LA Short-Term Rental Laws: Registration, 120-Night Cap, and Tax

If you want to rent your home to guests for 30 nights or fewer at a time in Los Angeles, the short-term rental laws require you to register the property with the Department of City Planning under the Home-Sharing Ordinance, Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 12.22 A.32.¹ The unit has to be your primary residence, you can only register one property at a time, standard hosting is capped at 120 nights per calendar year, and every listing must show your city registration number. Hosts also collect a 14% Transient Occupancy Tax on every booking and keep records of every stay for three years.

Who Can Register

The ordinance defines a primary residence as the sole home where you live for more than six months of the calendar year. Second homes, vacation properties, and investment units don’t qualify. Each person is limited to one active registration, which shuts out operators trying to run multiple listings across different addresses.¹

Some properties are off-limits no matter who lives in them:

Units covered by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, which generally means apartments in buildings of two or more units built before October 1, 1978.¹
Affordable and income-restricted housing covered by covenants or by city, state, or federal restrictions.¹
Any unit with an unresolved home-sharing citation, which blocks registration or renewal until the citation is cleared.¹

Accessory dwelling units subject to rent stabilization are covered by the same prohibition and can’t be used for short-term rental.² To find out whether your address is RSO-covered, run it through the city’s ZIMAS tool at zimas.lacity.org and look under the Housing section for an RSO designation.³ Do that check before you pay the registration fee, because it isn’t refundable.

Documents to Have Ready

The city verifies both who you are and that the address is really yours, so gather your paperwork before starting the application. A California driver’s license or state ID showing the property address is the anchor. Add a second proof of residency: a vehicle registration, voter registration, or a recent utility bill in your name at that address.

Renters have an extra requirement. If you’re a tenant, your landlord has to sign a city-provided affidavit authorizing home-sharing at the unit, and the signature must be notarized. If the property is sold while your registration is active, you have 30 days to submit a new notarized affidavit signed by the new owner.⁴ The application also asks you to name a local responsible contact person and list every platform you plan to use.⁵ The city’s administrative guidelines spell out acceptable document formats in more detail.⁶

How to Register and What It Costs

Applications go through the City of Los Angeles online registration portal, linked from the Department of City Planning’s home-sharing page. You enter your information, upload your residency documents, and pay a non-refundable filing fee. The City Council enacted a comprehensive fee update effective February 23, 2026, so check the planning department’s current fee schedule before you apply.⁷

After payment, the portal shows a confirmation with a tracking number. If your application is approved, the city issues a registration number that has to appear on every listing you post. Hang on to the confirmation and payment receipt in case a question about your status comes up later.

Registrations last one year. Renewals should be filed at least 30 days before your current registration expires, and you’ll submit your prior year’s hosting activity records with the renewal to show you stayed within the day cap.⁸ Renewal costs were revised in the February 2026 update as well.

The 120-Night Cap and Extended Permits

Standard home-sharing is limited to 120 nights per calendar year.¹ Every guest night counts, and going over without authorization triggers enforcement. If you want to host beyond 120 nights, you need Extended Home-Sharing registration, which comes with additional requirements and higher fees.

To qualify for extended registration through the administrative track, you must meet all of the following:⁸

You’ve held a valid home-sharing registration for at least six months or hosted for at least 60 days.
You’ve mailed notice of the application to adjacent and abutting owners and occupants.
Your registration hasn’t been suspended or revoked in the past two years, and you’ve received no more than one citation in the past three years.

Hosts with more than one citation in the last three years aren’t automatically shut out, but they’re routed into discretionary review, where City Planning evaluates the application individually and can hold a public hearing at which neighbors testify. The department weighs factors including whether there’s a pattern of nuisance behavior at the address.⁸ Before the February 2026 fee update, the added fee for administrative extended review was $850 and discretionary review was $5,660. Confirm the current amounts on the fee schedule before applying.

