Short-Term Rental Research and Data
Original counts from 76 U.S. city, county and state short-term rental registers: 275,665 permit and license records in 26 states, counted 2026-10-08. Free to quote and reuse with credit.
Short-Term Rental Permit Statistics: U.S. Registers in 2026
How many short-term rentals are on public permit registers, where they are, how many registers publish a phone or email, and what share of permits are active, expired or pending. Counted from 76 government registers.
PermitPulse counts 275,665 short-term rental permit and license records on 76 public government registers in 26 U.S. states, as of 2026-10-08.
TrendsNew Short-Term Rental Permit Filings, 2024 to 2026
Are more people registering short-term rentals, or fewer? January to September filings in the registers that keep their full history, plus the markets where the most permits on file are less than a year old.
In the 5 registers that keep their full filing history, 3,202 new short-term rental permits were filed from January to September 2026, against 3,020 in the same months of 2025 and 3,782 in 2024.
OwnershipWho Holds Short-Term Rental Permits: People, Companies and Trusts
The share of permits held in a company's name, a trust or a person's name, register by register, and what Nashville's and New Orleans' permit types say about investors and owner-occupiers.
Across 19 registers that name the legal holder, 32% of 150,469 short-term rental permits are held in a company's name (LLC, corporation or partnership) and 2% in a trust.
Download the data
Aggregate counts only: no names, addresses, phone numbers or emails. Free under CC BY 4.0; credit "Lead Mining Company, PermitPulse data" with a link to the study.
| File | What it holds |
|---|---|
| str-permits-by-state.csv | Records per state, with phone, with email, pending, filed in the last 12 months |
| str-permits-by-market.csv | The same counts for 30 short-term rental markets |
| str-permit-filings-by-month.csv | New filings per month, 2024 to 2026, in the registers that keep full history |
| str-permit-filings-by-register.csv | January to September filings per register, 2024, 2025 and 2026 |
| str-permit-holders-by-register.csv | Permits held by companies, trusts and people, per register |
How the counts are made
Every number comes from public short-term rental permit, license and registration files that U.S. cities, counties and states publish. Lead Mining Company collects them for its PermitPulse™ database and counts them directly; nothing is estimated, surveyed or scraped from booking sites. Map layers that turned out not to be permits (zoning maps, parcel layers, listing heatmaps) are excluded. Idaho and Iowa have no registers to count, because state law preempts local short-term rental permitting there.
Related reference pages: which cities and states publish registers, permit rules by state and the glossary of permit terms.