America's Short-Term Rental Capitals, 2026

The permit capitals are villages, not metros

Total permit counts crown the usual giants — Kissimmee, Panama City Beach, New Orleans. Divide by population and the map flips. The most short-term-rental-dense place in America is Bradenton Beach, Florida: 257 vacation rental licenses in a town of 927 people. That is one license for every 3.6 residents.

1. Tiny beach towns lead the nation

Bradenton Beach (277.2 per 1,000), Key Colony Beach (202.9), Indian Rocks Beach (173.2), Anna Maria (155.5) — Florida's barrier-island villages carry license densities that big cities never approach. In these towns the short-term rental is not a side economy. It is close to the main one.

2. Wisconsin's lake country rivals Florida's beaches

The surprise of the ranking: 5 of the twelve densest cities are in Wisconsin. Bayfield (195.9 per 1,000), Eagle River (188.0 per 1,000), Sister Bay (176.9 per 1,000), Hayward (166.6 per 1,000), Wisconsin Dells (97.2 per 1,000) — Northwoods and Door County towns where the state licenses short-term rentals as tourist rooming houses. The drive-to Midwest is licensed as densely as the fly-to coasts, and almost nobody talks about it.

3. Panama City Beach is the only city with both scale and density

Most cities are one or the other: thousands of permits spread across a large population, or a dense handful in a village. Panama City Beach is both — 3,605 licenses in a city of 19,955, which is 180.7 per 1,000 residents at real scale. By this measure it is the working capital of the American short-term rental economy.

4. The famous markets are calmer than their reputation

Kissimmee holds America's largest city count (4,137 licenses) yet ranks at 48.8 per 1,000 residents — dense, but a fraction of the island villages. Miami, for all its short-term rental fame, sits at 3.4 per 1,000. In big cities, rentals are a visible sliver. In the capitals above, they are the fabric.

What it means if you own or market a rental

Per-capita density is a competition gauge. In a permit capital, every guest search is crowded with licensed neighbors, and presentation — photography, listing copy, a direct booking site of your own — decides who gets the booking. In a low-density city, the opportunity is the reverse: being one of the few professional operations in a market that has not professionalized yet. If your market is on this list, our guide on competing when supply surges is the practical companion to these numbers.

The top 25, ranked

The full 97-city ranking is in the free CSV download.

States, per 100,000 residents

State numbers are floors, not censuses — they reflect what registries publish. Louisiana's figure includes New Orleans permit applications as well as licenses; Texas appears low because only one city registry in our compilation publishes there. Read the column as "records on file per 100,000 residents," never as a complete count of rentals.

Methodology and limitations

Permit counts come from the same official state, city, and county registries behind the rest of this hub — deduplicated by permit number, third-party mirrors excluded, as of July 2026. Population figures are the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 Population Estimates for incorporated places (SUB-EST2024) and states (NST-EST2024). We ranked only cities with at least 100 permit records, and only incorporated cities — unincorporated resort communities such as Santa Rosa Beach or Door County townships have no matching census place, so they are absent even where permits are plentiful.

Three cautions. A registry's city field is a mailing city, which can cover a wider area than the census place of the same name — treat exact ratios as strong estimates, not surveys. A license is not a listing: one license can cover several units, and licensed homes are not always rented. And coverage follows publication: cities whose registries publish nothing are absent entirely.