Pinellas County · Florida
St. Petersburg Vacation Rental Market
St. Petersburg is the strictest market we cover. The city treats short-term stays as a transient accommodation use under its land development regulations: in residential zoning, a property may be rented for under 30 days no more than three times in any rolling 365-day period. Renting more often than that means operating as a licensed hotel or motel, or sitting inside an approved Resort Facilities Overlay district. Nightly renting a normal residential house here is, in practice, not a business you can run legally.
Rules last checked September 10, 2026
Can you operate a short-term rental here?
Restricted — under-30-day stays capped at 3 per year in residential zoning
Minimum stay
Stays under 30 days count toward the 3-per-365-days cap
City registration required
No separate short-term rental certificate identified
Taxes
13% total — 6% state sales tax, 1% Pinellas surtax, 6% county tourist development tax
Revenue and occupancy
Not published yetWe do not publish revenue, ADR or occupancy figures for St. Petersburg. There is no sourced benchmark we are willing to stand behind, and the zoning cap makes headline nightly numbers misleading here anyway.
Model it with your own assumptionsWhat owners run into here
Owners buy in St. Pete expecting Gulf-coast nightly rates and then discover the three-rentals-a-year cap. The realistic strategies here are 30-day-plus mid-term tenancies, a property inside the Resort Facilities Overlay, or a licensed hotel-classified building. We will tell you which of those a specific address can support before you commit.
County and jurisdiction notes
The city rule is separate from unincorporated Pinellas County, which since August 2025 runs its own Certificate of Use programme. Aggregator sites routinely mix the two up. We read the city handout and the county ordinance as different instruments and treat them separately.
See the full St. Petersburg rulesThinking about renting out a St. Petersburg property?
Send us the address and we will tell you what we think it can do, what the local rules require, and whether co-hosting makes sense for you.