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A short-term rental is legal only where that city's ordinance says it is. In Los Angeles and New York City, the rules below keep most ordinary rentals from operating as full-time unhosted Airbnbs.
By RentalAnalytics Editorial Team · Published October 12, 2026
If the legal night count is a fraction of the year, the gross you underwrote at 70% occupancy was never available. The comparison that matters is legal short-term income against a normal long-term lease, after the extra costs of hosting.
Los Angeles Ordinance No. 185931 added home-sharing rules to the municipal code. The ordinance defines home-sharing as an accessory use of a host's primary residence for a maximum of 120 days in a calendar year, for stays of 30 consecutive days or less. Primary residence means the sole residence where the host lives for more than six months of the calendar year.
A host cannot hold more than one home-sharing registration, or operate more than one home-sharing unit, at a time. Units under the city's Rent Stabilization Ordinance, affordable-housing covenants, or income restrictions are not eligible. A tenant needs the landlord's prior written approval. Accessory dwelling units with a complete building-permit application on or after January 1, 2017, cannot be used for home-sharing unless that unit is the applicant's primary residence.
Extended home-sharing is a separate approval that can allow more than 120 days. Without it, hosting platforms are not supposed to complete bookings past that limit. The ordinance sets a daily fine of $2,000, or two times the nightly rate, for home-sharing past the cap without that approval. Registration lasts one year, is not transferable, and the city number has to appear in ads. Hosts keep stay records for at least three years, pay transient occupancy tax, and pay a per-night fee the council sets. No more than two overnight guests, not counting children, are allowed per habitable room, not counting kitchens.
That package is the opposite of buying a house across town and listing it every weekend. The host has to live there most of the year, and the unhosted calendar is capped unless an extended approval is in hand. The ordinance text is Ordinance No. 185931 (PDF). The planning department's program page is lacity.org home-sharing.
New York City's short-term rental registration law is Local Law 18 of 2022, in Title 26 of the Administrative Code. The Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement says a short-term rental is a rental for fewer than 30 consecutive days. Stays of that length are not banned outright. They are allowed only in a narrow form.
You cannot rent an entire apartment or home to visitors for less than 30 days, even if you own it or live in the building. That applies to permanent residential buildings. A short stay is permitted when you stay in the same unit, you have no more than two paying guests, and guests have access to the whole unit. Private dwellings and Class A multiple dwellings used this way have to be registered. The fee is $145 plus a small processing fee, and it is not refundable.
One- and two-family homes are for residence of more than a month at a time, so an unhosted entire-unit short stay is not allowed there. Sharing with up to two paying guests can be, if you register and you are home. Entire-unit short stays the city allows are tied to Class B multiple dwellings, such as hotels and rooming houses, not to ordinary apartments.
You are not eligible if the unit is NYCHA housing, rent-controlled, or rent-stabilized, or if the owner has placed the building on the prohibited buildings list. A host has to be a natural person and the permanent occupant. Booking platforms are part of the enforcement design. The city tells hosts to register before they list.
Read the rules on the city's own pages: registration rules and laws and the FAQ for prospective hosts.
Use a round example, not a listing you should expect to find.
Assume a place that could earn $200 a night on the nights you are allowed to host, and that guests actually book half of the legal nights. Cleaning and a platform fee take 25% of those receipts. You still pay the mortgage, tax, and insurance all year.
In Los Angeles, under the basic 120-day cap and this example's 50% booking assumption, you host 60 nights. Gross receipts are $12,000. After the 25% haircut you have $9,000 before fixed housing costs. A long-term lease at $2,500 a month is $30,000 of scheduled rent before vacancy and operating costs. The short-term year in this example is not close, even before you count your own time.
If you had underwritten 200 occupied nights at $200, you would have been modeling a calendar the basic registration does not allow. That is the mistake the ordinance is designed to make expensive. Extended approval, if you get it, is a different cap. Model the approval you hold, not the one you plan to apply for.
New York City's hosted-only rule changes the product along with the night count. You are sharing your home with up to two paying guests while you are there. That can be a spare-room strategy. Compare that income with roommate rent on a lease. A full apartment's nightly rate assumes an empty unit the rules do not allow.
The short-term versus long-term tool lets you enter a nightly rate and an occupancy and set them next to a long-term rent figure for the ZIP. Put the legal night cap in as the ceiling before you read the result. How to analyze short-term rental cash flow covers platform fees, cleaning, and seasonality on top of the usual rental math. If the long-term side wins, break-even occupancy shows how full that lease has to stay. Can a vacation rental qualify for a 1031 is the follow-up if you also hoped to exchange a place you host.
Match the property to the ordinance in the city where it sits. A state statute does not replace a city registration program.
Rules change. These two cities are here because their primary pages spell out the cap and the host-present rule. Do not paste either rule onto a different city. Open that city's code before you model the income. A long-term lease skips this layer and still has vacancy and local rent rules of its own. The comparison only works if you use income you are allowed to collect.
If the long-term lease you are comparing against is also under a local rent cap, read Rent Control 101: What It Does to Your Cash Flow before you treat that lease as uncapped income.
Home-sharing of a primary residence is allowed if you register and follow the ordinance. The basic registration caps that use at 120 days in a calendar year. Listings that are not the host's primary residence, and units covered by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, are outside the program. Extended home-sharing is a separate approval for hosts who want more than 120 days.
No. The city's FAQ says they are not banned. Unhosted rentals of an entire home or apartment for fewer than 30 days are not allowed in permanent residential buildings. A registered host who stays in the unit, has no more than two paying guests, and maintains a common household can do a short stay. Rent-stabilized and rent-controlled units cannot be registered.
A listing going live is not a legal opinion. Los Angeles requires the city number in the ad and tells platforms not to complete bookings past the night cap without extended approval. New York City requires registration for covered short-term stays and reviews listings. Fines and a lost registration sit with the host, not with the calendar you hoped to fill.
Cap the occupied nights at what the approval allows, then apply a booking rate below that cap. In the Los Angeles example, 120 legal days at a 50% booking rate is 60 nights, not 200. Compare the result with a 12-month lease after vacancy. Use the STR versus long-term tool with those inputs.
In these two cities, the sources say no. Los Angeles excludes primary residences subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance or income restrictions. New York City says rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants are not eligible to register, along with NYCHA apartments. A lower legal rent is not a reason to switch the unit to nightly stays.
Put a nightly rate you can defend and an occupancy that fits the ordinance into the short-term versus long-term tool. If the long-term lease wins once the night cap is in the model, the STR plan was a licensing problem before it was a pricing problem.
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