—Short-term rental rules · Washington, DC
Washington, DC anchors its STR framework on a single principle: the listing must be the host’s primary residence. The line between hosted and unhosted is what then sets the cap and the license class.
Last reviewed against current municipal sources on 2026-05-20.
01The Washington, DC context
A hosted short-term rental — host present at the property during the stay — can operate year-round under the basic license class. An unhosted stay — guest alone at the property — is capped at a limited number of nights per year. Both require the operator to use the property as their primary residence.
DC’s Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection runs the license, and enforcement is paperwork-driven: address mismatches, investor-LLC ownership patterns, and missing licenses are the things that surface. The penalty for operating without the right class is meaningful, and the audit trail typically starts with a neighbor complaint.
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 Washington, DC's own District of Columbia guidance.
02The house-rules angle
Because the regime hinges on residency, the rules a guest most needs to honor are the ones that protect that residency story: no parties, no events that draw a Council member’s constituent mail, no occupancy that strains a residential building.
A signed acknowledgment of occupancy limits, party prohibition, and quiet hours both deters incidents and documents that you ran the unit as the licensed class describes — neighborly residential hosting, not de facto hotel operation.
These are starting points to adapt — not legal advice, and not specific to any one District of Columbia 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 Washington, DC 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