Tourist rooming house licenses on the wisconsin datcp lodging file, as of July 2026 — compiled, deduplicated, and free to cite. Part of Cavmir's U.S. STR permit data hub.
Wisconsin licenses short-term rentals as tourist rooming houses through the state agriculture department, DATCP — one statewide file, twelve thousand licenses, and more licensed communities than any other state in this compilation.
Wisconsin's three biggest markets — Green Bay, Hayward, Sturgeon Bay — account for about 12% of the state's licensed records; the rest spread across 215 more communities with ten or more on file. Where a property sits on that curve — dense top market or long tail — changes how guests find it, and how hard a listing has to work to stand out.
The headline figure counts tourist rooming house licenses on the Wisconsin DATCP lodging file, deduplicated by permit number. A license is not a listing: some licenses cover multiple units, some licensed homes sit unrented, and jurisdictions that publish nothing are missing entirely. Treat it as a verified floor for the size of Wisconsin's legal short-term rental market — not a census.
The surprise is how spread out it is. Door County harbor towns, Northwoods lake cabins around Hayward and Eagle River, Lake Geneva weekend houses, Green Bay on game days — more than two hundred communities, most of them small. These are drive-to markets, and the guest is often choosing between towns as much as between houses.
That rewards listings that sell the place, not just the property: the lake, the season, the reason to make the drive from Chicago or the Twin Cities. Seasonality is steep, so a pricing calendar and off-season storytelling do real work. Cavmir markets Wisconsin stays the way guests actually shop them — by the trip, with local search and content that names the town and the water.
The Wisconsin DATCP lodging file lists 12,015 licensed tourist rooming houses as of July 2026.
Wisconsin licenses short-term rentals as tourist rooming houses through the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP). This page is built from the DATCP public lodging license file.
By records on file: Green Bay (633), Hayward (431), Sturgeon Bay (409). Green Bay leads with 633.
Directly from the official registries listed on this page, pulled and deduplicated in July 2026. No records are estimated or modeled — see the methodology on the national data page for what was excluded and why.
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, “Wisconsin Short-Term Rental Permit Data,” compiled from official state, city, and county registries, July 2026. https://cavmir.com/data/wisconsin-short-term-rental-permits/New permit requirements, caps, moratoriums, new registries in Wisconsin — one plain-English email when something actually changes. If nothing changes, you hear nothing.
Cavmir markets short-term rentals in Wisconsin — photography-led listings, direct-booking websites, and local SEO built around how guests actually search. The registry tells you how many competitors you have; we make sure you do not look like any of them.
