Started August 2026
Short-term rental rules, city by city, in plain language
Most short-term rental regulation is local. The permit you need, whether you can operate at all, how many guests you can host, and what happens if you get it wrong are all decided by a city council and administered by a city department, not by the platform you list on.
This site takes one city at a time and writes down what its own pages and ordinances actually say: the name of the license, who has to hold one, the operating rules attached to it, and the enforcement the city publishes. Every figure is linked back to the government page it came from so you can check it yourself before you act on it.
City guides
Two cities so far. More are added as each one is fully sourced.
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Nashville, Tennessee
A Short Term Rental Property permit from Metro Codes, split into owner-occupied and not-owner-occupied types, with a zoning map that decides which one you can even apply for.
STRP permit · Metro Codes -
Austin, Texas
An annual-then-biennial operating license from Development Services, rewritten twice since February 2025, now with platform-side enforcement that removes unlicensed listings.
STR operating license · DSD
How these guides are written
- Government sources only for the rules. Fees, deadlines, permit names, occupancy limits and penalties come from the city's own website or its published code, and the link is on the page.
- If it cannot be verified, it is not printed. Widely repeated numbers that no city page confirms get left out rather than passed along. Where a guide is silent on something, that is deliberate.
- Dated, not evergreen. Each guide states the month it was checked. Short-term rental codes move fast, and a guide that does not tell you how old it is cannot be trusted.
- Operator-facing. The audience is the person who has to file the application and keep the property compliant, not a policy reader.
About this site
STR Regulations Guide is an editorial resource covering short-term rental regulation at the city level. It began publishing in August 2026. It is not affiliated with any city, and nothing here is legal advice: it is a reading of public regulations, with the sources attached so you can take them to your own attorney, your city's permit office, or both.
Corrections are welcome, particularly from operators who have just been through an application and found a page out of date.