The State of Short-Term Rental Permits 2026

Licensing went mainstream while nobody was counting

There is no national registry of short-term rentals in the United States. Licensing lives in a Florida state file, a Seattle open-data portal, a Wisconsin agriculture-department spreadsheet, a New Orleans permit system — hundreds of official sources that almost never get read together.

We read them together. In July 2026, Cavmir pulled every official short-term rental registry we could verify — 21 of them, across 14 states — deduplicated the records by permit number, and excluded everything we could not attribute to a government source. The result is 129,643 verified permit and license records, and four findings that matter to anyone who owns, manages, or markets a short-term rental.

1. Florida is 39% of everything

The Florida DBPR vacation rental file lists 50,295 current licenses — more than every other state in this compilation combined would need to double to match. They spread across 278 communities, but they cluster hard:

• Kissimmee: 4,137 licenses — the most licensed city in America's most licensed state
• Panama City Beach: 3,605
• Davenport: 2,476
• Miami Beach and Miami: 1,702 and 1,666

The headline inside the headline: the Disney corridor (Kissimmee plus Davenport) holds 6,613 licenses — nearly double Miami and Miami Beach combined. Florida's short-term rental economy is a theme-park economy first and a beach economy second.

2. New Orleans shows what strict looks like

The City of New Orleans publishes both its permit applications and its active licenses. The two numbers, side by side, are the sharpest picture of a strict licensing regime anywhere in public data: 24,275 application records on file — and 1,754 currently active licenses.

Whatever your view of the policy, the market consequence is unambiguous: an active New Orleans license is one of the scarcest legal assets in American short-term rentals, in a city where leisure demand never stops. The hosts who hold one are not competing on supply. They are competing on presentation and direct-booking economics.

3. The deepest registries are city-built

Outside the two statewide files, the richest data lives in city open-data portals — and it shows how differently cities run their programs:

• Seattle: 18,877 license records, one of the deepest city registries in the country
• Scottsdale: 3,616 licensed short-term rentals in a single Southwest city
• Denver: 2,264 active licenses — and a registry clean enough to tell you which ones lapsed
• Asheville: 1,703 homestay permits under one of the country's more restrictive frameworks

4. Licensing is not a coastal phenomenon

The largest non-coastal dataset in the country belongs to Wisconsin, where the agriculture department licenses short-term rentals as tourist rooming houses: 12,015 licenses across 218 communities — more licensed communities than any other state we compiled. Door County harbor towns, Northwoods lake country, Green Bay on game weekends: the drive-to Midwest is thoroughly, officially licensed.

What this means if you own or manage a rental

Public registries change the competitive game in two ways. First, your competition is countable — you can know, not guess, how many licensed rentals share your market. Second, professionalism is visible: in dense markets like Kissimmee or Scottsdale, thousands of licensed operators show up in the same searches, and the listings that win look like small hotel brands, not spare rooms. In supply-capped markets like New Orleans or Aspen, the license itself is the moat — and the opportunity is converting scarce demand into direct bookings instead of paying OTA commissions on it.

Methodology and limitations

Records were pulled in July 2026 directly from official sources, including the Florida DBPR public lodging records, the Wisconsin DATCP lodging license file, and city and county open-data portals including the City of Seattle and the City of New Orleans. Records were deduplicated by permit number within each registry. We excluded 83,678 raw rows: third-party mirrors, sources we could not attribute to a government body, truncated exports, and non-U.S. registries.

Three limitations to keep in mind. A license is not a listing — one license can cover several units, and licensed homes are not always rented. Coverage follows publication — jurisdictions that publish nothing are absent, so state totals are floors, not censuses. And statuses are registry-specific — we only report a record as active where the source registry says so explicitly.