, Flagler and others	June 1	December 1
6 (Panama City)	Bay, Walton, Okaloosa, Escambia, Leon and others	June 1	December 1
7 (Ft. Myers)	Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Sarasota and others	December 1	June 1

The Division spells out the trap itself: "Fees are based on the application date and licenses expire on the next renewal date. In some cases this can result in paying for your initial application and then in days or weeks paying again to renew." Buy in Collier County in November, and since District 7 renews on December 1, applying two weeks early means paying twice inside a month. Online applications process in one to two business days, so filing early out of caution buys you nothing.

Once licensed, four standing obligations apply:

• Display the license conspicuously, keep the unit clean and sound, change bedding between guests or weekly, and provide soap.
• Sanitize dishes and glassware between guests. Doing that properly needs a three-compartment sink or a commercial dishmachine, which almost no vacation rental has, so the Division lets you post its Notification of Exception to Sanitization Requirements notice instead.
• File a Certificate of Balcony Inspection every three years if the building is three stories or more, unless the exterior balconies and stairs are condominium common elements and you can prove it. This catches condo hosts in beachfront towers who assume the association handles everything.
• Train and equip. Annual human trafficking awareness training for housekeeping and reception staff within 60 days of hire under Fla. Stat. 509.096, smoke detectors in every living unit, hearing-impaired detectors at one per fifty units, and NFPA 101 compliance.

The penalties sit in Fla. Stat. 509.261. The division can levy fines up to $1,000 per offense, and for violations of a "critical law or rule" it may treat each day as a separate offense. Opening for operation without a license, or while suspended or revoked, is a second degree misdemeanor, and the division posts a closed-for-operation sign on the property.

Then there's the local layer, which the state license neither covers nor replaces. Your city or county may require a business tax receipt under Fla. Stat. 205.042, a local registration, an inspection, a designated responsible party, posted occupancy limits, or parking minimums. Whether it does depends entirely on where the property sits, and no state cap limits what it can charge you.

Required Documents for Florida Short-Term Rentals

Since that local layer varies so much, think of the paperwork as two packets. The state packet is identical for every host in Florida. The local packet varies by address, and it's the one that stalls people.

The state packet:

• The DBPR vacation rental application, filed through a DBPR Online Services account. The account is mandatory, because the division won't take unit addresses by paper or email.
• Every rental unit address, matched to your declared unit count. List ten units, submit ten addresses. Later changes happen in the same portal.
• Your Florida sales tax registration. Apply with Form DR-1 through the Department of Revenue's registration portal and you receive a Certificate of Registration, Form DR-11. Agents registering multiple owners' properties use Form DR-1C instead.
• A Certificate of Balcony Inspection (DBPR HR-7020) at three or more stories, refiled every three years, plus your human trafficking training records.
• A guest register. Fla. Stat. 509.101(2) requires every transient establishment operator to keep a register showing occupancy dates and rates charged, in chronological order, available on request. A channel manager booking export usually satisfies this, provided you can actually produce it.

The local packet, which you have to go and ask for:

• A local business tax receipt from the city, the county, or frequently both, and a county tourist development tax account, which is separate from your state sales tax registration in most of Florida.
• A local vacation rental registration or permit where one exists, often with a responsible-party contact and a posted occupancy figure.
• Written HOA or condo association confirmation that short-term rental is permitted. Make sure you get it before closing, not after.
• Proof of the pre-2011 position if your city has a grandfathered ordinance. Ask planning for the ordinance number and adoption date, and don't forget to keep a copy, because that dated ordinance is what settles any later argument about eligibility.

Florida Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming both packets are in hand, tax is where the ongoing work lives. Three layers of it sit on a Florida short-term stay, and the reason hosts get burned isn't the total. It's that those layers go to different agencies, and your booking platform may only be handling some of them.

Layer one is the state's 6% sales tax. The Department of Revenue's brochure GT-800034 puts it directly: Florida's 6% state sales tax, plus any applicable discretionary sales surtax, applies to rental charges for the right to occupy living quarters "for rental periods of six months or less." Condos, single-family homes, beach houses and apartments are all named explicitly.

Layer two is your county's discretionary sales surtax. It rides on top of the state rate, it isn't uniform, and it gets renewed or expires on a calendar-year cycle. Do check yours on the Department of Revenue rate page rather than trusting a number in any article, this one included.

