California Short-Term Rental Permits, City by City

California has no statewide STR license. How San Diego, LA, Sonoma, Marin, Sacramento and other local programs work, what their registers show, and how to use them.

Published Oct 23, 2026 · 24 min read · by Lead Mining Company

California does not license short-term rentals at the state level. There is no state register to download, no state permit number, and no state agency that licenses short-term rentals. Every program is local. A city or county decides whether short-term rentals are allowed, what permit they need, how the transient occupancy tax is collected, and whether the resulting list is published.

That has two effects for anyone selling to California hosts. The rules change at every city line, so a pitch that fits San Diego can be wrong in Sacramento. And the data has to be assembled register by register. This guide walks through the California programs that publish usable records, what each one requires of owners, what the records contain, how transient occupancy tax registration fits in, what privacy law says about government records, and how vendors can work the lists within telemarketing and email rules. Counts from our PermitPulse dataset are as of October 2026 unless a different date is given.

Why California has no statewide short-term rental list

Short-term rental rules in California sit in city and county codes. They usually come in three layers:

A land-use or zoning permission. Whether a short-term rental is allowed at this address at all. Sonoma County calls it a Transient Vacation Rental Permit. Santa Barbara treats short-term rentals as a hotel use, allowed only in certain zones.
An operating license or registration. The permit a host holds to operate, often with a local contact, an occupancy limit and a number that must appear on listings. San Diego's STRO license and Los Angeles County's registration certificate are examples.
Tax registration. A transient occupancy tax certificate, and in many cities a business tax certificate. These are local taxes, and each city or county sets its own rate.

Some places run all three; some run only the tax piece. Because of that, a "California short-term rental list" is really a stack of separate lists that do not share fields, dates or definitions. For a state-by-state comparison of how other states handle this, see our guide to STR permit requirements by state.

California registers in PermitPulse

PermitPulse holds 24,522 California records as of October 2026. 19,420 of them, or 79 percent, carry a phone or email. California records are phone-heavy and email-light: in our October 22 counts, 19,402 California records had a phone and only 101 had an email. Here are the main sources, with record counts from our register list and contact counts from our per-register counts of October 22, 2026.

Register	Records	With phone or email	Main fields
San Diego STRO licenses	8,850	8,847 of 8,847	Host name, local contact name and phone, address, tier, expiration
San Bernardino County STR permits	5,328	5,327 of 5,328	Name, phone, address, permit date, status
Sonoma County STR permits	2,424	2,267 of 2,417	Name, phone, permit type, date
El Dorado County vacation home rental permits	1,978	1,518 of 1,978	Name on most, phone, address, permit status
Marin County registered active STRs	1,594	0	Business (DBA) name, address, registration date, parcel
City of Sacramento STR permits	539	536 of 538	Name, phone, address, status
Sonoma County vacation rental licenses	506	504 of 506	Name, phone, license
City of Santa Barbara permitted STRs	255	0	Address-level list
Los Angeles County (unincorporated) STR certificates	211	209 of 211	Phone, address
City of Placentia STR permits	106	100 of 106	Phone, address

The El Dorado County count is from our per-register counts, since that file is not in our main register list. Smaller county and city files fill in more of the coast: our California file also holds records for towns such as Cambria (377), Paso Robles (353), Cayucos (313), Templeton (173) and Oceano (165), none with a phone, and Dana Point (101), all with a phone.

The same table read another way: about 78 percent of California records come from four places: San Diego, the San Bernardino County mountains and desert, Sonoma County (two files) and El Dorado County. The rest are scattered across small programs. Live counts for the state are on our California page.

San Diego: the STRO license

San Diego's program is the largest and best documented in the state. The City Treasurer's STRO page says it has been unlawful to operate a short-term residential occupancy without a license since May 1, 2023, and defines STRO as occupancy of a dwelling unit, or part of one, for less than one month.

