Data licence

You can republish this data. You do not need to ask.

CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International · read the licence

Every rule, limit, fee, penalty, verification date and comparison table on this site is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. That means you may copy it, republish it, quote it, build on it and embed it, including commercially, in any medium, as long as you give credit and link back.

Australian compliance information is worth more when it travels. The reason both existing short-stay rules databases are wrong is not that the law is unknowable, it is that nobody maintains a checkable copy of it. A licence that lets a strata manager, a property-management blog or a council put our table on their own page, and get an updated one when the law moves, spreads correct information further than we ever could alone.

What you must do

• Credit Short Stay Rules and link to the page the fact came from, not just to the homepage.
• Keep the verification date with the fact, and make clear it is our date. Our "last verified" stamp says when we last re-read the official source. Presenting it as your own check is the exact failure this site exists to correct.
• Say if you changed anything. If you summarise, round or reword a rule, note that it has been adapted. A cap restated slightly wrong is worse than no cap at all.

What you must not do

• Do not imply we endorse you, your product or your interpretation.
• Do not present stale data as current. If you take a snapshot, date the snapshot.
• Do not apply legal or technological restrictions that stop others doing what the licence allows.

What is not covered

The licence covers the data and the writing around it. It does not cover:

• The photographs. Every hero image is sourced from Wikimedia Commons and carries its own licence and its own author, credited under each image. Several are ShareAlike. Take the licence from the credit line on the page, not from this one.
• The name, logo and brand of Short Stay Rules.
• The underlying government sources. Legislation, council pages and regulator material carry their own terms. We link to all of them so you can go to the source directly, which for anything load-bearing you should.

An honest note about what a licence can and cannot do

Facts are not copyrightable in Australia. That a council caps non-hosted letting at 60 nights is not ours to own, and we would not want it to be. What copyright can attach to is the compilation: the selection, structure and expression of the dataset, and the writing on these pages. That is what this licence is granted over.

So treat the attribution requirement as what it actually is. Over the compilation and the prose it is a licence condition. Over a single bare fact it is a professional courtesy, and one we would rather ask for openly than pretend to enforce. We are telling you this because a site that overstates its own legal position has no business correcting anyone else's.

Machine-readable copies

The full dataset is published at two stable URLs, rebuilt every time the site is, so an automated copy stays current instead of going stale the day it is taken:

• /data/short-stay-rules.json — every jurisdiction, every rule, every source URL and verification date.
• /data/short-stay-rules.csv — one row per rule, for spreadsheets.

Both carry the licence and the attribution string inside the file. If you are building something on this, tell us and we will warn you before anything about the format changes.

How to attribute

Copy one of these. Every jurisdiction, guide and comparison page carries the same block with its own title and date.

Found an error in something you republished?

Tell us and we will re-verify against the official source, correct it here, and log it in the rule-change log so anyone else carrying the same figure can see it moved. hello@shortstayrules.com

Short Stay Rules is an independent information service. We link every fact to its official source and show you when we last verified it, but we are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. Rules change. Always confirm with the official source or your council before making decisions about your property.