Layer three is the local option transient rental tax, which most people call the tourist development tax or the bed tax. Form DR-15TDT is the authoritative list, covering the tourist development tax, the convention development tax, the tourist impact tax and the municipal resort tax. County rates run from 0% to 6%, with a few small inland counties at zero and most tourism counties at the top. Miami-Dade sits at 6% generally, but the form's footnote sets 7% for Miami Beach and 4% for Surfside and Bal Harbour, which shows how granular this gets.

Who collects it matters more than the rate. The Department of Revenue is explicit that "most counties self-administer the transient rental tax," so the tourist tax goes directly to the county while state sales tax and surtax always go to the Department. Get that wrong and you can be fully paid up with Tallahassee while running a growing debt to your county. Registration isn't optional and no platform waives it: the Department requires "every person ... who rents, leases, lets, or grants a license to use transient accommodations" to register, and requires each place of business to be separately registered. Two houses means two registrations.

Which brings us to the gap that costs Florida hosts the most money. Airbnb collects and remits the 6% state transient rental tax and the discretionary surtax statewide, but it collects county tourist development tax only in the counties where it has an agreement. Yours may not be one. The Osceola County Tax Collector puts it about as plainly as a government office ever does: "Osceola County is NOT CONTRACTED with Airbnb, VRBO, Evolve, or any other third-party booking platforms. It is the responsibility of the property owners and agents to collect and remit the 6% tourist tax to the Osceola County Tax Collector for all short-term rentals."

Work a booking through it. A five-night stay in Kissimmee at $200 a night with a $150 cleaning fee gives you $1,150 of taxable consideration, since Osceola counts mandatory separately stated charges like cleaning and departure fees in the total. The state's 6% takes $69, and Airbnb hands that to Tallahassee for you. Osceola's 6% tourist development tax takes another $69, and nobody is sending that but you. Repeat across a season and that second $69 compounds into a five-figure liability, which is exactly what Osceola's random audit program and its three-year records requirement exist to find.

A few exemptions apply. A guest on a bona fide written lease for continuous residence longer than six months is exempt, as is anyone who has resided there over six months and paid tax on the first six, from the seventh month onward. Full-time students with a written statement from their institution and active-duty military under official orders are exempt too.

The deduction side runs in your favor. License fees, insurance, cleaning and management, supplies, utilities, depreciation and mortgage interest are all ordinary write-offs, and the lodging taxes you collect aren't your income, so they never inflate your taxable revenue. To see how those costs land across different Florida submarkets, BNBCalc Markets compares revenue and expenses at neighborhood level rather than from one blended statewide average.

Does Florida Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Yes, though not in the way you're expecting, and getting the distinction right tells you where to spend your compliance effort.

The state is light-touch on how you operate. Vacation rentals sit outside Florida's routine lodging inspection cycle: Fla. Stat. 509.032(2)(b) requires biannual inspections of licensed public lodging establishments, then says units classified as vacation rentals "are not subject to this requirement but shall be made available to the division upon request." Inspections happen on complaint, and complaints are rare. The Division's annual report for FY 2024-25 logged 252 vacation rental complaints across the entire state, of which just 27 were confirmed, against 47,728 active licenses covering more than 171,000 units. The odds of a state inspector appearing at your door are close to nil.

The state is not light-touch about the license itself. That same report notes the division "closed approximately 10,800 delinquent licenses in August 2024" and now runs monthly sweeps of licenses two or more years overdue. Since operating unlicensed is a second degree misdemeanor carrying $1,000-per-offense fines, a lapsed renewal is the most common way an otherwise careful Florida host falls out of compliance.

Local enforcement is where the real risk lives, and it's uneven by design. Code enforcement fines under Fla. Stat. 162.09 run to $250 a day for a first violation and $500 for a repeat, but municipalities of 50,000 or more may adopt enhanced penalties of $1,000 a day for a first violation and $5,000 a day for a repeat, with up to $15,000 for something irreparable. Those accrue daily, a completely different exposure from a one-off citation. Grandfathered cities enforce hardest, since they have the most to enforce. Miami Beach prohibits rentals of under six months and one day in all single-family homes and in many multifamily buildings in certain zoning districts, and requires permitted rentals to display their Business Tax Receipt number and Resort Tax certificate number in every advertisement. A listing missing those numbers is self-reporting. County tax offices are the third enforcer, and often the busiest.

So Florida is a strong short-term rental state on a sharply uneven local map. Demand runs high across several seasons, the state won't ban you, and the license is cheap and fast. Get the address wrong, though, and state protection won't save you, because a city that beat the 2011 deadline can enforce rules the state would never let it pass today.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Florida

So the sequence below opens on that date rather than on the license, and order matters throughout, since several steps depend on documents from somebody else's timeline.