The four tiers

Tier	What it covers	Cap	Application fee	License fee
Tier 1, part-time	Rentals of 20 days or fewer a year; host need not live onsite	None	$33	$193
Tier 2, home sharing	Rooms rented more than 20 days a year while the host lives onsite; host may be absent up to 90 days a year	None	$33	$284
Tier 3, whole home	Whole-home rentals over 20 days a year, outside Mission Beach	1% of housing units outside Mission Beach; two-night minimum	$41	$1,129
Tier 4, Mission Beach whole home	Same as Tier 3, inside the Mission Beach planning area	30% of Mission Beach housing units; two-night minimum	$41	$1,129

Fees took effect March 1, 2025 and are non-refundable. A host may hold only one license at a time, and licenses are not transferable. Licenses run two years, renewal notices go out by email 60 days before expiration, and renewal fees match the initial fees. Tier 3 and Tier 4 homes must be used for short-term rental at least 90 days a year, and those hosts file quarterly reports to prove it.

How full the caps are

The city's table, dated October 9, 2026, showed 8,429 licenses issued: 135 in Tier 1, 2,336 in Tier 2, 4,859 in Tier 3 and 1,099 in Tier 4. Tier 3 had 802 licenses remaining. Tier 4 had none, and its waitlist was set by random lottery after the application period closed on August 15, 2025. Adding issued and remaining gives a Tier 3 cap of about 5,661 licenses (4,859 + 802), which is our arithmetic, not a city figure.

What the San Diego records contain

The city publishes active licenses on its open-data portal as a CSV under a public domain dedication. The data dictionary lists the license ID, the full address and its parts, ZIP, tier, community planning area, expiration date, the rental unit business tax number, the TOT number, coordinates, the local contact's name and phone, the host contact's name and the council district.

Note which phone that is. It is the local contact's phone. For many hosts that is their own number. For others it is a manager or co-host. If you sell management, a record whose local contact is a company is already served.

In PermitPulse, every San Diego record has a phone and all but one has a host name. The tier mix in our copy is Tier 3 5,114, Tier 2 2,477, Tier 4 1,107 and Tier 1 149, a total of 8,847 on October 22. That is higher than the city's issued count; the city's table counts licenses in force on October 9, while our copy counts records captured from the dataset, so check the expiration date on any record before you act on it. The biggest ZIP codes are 92109 (2,618 records), 92037 (844), 92107 (796), 92101 (570), 92104 (482), 92103 (441), 92102 (415) and 92117 (338), across 33 ZIP codes in all. By city name, 8,142 records say San Diego, 663 La Jolla and 39 Del Mar. Only 12 names appear on more than one record, and none on more than two, which fits the one-license-per-host rule.

See our San Diego page and La Jolla page for live counts.

The City of Los Angeles adopted its Home-Sharing Ordinance on December 11, 2018. It took effect July 1, 2019, and enforcement began November 1, 2019, according to the Department of City Planning's Home-Sharing FAQ. The FAQ lists the eligibility rules:

The rental must be the host's primary residence, where they live more than six months of the year.
The home must not be subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance or another affordability restriction.
The space must be approved for residential use; no vehicles, sheds or trailers.
The property must have no pending citations.
A renter needs the landlord's notarized written approval.
The host must hold a Transient Occupancy Registration Certificate from the Office of Finance, or list only on platforms that have a platform agreement with the city.
A valid registration number must appear on every listing.

Home-sharing is capped at 120 days a year unless the host qualifies for extended home-sharing, which requires at least six months of valid registration or 60 days of hosting, notice to neighbors, no suspension in two years, and limited citations. Registrations run one year, must be renewed annually and cannot be transferred.

The FAQ is from 2019, so check City Planning for current fees and procedures. PermitPulse does not currently carry a City of Los Angeles home-sharing register. What the rules tell a vendor is still useful: Los Angeles hosts are, by design, people renting their own homes, and some are tenants with landlord approval. They buy like households, not like investors.

Los Angeles County, unincorporated areas

Outside city limits, Los Angeles County runs its own program through the Treasurer and Tax Collector. The TTC short-term rental page says homeowners or hosts whose primary residence is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, and who rent out a home or rooms for stays of 30 consecutive days or less, need a Short-Term Rental Registration Certificate from the Treasurer and Tax Collector. Registration requirements do not apply to properties in coastal zones. Hosts must collect and pay transient occupancy tax within 30 days after the rental start date. The TTC can fine hosting platforms up to $1,000 a day for listings without a valid certificate.

