How Florida Licenses Vacation Rentals

Florida licenses vacation rentals at the state level. Under Chapter 509 of the Florida Statutes, a vacation rental is a public lodging establishment, and each one needs a license from the Division of Hotels and Restaurants, part of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR). As of 2026-10-08, PermitPulse holds 52,029 Florida short-term-rental records, 49,712 of them from the DBPR vacation-rental license file, and 38,710 list a phone number.

That makes Florida one of the few states where a single public file covers short-term rentals everywhere, from the Panhandle to the Keys. This guide explains what the law counts as a vacation rental, what the license file contains, what it leaves out, and how the numbers break down by town.

What counts as a vacation rental in Florida

Florida defines the term in section 509.242(1)(c): a vacation rental is any unit or group of units in a condominium or cooperative, or any individually or collectively owned single-family, two-family, three-family or four-family house or dwelling unit, that is also a transient public lodging establishment, but is not a timeshare project.

"Transient" is defined in section 509.013(4)(a)1: a unit rented to guests more than three times in a calendar year for periods of less than 30 consecutive days. A house or condo rented out that often for short stays falls inside the definition, which is why the license file reaches far beyond professional operators to individual owners with one property.

Who issues the license

Section 509.241 requires each public lodging establishment to obtain a license from the Division of Hotels and Restaurants before it operates. Licenses are renewed annually on a staggered schedule the division sets by rule. For vacation rentals, the statute also requires the licensee to report a change in the street or unit address, or in the number of houses or units under the license, within 30 days.

The practical result for anyone selling to hosts: the state keeps a current, renewed list of who holds each vacation-rental license and where the property is. Cities and counties can add their own registration programs on top, but the state license is the common layer.

What the license file contains

Here is what the Florida records in PermitPulse carry, counted across the 52,029 Florida records as of 2026-10-08:

Two gaps stand out. Email is close to absent, so Florida outreach runs on phone and mail. And the file carries almost no filing dates, so you cannot sort Florida licenses by age the way you can in Texas or Nashville. Our export adds a first-seen date, which records when each license first appeared in our database; for a subscriber pulling monthly, that is how new Florida licenses show up.

Houses and condos

Each Florida license is coded with a class. The two that matter are DWEL, a dwelling (house), and CNDO, a unit in a condominium. Statewide the split is:

Houses outnumber condos about 2.3 to 1 across the state, but the mix swings hard by town. The condo and house guide ranks every Florida city file by its split.

Where Florida's licenses are

The license file is statewide, but the rentals are not spread evenly. These are the largest Florida towns in PermitPulse, counted from the city on each license after spelling variants are merged:

The top ten towns hold 19,231 licenses, 37% of the Florida file. Panama City Beach leads. Every town on this list has its own page with ZIP counts and the house and condo split; the full ranking is in Florida cities with the most licensed vacation rentals.

Who holds the licenses

Because every DBPR record names the licensee, you can see how concentrated the market is. Counting each licensee name against the number of different property addresses it holds, 5,747 Florida records sit under a name that appears on two or more addresses, and 996 under names with ten or more. The largest single licensee name appears on 86 addresses. The rest of the file, most of it, is individual owners with one licensed property.

A licensee is whoever applied for the license. That can be the owner, or a management company licensing the units it runs. The multi-property owner guide covers how to tell them apart and what the counts can and cannot show.

What the license file leaves out

• Bookings and revenue. A license says a property is set up to rent short-term. It does not say how often it books or what it earns.
• Bedrooms, pools and amenities. None of these are on the license.
• Who manages the property. The licensee may be the owner or a manager; the file does not say which.
• Local registration. Some Florida cities and counties run their own registration programs on top of the state license. PermitPulse carries one county layer, Collier County's registration compliance data, which records whether a parcel has a valid registration rather than who to call.

Using the Florida file

1. Pick your towns. Start from the Florida page or a city page and check the count, the phone coverage and the ZIP codes.
2. Choose houses or condos. The export can be filtered by license type; houses are labelled "Vacation rental - house" and condos "Vacation rental - condo".
3. Separate portfolios from individual owners. Group by licensee name before you call, so a company with forty licenses gets one conversation, not forty.
4. Check compliance before dialing. Most Florida phones in the file belong to the licensee and many are personal mobiles. Scrub against Do Not Call lists and follow the TCPA; the compliance guide covers the basics.