1. Run the June 1, 2011 check before you buy. Call the planning department and ask two dated questions: does a vacation rental ordinance exist for this address, and was it adopted on or before June 1, 2011. If both answers are yes, get the ordinance number and read what it says about minimum stay. Everything else here is survivable. This one isn't.
2. Read the HOA or condo documents. State preemption protects you from governments, not private covenants. Under Fla. Stat. 720.306(1)(h) a homeowners association can adopt amendments governing rental terms under six months and can prohibit renting a parcel more than three times a calendar year, and those apply to every parcel owner whenever they bought and whether or not they consented. Condominium rules under Fla. Stat. 718.110(13) are friendlier, binding only owners who consent or take title afterwards.
3. Check the homestead consequence if you live there. Fla. Stat. 196.061 treats renting all or substantially all of a homesteaded dwelling as abandonment of the homestead, and abandonment after January 1 costs you that year's exemption once the property is rented more than 30 days a calendar year for two consecutive years. A few weekends is fine. A year-round listing is a property tax decision as well as a rental one.
4. Register with the Department of Revenue. File Form DR-1 for your sales tax Certificate of Registration, registering each property separately. Do it early, and remember that the number is useful everywhere else.
5. Apply for the DBPR vacation rental license. Open a DBPR Online Services account, pick Condominium or Dwelling, choose Single unless you're a licensed agent, submit each unit address, and pay the $50 application, $10 HEP and license fee. Be aware that renewal runs on your district's schedule rather than your anniversary, so check that date first.
6. Open your county tourist development tax account. Look your county up on Form DR-15TDT, and if it self-administers, set up an account with the tax collector or comptroller even when you expect your platform to collect. Filing a zero return is a small chore. An unfiled account is an audit.
7. Get the local business tax receipt and any local registration. Ask the city first, then the county, since plenty of Florida hosts need both. Settle any local requirement for a 24/7 responsible party or posted occupancy limit at the same time, then handle the safety items before your first guest: smoke detectors, the balcony certificate at three stories or more, the sanitization notice, and trafficking-awareness training for your cleaners.
8. Configure tax collection deliberately, then model the full stack. Confirm which taxes your platform actually remits for your county, collect the rest at booking, and hold it separately from operating cash. Then put license fees, insurance, the whole tax load and local registration costs into the spreadsheet before the $30,000 furniture order rather than after it.

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

Working through that list will throw up questions, and where you take them depends on the question. Half have one statewide answer and half depend entirely on your address. The two state agencies come with real phone numbers. For the local pieces, what helps is the lookup method, because no directory covering 67 counties and 400-plus municipalities saves you the phone call.

State license, inspections and complaints

The DBPR Division of Hotels and Restaurants handles your vacation rental license from application to renewal, and investigates complaints about licensed properties.

• Address: 2601 Blair Stone Road, Tallahassee, FL 32399-1011
• Phone: 850.487.1395 (TTY 800.955.8771)
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern. The department names 8 to 10 a.m. and 3:30 to 5 p.m. as its quieter windows.
• Online: apply and manage licenses through DBPR licensing, check any property against the license verification tool, and file complaints through the DBPR complaint portal.

State sales tax registration and filing

The Florida Department of Revenue handles your sales tax registration, your returns and the discretionary surtax, plus the tourist development tax for the minority of counties that don't self-administer.

• Taxpayer Services: 850-488-6800, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern, Monday to Friday
• Email: [email protected], with a Spanish-language unit at [email protected]
• Mailing address: Taxpayer Services, Florida Department of Revenue, Mail Stop 3-2000, 5050 W Tennessee St, Tallahassee, FL 32399-0112
• Online: register at the Department of Revenue registration portal, and find the full contact list including local service centers on the General Tax Administration contacts page

One practical note from my last check in July 2026: the Department is flagging telephone system problems and long hold times on its own contact page and steering people toward local service centers. Email, or budget the time.

Finding your county's tourist tax office

Open Form DR-15TDT and find your county. The "Collected By" column tells you whether the tourist development tax goes to the Department of Revenue or straight to the county. If it says County, search for your county's tax collector or comptroller and look for "tourist development tax." That's the office that registers you, takes your monthly return, and audits you. The Department's own instruction is to contact the county to verify the rate, because "not all counties notify the Department of changes in their local option transient rental tax rate."

Finding your city or county zoning and code contacts

Zoning determinations come from the local planning department and there's no state shortcut. There is a repeatable sequence, though.