The county's certificate register held 211 records in PermitPulse as of October 2026, and 209 of them carry a phone. It is small because it covers only unincorporated, non-coastal areas and only primary residences. Like the city, it is a list of households.

San Bernardino County: Big Bear, Lake Arrowhead and Joshua Tree

San Bernardino County licenses short-term rentals in its unincorporated mountain and desert areas. Its program site, str.sbcounty.gov, refused automated reads when we checked, so we link it rather than restate its rules. Read it before you make any claim to a host about county requirements.

The data is where this county stands out. The San Bernardino County register held 5,328 records in PermitPulse as of October 2026, every one marked Active, and all but one with a phone. Every record carries a name, an address and a filing date. Dates run from September 30, 2019 to October 12, 2026, and 1,043 fall in the last twelve months. Records by permit year:

Filing year	Records
2019	19
2020	511
2021	941
2022	620
2023	853
2024	662
2025	911
2026, to October 12	811

By area, the largest are Big Bear Lake Area (1,113), Joshua Tree (1,088), Lake Arrowhead (853), Sugarloaf (362), Crestline (231), Landers (191), Running Springs (146), Yucca Valley Area (143), Twin Peaks (118) and Fawnskin (106), out of 27 areas. 316 names appear on more than one record, covering 1,557 records, and the largest single name appears on 62.

This is the most active California register in our data. In the week of October 12 to 19, it added 118 of the 141 California records first captured that week. By town, that week brought 25 in Joshua Tree, 24 in Lake Arrowhead and 18 in the Big Bear Lake Area. See our Big Bear and Joshua Tree page.

Sonoma County

Permit Sonoma's vacation rentals page lists what a vacation rental in unincorporated Sonoma County must have: a certified vacation rental property manager, a transient vacation rental zoning permit, a transient occupancy tax number, and a vacation rental license. Permits are allowed in cap zone districts where concentrations are below the designated cap, and not in vacation rental exclusion districts or in over-concentrated cap zones. The county's map viewer shows whether a given parcel can have a vacation rental.

The certified property manager requirement matters to vendors. A Sonoma host cannot run a permitted vacation rental without one, which makes property management a required purchase rather than an option.

The Sonoma County permit register held 2,424 records in PermitPulse as of October 2026. On October 22, 2,267 of its 2,417 records had a phone and 2,337 had a name. Permit types in our copy are Transient Rentals - Vacation (1,417), Zoning Permit (997) and Use Permit (3). Filing dates run from January 2011 to September 2026, and 142 fall in the last twelve months. A second file, the county's vacation rental license list (described as a grandfathered and exempt list), adds 506 records, 504 with a phone. See our Sonoma County page.

Marin County

Marin County publishes its registered short-term rentals on its open-data portal. The county's description says the data covers active short-term rentals registered by the County of Marin and includes the doing-business-as name, the address, geographic information, the registration date and the parcel number. It is updated quarterly.

There is no phone or email in that list, so none of our 1,594 Marin records is contactable by phone or email. Marin is a mail market. Place names in the California file with no phone include Stinson Beach (344 records), Mill Valley (303), Dillon Beach (235), Inverness (144) and Bolinas (107). The DBA name field means some records name a business rather than a person; letters should be addressed accordingly.

Because the county refreshes quarterly, the whole file can reload at once. In the seven days to October 23, 2026, 803 Marin records were re-imported. Those were not new rentals, and a vendor who treated them as new would have mailed old records twice.

City of Sacramento

Sacramento's Revenue Division runs the city's program. Its short-term vacation rentals page says the City Council established the permit on January 19, 2016 (City Code 5.114), and every operator of a rental for stays of 30 days or less needs one. The rules split by residence:

Primary residence. The operator gets a short-term rental permit, pays an annual business tax as a hotel of $50, and collects 12 percent transient occupancy tax from renters.
Secondary residence. A home that is not the operator's primary residence may be rented short-term for a total of 90 days in a calendar year. After that, it may rent only for 31-day minimum stays until the next year. The same $50 business tax and 12 percent TOT apply.

