—Short-term rental rules · Denver
Denver runs one of the strictest primary-residence regimes in the country. The Short-Term Rental Business License attaches to the licensee's primary home — investors and second-home owners are explicitly outside the program, and Excise and Licenses runs document audits to keep it that way.
Last reviewed against current municipal sources on 2026-05-20.
01The Denver context
A Denver STR license is issued to the person, not the address, and the address has to be the licensee’s primary residence — verified by driver’s license, vehicle registration, voter registration, or a utility bill in the licensee’s name at the unit. Renewals re-check, so the requirement persists.
Investor-owned whole-home STRs are the category the city enforces against. Fines compound, and platforms (Airbnb, VRBO) are required to verify license numbers before listings go live, so the typical pattern is "license check fails → listing pulled" rather than "fine after the fact." If your rules and acknowledgment make the primary-residence framing visible to the guest, you signal the listing’s actual posture on the way in.
Local rules change — confirm current requirements with your city before you list. This page is a market-context summary and a house-rules starting point, not a legal source or a substitute for Denver's own Colorado guidance.
02The house-rules angle
A Denver host should be explicit about the primary-residence framing — the guest is staying in someone’s actual home — and about the city’s noise and occupancy norms. Rules tied to lived-in spaces (no smoking, respect for the host’s belongings) land differently when the guest has acknowledged each one.
Denver guests skew toward conferences, weddings, and Rockies-area getaways. Specificity about the no-event rule keeps the listing out of party-house territory.
These are starting points to adapt — not legal advice, and not specific to any one Colorado ordinance. Edit the wording and any amounts to your property and what your platform and city allow.
03Put the rules on the file
A house-rules block in your listing is disclosure — it proves the rule existed. It does not prove the guest who booked your Denver place ever saw that specific rule or agreed to it. What sits in the file as evidence after an incident, and what shows good-faith compliance in a regulated market, is acknowledgment: the guest confirming each rule and each fee individually, with a timestamp, before check-in.
PreArrive turns the tuned rules above into a packet the guest signs in about ninety seconds. They tap each rule and each fee to acknowledge it, draw a signature, and you get a PDF certificate — disclosure and acknowledgment in one file, with a two-event audit trail and a content hash. It is evidence, not a verdict: it does not litigate a dispute or decide a code question for you, but it puts a traceable record behind every stay.
Build a packet from these rules once, send it on every reservation. Free covers one property. No credit card.
04Verify with the source
This page is a plainspoken summary. The municipal sources below are where the actual rules live. If something here disagrees with the source, the source is right — let us know and we'll re-review.
Page reviewed 2026-05-20.
05Other regulated markets
The same disclosure-versus-acknowledgment gap shows up across every active STR market. Each city below has a plain-language local summary and a house-rules angle tuned to that market.
Want all of them in one place? See PreArrive for regulated-market hosts.
06Keep reading