—Short-term rental rules · Philadelphia
Philadelphia draws its STR line on the operator-class question first: are you renting a room or floor of your primary residence, or are you running an unhosted listing in a separately-owned unit? The license class determines what is allowed where.
Last reviewed against current municipal sources on 2026-05-20.
01The Philadelphia context
Limited Lodging is the owner-occupied class: the host uses the property as their primary residence and rents portions of it, or the entire property when away — with the away-from-home unhosted portion capped at a fixed number of nights per year. It is broadly available across residential zones.
Visitor Accommodation is the unhosted commercial class: separately-owned units rented to guests with the operator off- site. It requires commercial zoning, additional life-safety compliance, and a different inspection regime — and is restricted to zoning districts that permit lodging use.
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 Philadelphia's own Pennsylvania guidance.
02The house-rules angle
Because the rules turn on class rather than address, the most valuable thing for a guest to acknowledge is the actual class they are staying under: are they in a primary residence the host normally lives in, or in a unit zoned commercial. The occupancy and conduct expectations differ, and getting them on paper reduces the everyday ambiguity.
A signed acknowledgment that names the license class — Limited Lodging or Visitor Accommodation — plus the standard occupancy and noise rules documents that the guest understood what they booked, which is what a complaint response wants to show.
These are starting points to adapt — not legal advice, and not specific to any one Pennsylvania 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 Philadelphia 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