STR Law Map is a reference desk for short-term-rental regulation, and a reference desk lives or dies on whether its answers are current and traceable to the actual law. A stale answer here can cost a host thousands in fines or a shutdown notice. This page sets out exactly where every field on a location page comes from, how we verify and date it, and how we handle corrections — so you can check our work and, when it matters, take the ordinance itself to a professional.
How we research a jurisdiction
Each location page follows one fixed schema: whether a permit or license is required, primary-residence rules, annual night caps, registration fees, the transient-occupancy-tax (TOT) rate, whole-home versus hosted rules, and zoning or HOA notes. We fill each field from the jurisdiction’s own governing documents rather than from summaries, then normalize it into the comparable format so two cities can be read side by side. Where a city’s rules are genuinely ambiguous or in flux, we say so on the page instead of inventing a clean answer.
The primary sources we use
- The municipal code itself — the chapter of the city or county ordinance that governs short-term rentals, read from the official code library, and linked from the page so you can see the exact text.
- The city’s own permitting or licensing program page — the official application, fee schedule, and requirements published by the government department that administers the program.
- The tax authority — the city, county, or state page that sets the transient-occupancy / lodging tax rate and registration duties.
What we don’t rely on
We do not build a listing from an STR management company’s blog, a news article, or another aggregator, because those go stale and rarely cite the ordinance. They are, at most, a signal to go and check the primary source. If a fact is not confirmable in a government document, it does not become a stated rule on the page — it becomes a “confirm with the city” note.
Verification and the “last verified” date
Every regulatory field is checked against a primary .gov source, and each page carries a visible “last verified” date — that freshness stamp is the whole trust model of this site. When a jurisdiction changes its rules, we re-verify the affected fields against the updated ordinance and re-date the page. We are a reference desk, not a law firm: we give you the rule, the number, the source, and the date, and a standing disclaimer on every page notes that this is information, not legal advice, and that rules change.
Corrections
If a city has changed its rules or a field looks wrong, please tell us through the contact page — choose the “Correction to a listing” topic. A correction pointing to the current ordinance is the single most useful thing you can send us; we re-verify against the primary source and re-date the page when we act on it.
A note on how these pages are produced
Our location pages are produced with the help of AI research and drafting tools, working against the primary government sources above. AI speeds up the reading and normalizing; it does not get the final say on the law. Every regulatory field is checked by a human-supervised process against the ordinance, permitting page, or tax authority before it is published, and dated when verified. We are upfront about this because the trust here rests on the receipts, not on who typed them.
STR Law Map provides general information, not legal advice. Always confirm current rules with the jurisdiction before relying on any listing here.