Is Airbnb legal here? Every city in this index

Short-term rental rules are set city by city, so "is it legal" has a different answer in each one. Every row below is read from that city's own published rules, and each links to the page with the figures and the exact wording behind them.

What all 9 cities have in common

Two things hold everywhere in this index, and they are the two that decide whether you need to plan at all:

• You need permission before you list. Every city here requires a licence or registration, and every one requires the number to appear on the listing itself — not just to be held on file.
• Permission is annual, and it is not transferable. Wherever a term is published, it runs one or two years and must be renewed; a change of property or host means a new application rather than an amendment.

Where they split

8 of the 9 cities require the rental to be the host's primary residence — the home you actually live in for most of the year. The exception is Austin, TX, which imposes no residence test at all. This single column changes the nature of the business: with a residence test you are renting out your own home; without one you are running a rental property.

The annual limit column splits four ways, and the distinction matters because "no number" does not mean "no limit":

• A stated annual cap — Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, Boston, MA. Counted in rental nights per calendar year, regardless of who is present.
• A tiered cap — San Diego, CA. The allowance depends on which licence tier you hold, so there is no single figure to quote.
• No cap, but another rule doing the same job — Denver, CO. Denver has no night limit but sends stays of 30 days or more to a different licence; Nashville caps a single stay rather than the year.
• Nothing published — Austin, TX, Seattle, WA. The city's licensing page states no annual limit. This is a statement about the page, not a guarantee that no limit exists elsewhere in the code.

Where the answer can still be no

In New York City, NY, an entire unit cannot be rented short-term outside specific building classes — the residence test is satisfied but the unit type is not. Beyond building class, three things sit outside every row above:

• Unit-level exclusionsRent-controlled, affordable, or owner-blocked buildings
• Occupancy taxOwed even where a licence is granted
• How these were readMethod, sources and limits

How to use this table

Read the first two columns before anything else. If the city says "residence only" and you do not live in the property, the rest of the page is not relevant to you — no fee, no tax rate, no renewal cycle will change the answer. If it says "residence only" and you do live there, the annual limit becomes the binding constraint, because it caps how many nights you can recover costs on.

Where a cell says "Not published", the city's page was read and did not carry that figure. Where it says "None stated", the city's page was read and states that no such rule applies. The two are not interchangeable, and each city page quotes the sentence the reading came from.