Why You Can't Buy Idaho or Iowa STR Permit Data
Both states preempted local short-term-rental permitting, so the public registers other states publish simply don't exist there. What happened, and what it means for outreach.
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Two states are missing from every list we sell, and the reason is not squeamishness or a licensing dispute. It is that the records do not exist.
Idaho and Iowa have both stripped their cities and counties of the power to require short-term-rental permits. No permit requirement means no permit applications, no register, and nothing to publish. A vendor offering you Idaho or Iowa "STR permit data" is either selling you something else entirely or selling you a file that has been stale since the law changed.
Idaho: House Bill 583
Idaho has been moving in this direction for years. A 2017 law already stopped cities from banning short-term rentals outright, but it left them room to require permits, charge fees, cap density and impose conditions — and several resort communities used that room aggressively enough that operating became impractical.
House Bill 583 closed the gap. Governor Brad Little signed it on 16 March 2026, and it took effect on 1 July 2026. It amends section 67-6539 of the Idaho Code, and it is the broadest state preemption of local short-term-rental regulation in the country.
The core of it: cities and counties may no longer require a permit, licence, registration or fee to operate a short-term rental. The law also classifies short-term rentals as a "nontransient residential use," which means for zoning purposes a short-term rental is treated the same as a long-term rental or an ordinary single-family home.
Local governments retain real authority over health and safety, provided they apply the same rules to short-term and long-term rentals alike. Smoke alarms in sleeping areas, carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers on each floor, escape ladders, occupancy limits under the state building code, emergency information for guests — all still permitted. So are the ordinances that apply to everyone: noise, parking, nuisance, traffic.
What is gone is the registration layer, and the registration layer is what produced the data.
Iowa: House File 2641
Iowa got there six years earlier and by a similar route. House File 2641, enacted in 2020, added the relevant restrictions to Iowa Code section 414.1.
Under it, Iowa cities cannot adopt ordinances, regulations or restrictions that specifically target short-term rental properties; cannot require a licence or permit fee for them; and cannot regulate them differently from other residential uses. There are narrow health and safety exceptions, but preserving residential housing stock, the rationale several cities wanted to use, is not among them.
The 2026 edition of the Code reads plainly. Paragraph 2 of section 414.1(1)(e) says: A city shall not adopt or enforce any regulation, restriction, or other ordinance, including a conditional use permit requirement, relating to short-term rental properties within the city.
Paragraph 4 adds: A city shall not require a license or permit fee for a short-term rental property in the city.
The same paragraph defines the property covered as a house, dwelling unit, condo, co-op or timeshare unit, or owner-occupied home offered for a fee for thirty days or less
, and classifies it as a residential land use for zoning purposes
. (Iowa Code section 414.1, Iowa Legislature.)
The exceptions are listed, and one of them matters for anyone hunting data: a city may still act to provide the city with an emergency contact for a short-term rental property
, as long as enforcement matches what applies to similar properties that are not short-term rentals. An emergency-contact requirement is not a permit, and it does not produce a public register of operators, but it is the one hook in Iowa law that can leave a city holding a list of rental contacts. The others cover fire and building safety, sanitation, traffic, noise, property maintenance and nuisance.
The practical effect matches Idaho's. Iowa municipalities do not maintain short-term-rental permit registers because they are not permitted to require the permits that would populate them.
Why this leaves a hole rather than a gap
It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because it explains why no amount of effort on our part would fix it.
Permit data exists as a by-product of regulation. A city decides operators must register. Operators fill in forms. The city keeps those forms as records. State public-records law makes the records available. We collect and normalize them.
Remove the first link and the entire chain fails. There is no public register to request, no open-data endpoint to poll, no clerk to file a records request with. The information about who runs a short-term rental in Boise or Des Moines was never collected by anyone.
This is different from the many markets that have permit programs but publish nothing online. There, the records exist and may appear online later. Idaho and Iowa are not a distribution problem. They are an absence.
What the coverage looks like
Our database currently holds 283,611 records from public registers, and none of them is from Idaho or Iowa. Those two states have nothing to give, and we would rather say so on the pricing page than let you discover it after you have paid.
Every query the system runs excludes Idaho and Iowa at the database level. Not filtered at the front end, not excluded by convention — the exclusion is in the code that builds every count, every preview and every export. There is no combination of filters that returns an Idaho record, because there are no Idaho records.
If a vendor offers you these states, ask one question: what is the source register, by name? For a state that has legally abolished the registration requirement, there is no answer. What you are most likely being sold is either pre-2020 Iowa data that has not reflected reality in six years, or a consumer marketing file with a short-term-rental label on it.
What to do if you sell into those markets
Short-term rentals obviously still operate in Idaho and Iowa. McCall, Sun Valley, Coeur d'Alene and the Iowa lake towns all have real inventory. What is gone is the register, not the market. So the answer is the same set of alternatives that apply anywhere permit data is unavailable:
- County property records, filtered as best you can. Weak targeting, authoritative ownership data, and cheap. See the tradeoffs in our overview of the seven approaches.
- Local partnerships — cleaners, photographers, handymen, suppliers. Slow to build, and in a market with no data moat, disproportionately valuable.
- Lodging tax records, where a state still collects them centrally. Preemption of local permitting does not always mean the elimination of tax registration, and tax rolls sometimes survive where permit registers do not. It is worth checking the current position with the relevant state agency rather than assuming either way.
And a strategic note: the preemption trend is real and it is not confined to these two states. Legislatures in several states have considered similar bills, usually framed as property-rights protection against restrictive resort-town ordinances. If that continues, the supply of short-term-rental permit data will shrink in exactly the places where operators are least regulated.
Which is an argument, if you need one, for working the markets that publish today rather than waiting. Coverage by state is here.