The city publishes a list of all active permits on its open-data portal, uploaded on the first Wednesday of every month. Our copy held 539 records as of October 2026, and 536 of 538 had a phone on October 22. Of those, 445 were active and 40 pending. The largest ZIP codes were 95816 (83), 95818 (77) and 95817 (70), and one name appears on 14 permits. Because a second home must switch to 31-day minimum stays after 90 days, a second-home host may want furnishing and cleaning that also suit month-long tenants. See our Sacramento page.

Santa Barbara, Placentia and El Dorado County

City of Santa Barbara

The city's Community Development short-term rentals packet (last updated July 24, 2024) treats short-term rentals as hotels and similar uses: stays of 30 consecutive days or less outside the coastal zone, and less than 30 days inside it. Conversion of a home to a short-term rental is a change of use from residential to nonresidential. Short-term rentals are allowed only in listed zones: R-MH, C-R, C-G and M-C inland, and R-4, C-L, C-P, C-1, C-2, C-M, HRC-1, HRC-2, HRC-2/OC and M-1 in the coastal zone. They are strictly prohibited in single-unit zones. Properties with an ADU or junior ADU may not be rented for less than 31 consecutive days.

The city launched a short-term rental enforcement program on August 1, 2023. In the coastal zone, enforcement against unpermitted rentals is limited to complaints about tenant behavior or nuisance conditions, unless the property has an ADU or JADU, but the city enforces business tax certificates and transient occupancy tax proactively. Every operator needs a business tax certificate and must collect and pay TOT. Our Santa Barbara list held 255 records as of October 2026, with addresses and no phones or emails.

City of Placentia

Placentia's short-term rentals page says the city adopted Ordinance No. O-2026-04 on May 5, 2026, amending Chapter 6.45 of its municipal code. A short-term rental is a rental of a dwelling unit, or part of one, for 29 consecutive days or less. Operators need a short-term rental operating permit, a site plan and floor plan, building and fire inspections before issuance and every year after, a valid city business license, and quarterly TOT filings. Each rental must have a local contact available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, who responds within one hour. A temporary moratorium on new permits ended when the ordinance took effect, and the city began accepting applications on Monday, June 8, 2026. Our Placentia list held 106 records as of October 2026, 100 with a phone.

El Dorado County and South Lake Tahoe

El Dorado County's vacation home rental FAQ says an operator caught renting without a permit owes a fine and cannot apply for a permit or join the waitlist for a year. Month-to-month or seasonal rentals to the same party are not vacation home rentals. Inside the city, the City of South Lake Tahoe requires a valid VHR permit to operate or advertise a short-term rental.

The El Dorado County permit file in PermitPulse holds 1,978 records, 1,518 with a phone and 1,535 with a name. Its most common statuses show a capped program: 752 closed, 728 active, 250 on the waitlist, 112 approved for payment, 52 complete, 20 incomplete, and 34 HHR permits (24 active, 10 closed). 167 names appear on more than one record, covering 659 records. The newest record in our copy was captured July 29, 2026. For a vendor, the waitlist is the interesting group: owners who want to rent and are waiting for a permit. See our South Lake Tahoe page.

Transient occupancy tax registration

Transient occupancy tax, usually called TOT, is the local hotel tax that applies to short-term rentals. In California it is set and collected by cities and counties, and almost every program above ties the permit to TOT registration.

Program	TOT rule on the official page
San Diego	A TOT Registration Certificate is required for any rental under one month, at no cost. Under Measure C, rates by tax zone are 11.75, 12.75 and 13.75 percent from May 1, 2025; 10.5 percent before.
Sacramento	12 percent TOT collected from renters, plus a $50 annual business tax as a hotel.
Los Angeles (city)	A Transient Occupancy Registration Certificate from the Office of Finance, or exclusive listing on platforms with a city agreement (2019 FAQ).
Los Angeles County	Hosts collect and pay TOT within 30 days after the rental start date.
Sonoma County	A TOT number is one of the four requirements.
Santa Barbara	Every operator collects and pays TOT and holds a business tax certificate.
Placentia	TOT registered and remitted quarterly.

