Permit and license records across 14 states, compiled from 21 official state, city, and county registries — deduplicated, attributed to their source, and free to cite. Read the State of STR Permits 2026 report for the full analysis.
Each state links to its own data page: the registries behind the number, the cities where the licenses cluster, and what the number does and does not mean.
The Florida DBPR file alone holds 50,295 current vacation rental licenses — 39% of every record we compiled, spread across 278 communities.
The Disney corridor town holds 4,137 licenses to Miami's 1,666 — two and a half times as many. Add Davenport's 2,476 and the corridor out-licenses Miami and Miami Beach combined.
The city's registry holds 24,275 permit application records — but only 1,754 licenses are currently active. That gap is the clearest picture in public data of how hard a strict regime filters the market.
Wisconsin licenses tourist rooming houses in 218 different communities — 12,015 licenses statewide, from Green Bay to Hayward. The quiet middle of the country is licensed too.
Every record comes from an official government source — a state license file or a city or county registry. Records are deduplicated by permit number within each registry. Sources we could not verify as official, third-party mirrors, and datasets with broken or truncated exports were excluded — 83,678 raw rows were dropped for exactly that reason.
Two honest caveats. First, a license is not a listing: one Florida condo license can cover several units, and a licensed home is not always actively rented. Second, coverage follows publication — states that publish little or nothing are underrepresented, so every number here is a floor, not a census.
These numbers are free to use in articles, research, and reports — no permission needed. We ask for one thing: credit Cavmir and link to this page so readers can check the source.
Cavmir, “U.S. Short-Term Rental Permit Data,” compiled from official state, city, and county registries, July 2026. https://cavmir.com/data/There is no single national registry — licensing happens state by state and city by city. This compilation covers 129,643 permit and license records across 14 states, drawn from 21 official registries as of July 2026. It is a floor, not a ceiling: many jurisdictions publish no data at all.
Florida, and it is not close. The Florida DBPR license file lists 50,295 current vacation rental licenses — about 39% of every record in this compilation. Wisconsin is the largest non-coastal dataset, with 12,015 licensed tourist rooming houses.
Every record comes from an official government source: state license files such as the Florida DBPR and Wisconsin DATCP, and city or county registries such as the City of Seattle, City of New Orleans, and Metro Nashville open-data portals. Records are deduplicated by permit number within each registry, and sources that could not be verified as official were excluded.
The current compilation was pulled directly from the registries in July 2026. We refresh it as registries publish new files and note the as-of date on every page.
Cavmir is a marketing agency for short-term rentals and boutique hotels. The same data on this page shapes how we position properties in licensed markets — where the competition is dense, where it is thin, and what that means for your listing.