1. Confirm which jurisdiction you're in. Watch out for an address with a city mailing name, since it often sits in unincorporated county, which is usually the looser of the two. The county property appraiser's parcel record settles it.
2. Read the ordinance yourself first. Most Florida municipalities publish their codes at the Municode Florida library, with others on American Legal or eCode360. Search for "vacation rental" and "transient."
3. Call the planning or zoning division and ask three specific questions: does this parcel's zoning district permit vacation rentals, does a vacation rental ordinance exist, and what was its adoption date. That third question is the whole ballgame.
4. Call code compliance separately. Planning tells you what's allowed. Code compliance tells you what gets enforced and what the fine schedule looks like. You want both answers.
5. Ask about the local business tax receipt at the county tax collector and at the city. Needing both is normal in Florida.

For the bigger markets, our county guides for Miami-Dade, Broward, Orange, Osceola, Polk, Collier, Volusia and Brevard already carry the local contact details and the municipality-by-municipality picture.

What Airbnb Hosts in Florida Report About Local Regulations

Hosts who've been through all of that talk about it in fairly consistent terms. Sentiment about Florida splits along a predictable line, and reading it before you buy is worthwhile. What follows is my read of the recurring themes rather than a survey, so weigh it accordingly.

• Florida investors talk about cities, not the state. In a long-running BiggerPockets thread on Tampa Bay and the beach areas, they map the region municipality by municipality: Gulfport permits short-term rentals citywide, Largo permits them but with commercial-grade build requirements, Clearwater prohibits them and pursues violators actively, and roughly thirty grandfathered homes on Clearwater's North Beach carry a premium precisely because they're grandfathered.
• Grandfathering dominates the practical advice. Experienced hosts tell newcomers to verify the ordinance date first and everything else second, and several point out that grandfathered status is itself an asset that transfers with the property. Dunedin and parts of St. Petersburg come up repeatedly as legal pockets inside otherwise restrictive cities.
• Enforcement reads as real but slow, and some hosts price that in. One participant in that Tampa thread notes the initial fine "isn't enough to scare away some owners," a candid description of how daily-accruing code fines get treated as a cost of doing business. In a Sarasota County thread, an investor cites the 30-day minimum in the unincorporated county and then observes that "hundreds of properties listed on Airbnb do not follow the rules."
• The tourist development tax is the recurring administrative complaint. Hosts who assumed Airbnb handled everything discover it covered the state's share but not the county's, sometimes a year or two in. The frustration is less about the money than about how easy it is to misread, given that the platform genuinely does collect some of your taxes.

The through-line is hard to miss. Hosts who research the state and skip the city get hurt. Hosts who verify the ordinance date and open the county tax account on day one find Florida a straightforward place to operate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a license to run an Airbnb in Florida?

Yes, in almost every case. Renting an entire unit more than three times in a calendar year for periods under 30 days, or advertising it as regularly available to guests, requires a vacation rental license from the DBPR Division of Hotels and Restaurants. A single-property owner pays $50 application, $10 education fee and a $170 annual license fee. Renting just a room needs no state license, though local rules and taxes still apply.

Can a Florida city ban short-term rentals?

Not unless it beat the deadline. Fla. Stat. 509.032(7)(b) prevents local governments from prohibiting vacation rentals or regulating the duration or frequency of stays, but that protection does not apply to ordinances adopted on or before June 1, 2011. Cities with qualifying older rules can still enforce minimum stays and district restrictions. Every other city may regulate noise, parking, occupancy, safety and registration, but cannot outlaw the activity.

How much tax do you collect on a Florida short-term rental?

Three layers. Florida charges 6% state sales tax on stays of six months or less, your county adds a discretionary sales surtax, and the county tourist development tax adds anywhere from 0% to 6%, reaching 7% in Miami Beach. State sales tax and surtax always go to the Department of Revenue. Most counties collect their tourist tax themselves, so check Form DR-15TDT for your county first.

Did Florida pass a statewide short-term rental law in 2025 or 2026?

No. SB 280 would have preempted vacation rental licensing to the state and capped local registration fees, but Governor DeSantis vetoed it on June 27, 2024, and no successor has passed. The 2025 session produced no vacation rental bill at all, and the only 2026 bill to move was a pool safety measure that died in the House on March 13, 2026. The 2011 preemption still governs.

If Airbnb collects taxes, do I still need to register with my county?

Yes. Airbnb remits Florida's 6% state tax and the discretionary surtax statewide, but collects county tourist development tax only where it has an agreement with that county. Osceola County states outright that it has no contract with Airbnb, Vrbo, Evolve or any other platform, and that owners must remit the 6% tourist tax themselves. The Department of Revenue separately requires each property to be registered regardless of platform behavior.

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