The San Diego TOT page also explains a detail that trips people up: a transient is someone renting for less than one month, and a month runs from the first day of occupancy to the same day of the next month, which "may or may not be 30 days."

Two things follow for vendors. First, TOT registration is a second public trail. San Diego's STRO data carries the TOT number on each record, and the city publishes a separate TOT establishments dataset. Second, tax filing is a recurring chore for every host. Bookkeepers and tax preparers have a reason to contact every operator on a register, not only new ones.

Public records and privacy in California

The registers in this guide are published by the governments that collect them. San Diego posts its STRO licenses as open data under a public domain dedication. Sacramento uploads its list of active permits every month. Marin County publishes its registered rentals and updates them quarterly. These are government records the agencies chose to make public.

The California Consumer Privacy Act treats that kind of information differently from data a business collects itself. The Attorney General's CCPA page says personal information "does not include publicly available information," and describes publicly available information as including information "from federal, state, or local government records," with public property records as an example. The same page says the CCPA applies to for-profit businesses that do business in California and meet one of three tests: gross annual revenue over $25 million; buying, selling or sharing the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents or households; or deriving 50 percent or more of annual revenue from selling California residents' personal information.

Three practical limits keep this in perspective:

The CCPA exclusion is about what counts as personal information under that law. It does not touch telemarketing law, email law or a city's own terms of use.
Anything you add to a record from another source, such as an appended email or a social profile, is not a government record. It may be personal information under the CCPA.
Many hosts are private individuals renting the home they live in, especially under Los Angeles, Los Angeles County and San Diego Tier 2 rules. Treat them with the care you would want from a stranger who found your name on a public list.

This is a factual summary, not legal advice. If your business meets a CCPA threshold or plans to resell data, talk to a privacy lawyer.

How vendors use the California lists

Each program's rules point to purchases its hosts must make. Matching your offer to the rule is more useful than matching it to the state.

If you sell	Best California files	Why
Property management	Sonoma County, San Bernardino County, El Dorado County	Sonoma requires a certified vacation rental property manager. In San Bernardino County, 316 names hold more than one record.
Turnover cleaning	San Diego Tier 3 and 4, San Bernardino County	Whole-home rentals with two-night minimums and, in San Diego, a 90-day minimum use rule: steady turnovers.
Insurance	San Diego (by expiration date), San Bernardino County (by filing date)	Two-year San Diego terms and dated county permits give you a decision point to time your contact.
Pool, spa and hot tub service	San Bernardino County desert and mountain areas	The most active California register; 5,327 records with a phone.
Maintenance and inspections	Placentia, San Bernardino County, El Dorado County	Placentia requires building and fire inspections every year.
Furnishing and setup	Records first captured in the last 60 days, any county	Setup happens once, at the start.
Bookkeeping and TOT filing	All files	Every program requires TOT; filings recur.
Real estate	San Diego Tier 4, El Dorado waitlist	Capped licenses and waitlists change what a property can earn.

For buyer-specific playbooks, see our pages for property managers, cleaning companies, pool and hot tub services and insurance agents.

Working the California data, step by step

Choose the jurisdiction first. Rules, fields and contact coverage change at each line. Build one campaign per program, not one for the state.
Read the program page. Know the tier, cap and tax rules for that place before you write a word. Hosts notice when a vendor gets their rules wrong.
Use the dates the register gives you. San Diego has expiration dates. San Bernardino and Sonoma have permit dates. Marin has registration dates. Sacramento and El Dorado have statuses.
Drop records that are not live. Closed and incomplete El Dorado permits, and San Diego licenses past their expiration date, are history.
Collapse repeats. Group by name and address. In San Bernardino County, 316 names cover 1,557 records; one owner should get one message, not 62.
Check who the phone belongs to. San Diego publishes a local contact phone. Where the local contact is a company, the owner already has help.
Pick the channel by the data. Marin, Santa Barbara and the small coastal files have no phones: use mail. Files with phones still need the compliance steps below before any call.
Do not treat a re-import as new. Quarterly refreshes, like Marin's, can reload a whole file in one day.
Verify before you quote rules to a prospect. Our free STR permit lookup shows whether an address appears on a public register.

