What Tighter Short-Term Rental Rules Mean for Neighbors

On September 22, 2026, Maui's Planning Commission voted 6–2 to recommend that 43 of 48 condo properties not be rezoned as hotel districts. Rezoning would have let them keep renting to visitors despite the county's phase-out of apartment-zone vacation rentals. Unless six of the nine County Council members vote to override that advice, or a court blocks the phase-out, most of those units must stop short-term renting by January 1, 2029, in West Maui and January 1, 2031, elsewhere. For neighbors anywhere, the lesson is the same: the boom in new listings has slowed, and local rules (registration, zoning, building bylaws) now decide what happens next door.

Key takeaways

US short-term rental supply growth peaked at about 20% in 2021–2022, according to industry analytics firm AirDNA; its July 2026 forecast puts 2026 growth at 2.7%.
New York City's Local Law 18, enforced since September 5, 2023, allows stays under 30 days only in registered homes where the host stays with at most two guests. Neighbors can report suspected illegal rentals through 311, without giving a name.
The best-known national study found that a 1% rise in Airbnb listings raised rents by 0.018% and house prices by 0.026% in a typical ZIP code. At 2026's forecast listing growth, that works out to under $1 a month on a $2,000 rent; the effect is larger where few residents own their homes.
Courts are reshaping local rules: an injunction has blocked Dallas's 2023 ban since that year, while a federal appeals court upheld most of New Orleans's rules in October 2025 but struck down its ban on business-entity permit holders.
Airbnb made its party ban permanent on June 28, 2022, and runs a Neighborhood Support form and call-back line for complaints.

What it means for you

Next to a rental: first check whether the unit is registered or permitted where your city keeps a list, then document problems before you complain.
Condo, co-op and HOA members: your building's governing documents can matter as much as city law, and their exact wording decides disputes.
Renters worried about rent and supply: research points to a real but modest rent effect, strongest in neighborhoods where most homes are rented rather than owner-occupied.
Thinking of hosting: in many cities, registration, an on-site host or operator, and quick responses to complaints are now conditions of operating legally.
Tourist towns: phase-outs like Maui's could add long-term housing, but economists also project lost jobs, tax revenue and condo value.

Is the rise still happening?

Short-term rentals are still growing, but the steep part of the curve is over. Airbnb's own shareholder letters, filed with the SEC, report over 8 million active listings worldwide at the end of 2024 (Q4 2024 letter) and over 9 million at the end of 2025 (Q4 2025 letter). Those are global figures, and the company does not break them out for the US.

For the US, the most-cited numbers come from AirDNA, a private analytics firm that tracks listings for investors. Its December 2025 outlook described a 20% peak in listing growth in 2021–2022 and forecast 4.6% growth for 2026 (AirDNA 2026 outlook). Its July 2026 midyear update cut that to 2.7%, citing mortgage rates back above 6% (AirDNA midyear outlook). These are industry estimates, not government statistics.

What has risen sharply is regulation. New York City's Office of Special Enforcement estimates that as many as 18,000 permanent homes were being used as illegal short-term rentals by 2018. Its report on fiscal 2026 (July 2025 to June 2026) counts just over 3,500 active registered hosts (NYC OSE annual report release). Chicago's open-data list of active shared-housing registrations held 3,753 entries on October 5, 2026 (Chicago Data Portal).

The rules neighbors can use

Status as of October 5, 2026, for places with recent changes or court rulings:

