—Short-term rental rules · San Francisco
San Francisco requires hosts to be permanent residents of the unit (270 nights of primary residence per year) and caps unhosted stays at 90 nights annually. The Office of Short-Term Rentals enforces aggressively.
Last reviewed against current municipal sources on 2026-05-20.
01The San Francisco context
OSTR maintains the host registration and a public list of permitted hosts; platforms cannot legally accept listings from unregistered hosts. The permanent-residence rule is the tightest in any major US market.
The 90-night unhosted cap is a hard ceiling — once you hit it, platforms freeze the listing for the calendar year. Hosts who book past it without realizing run into a frozen-listing problem mid-summer, not a fine after the fact.
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 San Francisco's own California guidance.
02The house-rules angle
An SF host should be specific about hosted vs. unhosted nights, the city’s strict noise norms (especially in Mission, NoPa, Hayes Valley), and the registration number that should appear on every listing. Acknowledgment on each item lands the framing the city wants to see.
Older Victorian and Edwardian buildings carry their own choreography — narrow staircases, sound carrying between units, no in-unit laundry overnight. Rules tied to those specifics narrow the post-stay complaint surface.
These are starting points to adapt — not legal advice, and not specific to any one California 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 San Francisco 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