Rules for How You Host

Every listing, on any platform, must display your valid city registration number.¹ A listing without a visible number is grounds for a citation against you and a takedown request to the platform, and platforms are required to verify numbers against the city’s database and remove listings that don’t have valid ones.⁹

Occupancy is capped at two overnight guests per habitable room, not counting kitchens, and not counting children. You have to give every guest a Code of Conduct covering safety and neighborhood expectations. Two operational rules generate the most complaints: amplified sound is prohibited after 10:00 p.m., and no more than eight people (excluding children) may gather outdoors in the evening during a stay.¹ Neighbor complaints build a paper trail that can jeopardize your renewal or block a later extended-permit application.

Transient Occupancy Tax and Records

Every short-term rental host in Los Angeles collects a 14% Transient Occupancy Tax on the rent charged.¹⁰ The rate has been in place since 1993 under LAMC Section 21.7.3.¹¹ Some platforms collect and remit TOT for you, but legal responsibility for accuracy stays with the host. If a platform handles collection and an error occurs, the city pursues you, not the platform. Keep your own records of the tax collected on each booking.

The ordinance also requires you to keep records of every stay, including length and price paid, for at least three years.¹ Those records do two jobs: they prove you stayed inside the 120-night cap, and they back up your TOT filings if you’re audited. You’ll also submit the prior year’s activity logs when you renew.⁸ A spreadsheet with check-in date, checkout date, nightly rate, and TOT collected per booking covers both requirements.

Fines for Getting It Wrong

Enforcement is aggressive and the fines are large enough to wipe out whatever a host earned by skipping steps. As of mid-2023, the base fine for a home-sharing violation was about $573 per violation, and repeat violations escalated to roughly $5,726 per unit.¹² Amounts are periodically adjusted, so current fines may be higher.

The escalation works like this: if a unit stays non-compliant after an initial citation, the second citation covers ten days of violations at the base rate, pushing the total past $5,700 in one action. For multi-family buildings with multiple non-compliant units, fines multiply per unit; a building with ten unregistered listings could face a second citation exceeding $57,000.¹²

Platforms carry their own exposure. A platform that processes a booking for a listing without a valid registration number can be fined $1,000 per day.¹ That gives platforms strong reason to pull your listing quickly once the city flags it, even if you’re personally willing to accept the risk.

What It Really Costs to Operate

The registration fee is a small piece of the actual operating cost. Plan for these recurring items before you take your first booking:

Transient Occupancy Tax at 14% of every dollar of rent collected. On a $200 nightly rate, that’s $28 per night on top of the listed price, and if the platform isn’t remitting for you, you file and pay it yourself.
Turnover cleaning between guests, generally $95 to $160 per turnover for a one-bedroom, depending on the service and unit condition.
Insurance. Standard homeowner’s or renter’s policies often exclude commercial hosting. Dedicated short-term rental liability coverage typically runs $600 to $3,000 per year. Some platforms offer host protection programs, but the coverage gaps are worth reading closely before relying on them.
Extended permit fees if you plan to exceed 120 nights. Historically $850 for administrative review and $5,660 for discretionary review, though these amounts may have changed with the February 2026 fee update.

If you’re pushing close to the 120-night ceiling on a whole-unit listing, a property management company handling communication, cleaning, and pricing charges 15% to 40% of gross rental revenue. For a casual host renting a spare room a few weekends a month, that overhead rarely pencils out.

1
City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles Municipal Code 12.22 A.32 – Home-Sharing
2
Los Angeles Housing Department. Accessory Dwelling Unit
3
Los Angeles Housing Department. RSO Property Search
4
Los Angeles Department of City Planning. Landlord’s Authorization to Conduct Home-Sharing
5
American Legal Publishing. Los Angeles Municipal Code SEC. 12.22 – Exceptions
6
City of Los Angeles. Home-Sharing Administrative Guidelines
7
Los Angeles City Planning. Home-Sharing
8
Los Angeles City Planning. Home-Sharing Ordinance FAQ
9
City of Los Angeles. Home-Sharing Platform Agreement
10
Office of Finance, City of Los Angeles. Transient Occupancy Tax Requirements
11
Office of Finance, City of Los Angeles. Transient Occupancy Tax – LAMC Article 1.7
12
City of Los Angeles. Home-Sharing Ordinance Enforcement Report