Place	Main rule	Status	What a neighbor can do
New York City	Local Law 18: stays under 30 days need city registration; the host must live there, stay in the unit during the visit and host no more than two guests	Platforms barred from processing unregistered bookings since September 5, 2023	Report through 311 with the address, unit and listing link
Chicago	Shared-housing units must register; voters in a precinct can petition to restrict or prohibit them there, and the City Council decides by ordinance	Registration list updated regularly	Look up the address on the city's open-data list
New Orleans	Owner and operator permits; the operator must be on site while guests are present and resolve complaints within one hour	Mostly upheld by the Fifth Circuit on October 7, 2025; the ban on business entities (such as LLCs) holding owner or operator permits and the one-unit-per-ad rule were struck down	Check the permit number, which must appear in every ad
Maui County	Ordinance 5909 (Bill 9) ends vacation rentals in apartment districts	Signed December 2025; hotel-rezoning exemptions and lawsuits pending	Testify before the council on rezoning bills
Honolulu	Ordinance 22-7 (2022) set a 90-day minimum outside resort areas	A federal judge permanently blocked it for existing 30–89-day rentals in December 2023	Report rentals of under 30 days to the city
Dallas	2023 ordinances ban short-term rentals in single-family zones	Blocked by a temporary injunction since December 6, 2023; city asked the Texas Supreme Court to lift it on October 16, 2025, and no ruling had been reported by early October 2026	Use noise, parking and nuisance rules, which still apply
Arizona (state)	Cities cannot ban rentals for being short-term (2016) but may require permits, an emergency contact and notice to neighbors (2022)	In force	Use the contact details the host must give nearby residents
Florida (state)	Local governments cannot ban vacation rentals or limit how long or how often they are rented, unless the rule dates from before June 1, 2011	A 2024 bill to widen state control was vetoed	Use local registration, noise and parking rules

The New York City conditions come from the city's guidance for hosts. Rentals of 30 days or more fall outside the rule, as do hotels and other buildings legally approved for short stays.

A City Council bill introduced on April 30, 2026 (Int 0879-2026) would let owner-occupants of one- and two-family homes host up to four guests without being present; it was still in committee in early October 2026. The New Orleans details come from the Fifth Circuit's opinion in Hignell-Stark v. City of New Orleans, which read the operator rule as requiring presence only while guests are there, upheld the requirement to show permit numbers in ads, and sent the case back to the district court. Chicago's restricted precincts are listed on the city's restricted-zone dataset.

Maui's council passed Bill 9 by 5–3 on December 15, 2025 (Maui County Council). Estimates of the units affected range from about 6,000 to 7,000 (Hawaii Public Radio).

The planning commission's September 22, 2026, recommendation covered 3,402 units in 48 properties and backed exemptions for only five properties with 397 units. On September 30, the council voted 5–4 to send rezoning for 32 more shoreline complexes to the commission. Six of nine council votes are needed to overrule a negative recommendation (Maui Now).

Sources for the other rows: Skift on Honolulu, CandysDirt on the Dallas injunction and the city's Texas Supreme Court petition, and Arizona's summaries of SB 1350 (2016) and SB 1168 (2022). SB 1168 caps city fines at $500, $1,000 and $3,500 (or one, two and three nights' rent, if higher) for first, second and later violations. Florida's limit is in section 509.032(7); the vetoed bill was SB 280 (2024).

Effects on rent and home prices

The study cited most often is by Kyle Barron, Edward Kung and Davide Proserpio, published in Marketing Science in 2021. It used Airbnb listings across the US from 2012 to 2016. In a ZIP code with a typical share of owner-occupiers, a 1% increase in listings raised rents by 0.018% and house prices by 0.026% (working-paper version).

The effect came from landlords moving homes from long-term to short-term rental, not from any change in the total number of homes. It was stronger where fewer homes were owner-occupied.

new rent  = current rent  × (1 + change in listings) ^ 0.018
new price = current price × (1 + change in listings) ^ 0.026

"Change in listings" is a decimal (0.10 for 10% more listings, 1.00 for twice as many); the exponent is the study's estimate. Using a power rather than simple multiplication keeps large changes accurate.

Illustrative example: a $2,000-a-month apartment and a $400,000 home in a typical ZIP code. If listings rise 10%, rent rises about 0.17%, or $3.43 a month. If listings double, rent rises about 1.26%, or $25.11 a month ($301 a year), and the home's value rises about 1.82%, or $7,274.

At AirDNA's forecast 2.7% listing growth for 2026, the same formula gives about 0.05%, or $0.96 a month. The effect was larger during the boom: in the study's 2012–2016 data, when median listing growth was 28% a year, Airbnb accounted for about 0.59 percentage points of the 3.18% average yearly rent growth in the median ZIP code of the 100 largest metro areas, close to a fifth. The numbers also grow where listings are concentrated and owner-occupancy is low.

