Running a short-term rental in Florida means satisfying two authorities that do not talk to each other. The state licenses you and taxes you, and its rules are the same in Pompano Beach as in Key West. Your city decides whether the property can legally operate at all, and its rules change at the city limit. Owners get into trouble almost exclusively because they satisfied one layer and assumed it covered the other.
This guide covers what applies everywhere in Florida. The city layer is where South Florida actually differs, so each of those has its own guide linked below.
General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules checked 18 September 2026 — verify current requirements with DBPR and your own city before you advertise.
The 2011 date that explains the whole patchwork
Almost every confusing thing about Florida short-term rental regulations traces back to one sentence in Florida Statute 509.032(7)(b). It preempts local governments from prohibiting vacation rentals, or from regulating how long or how often you rent — unless the local ordinance was adopted on or before 1 June 2011, in which case it is grandfathered and remains fully enforceable.
So there are effectively two kinds of Florida city:
- Grandfathered cities had restrictive rules on the books before that date and may still enforce them, including outright prohibition in particular zones. Miami Beach is the South Florida example that matters most: it prohibits stays under six months and a day across most residential zones, and that prohibition is lawful precisely because it predates the cutoff.
- Everywhere else, the state guarantees you may operate short-term. Cities cannot ban you or cap your nights — but they can require registration, licences, inspections, parking, occupancy limits, noise controls and a responsible local contact. Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pompano Beach and Hallandale Beach all sit here, and all four have used that room fully.
This is why “is Airbnb legal in Florida?” has no useful answer, and why the only question worth asking is whether short-term rental is legal at your exact address. Two identical condos four blocks apart can have opposite answers.
Layer 1 — the state licence
Florida requires a DBPR vacation rental licence — issued by the Department of Business and Professional Regulation under Chapter 509 — for a dwelling or condo unit that is rented to guests for stays of less than 30 days or one calendar month, more than three times in a calendar year, or that is advertised as available for such stays.
What owners most often get wrong:
- It is a state licence, not a substitute for a city one. Holding it does not make you compliant with Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale or anywhere else.
- Advertising can trigger it. The threshold is not only what you actually rented — offering the unit publicly for short stays counts.
- The licence type follows the property type. Vacation rental dwelling and vacation rental condo are separate categories, and single units and groups of units are licensed differently.
- Operating unlicensed is expensive. Florida Statute 509.261 provides for fines of up to $1,000 per day for an unlicensed public lodging establishment — before your city adds its own penalty.
Applications go through DBPR directly and are usually processed quickly. Confirm the current fee schedule on the DBPR vacation rental page rather than any third-party figure, including ours.
Layer 2 — the taxes
Short-term stays in Florida are taxed in more than one place at once:
- Florida state sales tax on transient rentals, plus any county discretionary sales surtax.
- County tourist development tax — the “bed tax” — which in South Florida applies to stays under six months.
- City-level tax in some places. Miami Beach adds its own resort tax for properties within the city, which is separate from the county’s.
Airbnb and some other platforms collect and remit certain of these automatically. That is genuinely helpful and also the single most common source of underpayment, because collection is not registration. You generally still register with the state and county, you still file where required, and platform coverage varies by county and by platform. If you list on more than one channel, assume the coverage differs between them until you have checked.
Our tax guide for Miami hosts breaks down who collects what in Miami-Dade specifically.
Layer 3 — your city, which is where the real work is
The state layer is nearly identical statewide. The city layer is not, and it is what decides whether your property is viable. In the South Florida markets we operate in:
| City | What the city adds on top of the state |
|---|---|
| Miami Beach | Prohibited in most residential zones (grandfathered pre-2011); Certificate of Use, BTR, association letter, resort tax, listing-number rules |
| Miami / Miami-Dade | Certificate of Use where the zone requires it, county tourist tax registration, zoning decided per address |
| Fort Lauderdale | Vacation-rental registration, city fee, safety inspection, posted occupancy limits, parking requirements |
| Hollywood | Online vacation-rental licence, inspection, and a noise-monitoring device retaining 180 days of data on certain properties |
| Pompano Beach | Annual short-term-rental permit plus Broward and city registrations, and an inspection |
| Hallandale Beach | Annual vacation-rental licence with application fee, BTR, facility checklist — and unusually strict condo associations |
And one layer the statute never touches: your condo or homeowners’ association. An association can prohibit short stays even where both the state and the city permit them, its rules are often stricter than the city’s, and they are not always public before you own the unit. Ask for the declaration and any rental amendment in writing before you buy — this is the single most common way a purchase turns out to be unusable as a short-term rental.
What did not change in 2026
It is worth stating plainly, because a lot of out-of-date advice circulates. In 2024, CS/SB 280 would have moved much of vacation rental regulation up to the state and limited what cities could impose. It passed the legislature and was vetoed in June 2024. No comparable bill has become law since.
So the 2011 preemption framework remains the baseline in 2026, and the practical trend runs the other way: individual cities keep tightening registration, inspection, occupancy and noise requirements each year. Anything you verified two years ago is worth re-checking at the city level, not the state level.
The order to do it in
- Confirm the zoning at the exact address — before an offer, not after. This is the only step that can make the whole plan impossible.
- Get the association rules in writing, if it is a condo or an HOA property.
- Apply for the city registration or licence, and book whatever inspection it requires.
- Apply for the DBPR vacation rental licence.
- Register for state and county taxes, then confirm what your platform actually collects.
- Only then advertise. In several Florida cities, advertising before registration is itself the violation.
How we can help — free, no catch
We run a free analysis of a specific property or address, usually within 24 hours, and we will tell you plainly if an address is a bad idea — we would rather say so than manage something that cannot operate legally. There is genuinely no catch: some owners go on to use our paid services and plenty just take the answer and run, which is fine.
Send us the address or listing you are considering and we will tell you what is realistic. If you would rather not handle any of it, we also manage South Florida rentals end to end for a small percentage of booking revenue.