Licence, Night Cap or Zoning: How Seven Markets Regulate Short-Term Rentals

“Short-term rental regulation” gets talked about as if it were one thing that a market either has a lot of or a little of. It is not. A licence, an annual night cap and a zoning rule are three different instruments, and a market can lean on any one of them, or stack all three. We maintain a regulatory tracker where every entry is verified by hand against official government sources, so we pulled the seven markets we have verified and compared what actually binds an operator in each.

The short version: a licence is the common instrument, not a night cap. Six of the seven markets require a licence, permit or register. Only three impose a fixed annual night cap, and those three caps do not even mean the same thing.

Key findings

• A licence is the norm; a night cap is the exception. Six of seven markets require a licence or registration. Only three set a fixed annual night cap.
• London is the one market with no licence at all. Its only binding constraint on a primary-residence host is a 90-night annual cap. There is no register to join, because the national scheme enabled in law is not yet operational.
• The three “caps” describe different things. London’s 90 nights apply to a primary residence let without planning permission; Sydney’s 180 apply to non-hosted lettings; Toronto’s 180 apply to entire-unit rentals. A bare number hides that.
• Where there is no night cap, the lever is the licence itself, or zoning. Edinburgh leans on a criminal-backed licence; Honolulu confines short-term rentals to resort and designated zones; New Orleans separates residential from commercial licences; San Diego runs a four-tier system with its own day thresholds.
• The work is auditable. Across these seven markets we have checked the rules against 25 official sources, every one linked from the relevant tracker page.

The seven markets, side by side

Market	Country	Licence or registration required	Fixed annual night cap	Official sources verified
Edinburgh	United Kingdom	Yes	None	6
Honolulu	United States	Yes	None	2
London	United Kingdom	No	90	6
New Orleans	United States	Yes	None	2
San Diego	United States	Yes	None	2
Sydney	Australia	Yes	180	4
Toronto	Canada	Yes	180	3

The “fixed annual night cap” column is deliberately strict. “None” does not mean a market is unregulated, and it does not mean a host may let all year without limit. It means there is no single calendar-year night number that applies across the market. In several of these markets the binding rule is a licence condition or a zoning line, not a night count.

A licence is the instrument most markets actually use

Edinburgh is the clearest case. Scotland’s Short-Term Let licensing scheme is mandatory, and operating without a licence is a criminal offence carrying a fine of up to GBP 2,500. There is no annual night cap; the control sits in the licence itself, which comes in four types depending on whether the property is your home, let while you are away, or a dedicated secondary let.

The two US permit markets work the same way through different machinery. New Orleans splits its licences into a residential class and a commercial class, with the commercial class requiring zoning approval through a conditional use permit. San Diego requires a Short-Term Residential Occupancy licence for any rental under a month, and sorts hosts into four tiers, from a part-time tier limited to 20 days a year up to whole-home tiers with their own utilisation rules. None of that reduces to a single annual night cap, which is why San Diego shows “None” in the table even though it is one of the more structured regimes here.

Honolulu leans hardest on zoning. Short-term rentals are confined to resort-zoned areas and a set of designated apartment zones, so the question there is less “how many nights” than “is this address even eligible.” The licence and the zoning map do the work together.

The three night caps are not the same number

Three markets do set a fixed annual cap, and it is worth being precise about what each one limits, because the figure travels badly when it is quoted on its own.

London allows a primary residence to be let for up to 90 nights per calendar year without planning permission, under section 44 of the Deregulation Act 2015. Go beyond 90 nights and you are in “material change of use” territory, which needs planning permission from the borough. London is also the only market in this set with no licence requirement at all: a national registration scheme is enabled in law under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, but no operational scheme had been brought into force as of 2025.

Sydney caps non-hosted short-term letting at 180 days a year across the Greater Sydney region, while hosted stays, where the operator is on site, are not subject to that cap. The cap rides on top of a mandatory state register with annual renewal, so Sydney is a register-plus-cap market, not a cap-only one.

Toronto also lands at 180, but its number applies to entire-unit rentals, and Toronto adds a constraint the others do not: you may only operate in your principal residence. Partial-unit rentals where the operator stays on site are not night-capped. Like Sydney, Toronto pairs the cap with registration.

So three markets share the word “cap,” two share the number 180, and all three mean something different by it. That is the single best argument for reading the rule, not the headline.

What this means if you operate across markets

• Do not assume a night cap exists. In four of these seven markets the binding control is a licence or a zoning rule, and you can be fully compliant on “nights” while being unlicensed or in the wrong zone.
• Read the cap’s scope, not just its number. Whether 180 applies to you in Sydney or Toronto depends on hosted versus non-hosted and entire-unit versus partial-unit. London’s 90 hinges on the property being your primary residence.
• Budget for local tax on top of the licence. Several of these markets layer an accommodation tax over the licensing regime, from Edinburgh’s visitor levy to San Diego’s zone-based occupancy tax and Toronto’s municipal accommodation tax. The rates and effective dates sit on each tracker page; treat them as moving parts.

Limits of this data

We would rather you trust this comparison because we are clear about what it is and is not.

• This is a comparison of recorded rules, not of enforcement or of how operators behave. A market requiring a licence tells you nothing here about how many listings actually hold one.
• “None” in the night-cap column is a statement about the absence of a single fixed annual cap, not about the absence of limits. Tiered day thresholds, zoning and licence conditions can all constrain how a property is used.
• Each entry was verified as of its own date, shown on the relevant tracker page. Regulations move; a levy can take effect or a cap can change between our verification and your reading.
• Seven markets is a deliberate floor, not a sample of the world. We add a market to this comparison only once we have verified it against official sources, which is why the count grows slowly.

Reproducibility

This report is mechanical. The comparison table and the coverage summary below are produced by our open script from the same verified tracker entries, so the same data lands on the same table every time. As we verify more markets, they enter this comparison automatically, and the counts move with them.

Tracker coverage (verified markets)	Figure
Markets independently verified	7
Require a licence or registration	6 of 7
Impose a fixed annual night cap	3 of 7
Official sources verified across all markets	25

Every figure traces back to a verified tracker entry, and every tracker entry traces back to the official sources it was checked against.