Worked examples with real counts

A hot tub service in the San Bernardino mountains

Start with the San Bernardino County file: 5,328 records, all active. Keep Big Bear Lake Area (1,113), Lake Arrowhead (853), Running Springs (146), Twin Peaks (118) and Fawnskin (106). That is 2,336 records in five mountain areas. Group by name. If repeats in this subset match the county-wide pattern, where 1,557 of 5,328 records (29 percent) belong to names on more than one record, expect somewhat fewer unique owners than records; the exact number comes from the grouping, not from this estimate. Send a letter to each property first, then email or call only within the rules below. A monthly update adds owners as they appear: 118 county records were first captured in a single week in October.

A San Diego cleaner timing renewals

San Diego licenses run two years, and the city emails renewal notices 60 days ahead. Sort the 5,114 Tier 3 records in our copy by expiration date and take the next 90 days. Whole-home Tier 3 hosts must rent at least 90 days a year and report it quarterly, so a host near renewal is also a host who has to keep the calendar busy. Remember the phone is the local contact's. Skip records where it is a management company.

A Sonoma County property manager

Every permitted vacation rental in unincorporated Sonoma County needs a certified vacation rental property manager. Take the 142 Sonoma permit records filed in the last twelve months. Those owners had to name a certified manager recently, so they are not your first target. Instead, use permit dates to find owners who have held a permit for several years: they have had time to decide whether their manager is working. Contact them by mail, with a clear offer, and keep phone contact to people who reply.

A Marin County furnisher

Marin's 1,594 registered rentals have no phone or email. The registration date field shows when each rental entered the county's list. Mail a short letter to rentals registered in the last quarter, addressed to the DBA name where there is one. Our guide to direct mail to vacation rental owners covers format and list prep.

A bookkeeper in Sacramento

Every Sacramento host pays a $50 hotel business tax each year and collects 12 percent TOT. The city's 445 active permits in our copy are 445 recurring filing chores. A one-page explainer on Sacramento's TOT and business tax, mailed or emailed to active permit holders, offers something useful before it asks for anything.

Compliant outreach to California hosts

California records are mostly phone numbers, and many belong to individuals. That puts telemarketing law at the center of any California campaign. This is a summary, not legal advice; state law can add requirements on top of the federal rules, so have a telemarketing lawyer review a calling program before you start.

Calls and texts

The federal rules at 47 CFR 64.1200, which implement the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, bar calls to cell phones made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice unless an exception applies, require prior express written consent for such calls when they are telemarketing, and bar telephone solicitations to residential numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule guide says sellers and telemarketers must delete numbers on the Registry from their lists at least every 31 days, must not call homes before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time, and must transmit caller ID.

For California permit phones, that means:

Assume the number is a personal mobile phone unless the record clearly names a business.
No autodialers, no prerecorded messages, no artificial voices.
No marketing texts without prior express written consent.
Scrub every list against the National Do Not Call Registry and your own do-not-call list before calling.
Call only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. Pacific time.

Our guide to calling STR owners under TCPA and Do Not Call rules has more detail.

Email

Few California records include an email. Where you have one, the FTC's CAN-SPAM guide applies: accurate headers, a subject line that matches the content, a clear statement that the message is an advertisement, a valid postal address, a working opt-out, and opt-outs honored within 10 business days. Each violating email can carry a penalty of up to $53,088.

Mail

Mail is the lowest-risk channel and the only one the Marin, Santa Barbara and small coastal files support. A letter to the property address reaches primary-residence hosts in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County and San Diego Tier 2 directly, because they live there.

A letter you can adapt

Dear [name],

Your short-term rental at [address] appears on [county or city]'s public register. I run [company], a [service] business in [area]. We work with vacation rental owners in [town] on [specific task, for example spa cleaning and water testing between stays].

If that would help you, call or text me at [number] or email [address]. I will send a price for your property within one business day.

[Name], [company], [postal address]

Inviting the owner to text you puts the first text in their hands. Keep a record of when and how each owner contacted you.

A call opening, for owners who asked to hear from you

"Hi [name], this is [your name] with [company]. You replied to our letter about [service] for [street name]. Is now a good time for two minutes, or should I call back at a time you pick?"