Cutting rentals also has costs. For Maui, the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization (UHERO) estimated that a full phase-out could add up to 6,127 homes to the long-term stock, a 13% increase. It could also cut visitor spending by nearly $900 million a year, eliminate about 1,900 jobs and lower condo prices by 20% to 40%. UHERO also found that 85% of the affected units were owned by out-of-state investors, so many may not become homes for local residents (University of Hawaii summary).

Condo, HOA and deed limits

Private rules can go further than city law, but only if their wording supports it. In Tarr v. Timberwood Park Owners Association (2018), the Texas Supreme Court held that a deed restriction limiting lots to "residential purposes" and single-family homes did not bar short-term rentals. Guests who sleep and eat in a home are using it as a residence, and the single-family clause limited what could be built, not how it was used (Supreme Court of Texas opinion).

The ruling binds only Texas courts; other states read similar wording under their own law. Associations that want a ban usually need an explicit minimum lease term, adopted the way their documents and state law require.

New York City gives building owners a separate tool. More than 14,000 owners and managers have put their buildings on the city's prohibited list, which blocks any registration there (NYC OSE). Rent-regulated apartments and public housing cannot be registered at all.

Platform rules also apply. Airbnb's community disturbance policy bans open-invite parties and treats excessive noise, trash, trespassing, parking problems and vandalism as disturbances. Hosts or guests who break it can be suspended or removed.

The company made the party ban permanent on June 28, 2022. It also screens bookings year-round and adds stricter limits on one- and two-night whole-home stays over holiday weekends. Airbnb says the US rate of party reports fell more than 50% after 2020 (Airbnb, May 2025). That figure has not been independently audited.

This section is general information, not legal advice. For a dispute over specific bylaws or a deed restriction, a local real estate attorney can read the actual documents.

Frequently asked questions

Does Airbnb tell neighbors what happened after a report?

For non-urgent concerns, Airbnb says its team investigates and follows up by email. For urgent problems, its Neighborhood Support page offers a call-back request. Airbnb does not say how much detail it shares about any action against a host. For anything that threatens safety, the same page says to contact local emergency services first.

Can I report an illegal rental in New York City without giving my name?

Yes. The city's guidance for neighbors says complaints through 311 can be anonymous, and their status can be tracked on the 311 site. The city lists warning signs such as a string of visitors arriving with luggage, key lockboxes or keypads, and guests gathering in hallways.

Do these rules cover monthly rentals?

Usually not. New York City and New Orleans define a short-term rental as a stay of fewer than 30 consecutive days. In New York, a 30-night stay counts as permanent occupancy. Honolulu tried to raise its threshold to 90 days, but that change is blocked for 30–89-day rentals that already existed before the ordinance; it still applies to newer ones.

Did New York's crackdown make hotels pricier?

A peer-reviewed 2025 study in the European Journal of Political Economy estimated that average hotel rates rose $14 to $19 a night after enforcement began, adding roughly $2.1 to $2.9 billion in hotel revenue over the first 18 months, mostly through higher prices rather than more rooms sold (Anastasi and coauthors). The authors also found that the hotel industry spent an order of magnitude more than home-sharing platforms on political contributions.

Will Maui's phase-out lower rents there?

It could add housing, but UHERO's estimate of up to 6,127 homes assumes every affected unit leaves the visitor market, and most are owned by out-of-state investors who may sell or leave units empty rather than rent to residents. Lawsuits filed in Maui's Second Circuit Court in December 2025 argue the phase-out is an uncompensated taking (Maui Now). The timetable could still change.

Steps if a rental causes trouble

Log each problem with the date, time, what happened and photos or video taken from your own property.
Find the listing and check its registration or permit number against your city's list, if it has one: Chicago publishes addresses, New Orleans requires the permit number in ads, and Austin publishes street names (Austin open data).
For danger, call 911. For noise or parking, use your city's non-emergency line or 311; in New York, file an illegal short-term rental complaint with the listing link.
Report the listing to the platform; for Airbnb, use the Neighborhood Support form or call-back request.
In a condo, co-op or HOA, send the log to the board and ask which rule in the governing documents applies.
Follow council agendas: Maui's commission must return its rezoning recommendations by November 24, 2026, and other cities debate rules the same way (Maui Now).