If anyone asks you to stop, stop, and add them to your internal do-not-call list the same day.

Mistakes to avoid with California permit data

Treating California as one market. A San Diego Tier 3 host, a Sacramento second-home owner and a Los Angeles home-sharer face different caps, taxes and residency rules.
Quoting another city's rules. Telling a Sonoma host about San Diego's 90-day minimum, or a Sacramento host about Los Angeles' 120-day cap, ends the conversation.
Calling local contacts who are managers. In San Diego the published phone is the local contact's. Selling management to a manager wastes both your time and theirs.
Counting re-imports as new rentals. Marin's quarterly refresh reloaded 803 records in one week. Use registration dates, not arrival dates.
Texting cell phones without consent. Most California permit phones are personal mobiles. Marketing texts need prior express written consent.
Ignoring status. El Dorado's file includes 752 closed permits. San Diego licenses expire after two years.
Assuming an address-only file is useless. Marin, Santa Barbara and the small coastal files have no phones, but a letter reaches every one of them, and fewer competitors bother.
Calling a permit new because it just reached your list. Use the permit or registration date when the register publishes one. Otherwise say you found it recently.

Getting California records from PermitPulse

PermitPulse pulls each California register every 24 hours, keeps each program's own fields, dates and statuses, and lists records first captured each week. The week of October 12 to 19 brought 141 California records, all with a phone; you can see that batch on the week's page. For more on how fresh records differ from older ones, see pending versus granted permits.

A California subscription is $99 a month for up to 10,000 rows a month. A one-time California download is $149. A free 25-row sample of any register is available after a free sign-up. Prices are on the pricing page. If you need California data joined to your own systems, such as TOT records matched to permits, custom lead-generation software builds start at $1,500. Whichever route you take, the outreach rules above apply to every record.

Questions and answers

Does California have a statewide short-term rental license?

No. California has no state short-term rental license or state register. Cities and counties run their own programs, usually a zoning permission, an operating license or registration, and transient occupancy tax registration. A California owner list has to be assembled from each local register, such as San Diego's STRO licenses, San Bernardino County's permits or Sonoma County's vacation rental permits.

How many short-term rental permit records are there in California?

PermitPulse holds 24,522 California records as of October 2026, from city and county registers. 19,420 of them, or 79 percent, carry a phone or email. The largest sources are San Diego's STRO licenses (8,850 records), San Bernardino County (5,328), Sonoma County (2,424 plus a 506-record license list) and El Dorado County (1,978). Marin County (1,594) and Santa Barbara (255) publish no phones.

How does the San Diego STRO license cap work?

San Diego licenses short-term rentals in four tiers. Tier 1 (20 days or fewer a year) and Tier 2 (home sharing with the host onsite) are uncapped. Tier 3 whole-home licenses are capped at 1 percent of housing units outside Mission Beach, and Tier 4 at 30 percent of Mission Beach housing units. On October 9, 2026 the city showed 4,859 Tier 3 licenses issued with 802 remaining, and 1,099 Tier 4 licenses with none remaining and a waitlist.

Do California short-term rental hosts have to register for transient occupancy tax?

In nearly every program, yes. Transient occupancy tax is a local tax set by each city or county. San Diego requires a free TOT certificate for any rental under one month, with zone rates of 11.75 to 13.75 percent since May 1, 2025. Sacramento charges 12 percent plus a $50 annual hotel business tax. Sonoma County, Santa Barbara, Placentia and Los Angeles County also require TOT registration or payment.

Are California short-term rental permit lists covered by the CCPA?

The California Attorney General's CCPA page says personal information does not include publicly available information, which includes information from federal, state or local government records. The registers in this guide are published by the governments themselves. That exclusion does not change telemarketing or email law, and data you add from other sources may still be personal information. This is not legal advice.

Can I text or call California short-term rental owners from a permit list?

Most California permit phones are personal mobile numbers. Under federal TCPA rules, telemarketing calls to cell phones using an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice, and marketing texts, need prior express written consent. Numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry must be removed from call lists at least every 31 days, and calls to homes are limited to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time. Mail is the lowest-risk first contact.