How we verify every rule

Short-stay regulation in Australia changes constantly, and most sites that summarise it go stale within months. This site exists to be the exception. Here is exactly how it works:

Primary sources only

Every fact on this site cites legislation, a state government page, a council page or a regulator. Never a blog, a news article or another database. If we can't anchor a fact to an official source, we either mark our confidence as low (visibly, on the page) or we don't publish it.

Dates that mean something

"Last verified" on our pages is literal: it's the date we last re-checked the official source, not the date we last touched the page. Verification runs on a fortnightly schedule. Every source URL is re-fetched, compared against what we have, and material changes update the page and are recorded in the rule-change log.

Depth over volume

We publish a page only when we have distinct, verified, local facts for that jurisdiction. Councils that simply follow their state framework don't get a thin duplicate page. The postcode checker routes you to the state framework instead.

What this method does not give you

Publishing the limits is the part that makes the rest worth believing, so here they are.

• "Last verified" is not "correct today". It means we re-read the cited source on that date and it still said what we say it says. A council that changed its policy the following morning will show a stale date until the next pass catches it.
• Some sources cannot be fetched automatically. A handful of government sites, including Hobart City Council and the NSW legislation site, block automated requests. Those jurisdictions are on manual review: a person opens them. It is slower, so their dates move less often.
• Confidence is marked, not hidden. Where we are less than certain, the rule carries a visible warning on the page and in the dataset. Those are the ones to confirm with the council before acting.
• Coverage is deliberately incomplete. We publish a council only where it has at least four verified rules of its own from at least two primary sources. Roughly 150 Australian councils touch short-stay rules; most simply follow their state, and a thin page for each would make the site look bigger and be worth less.
• We are not the source. Every fact links to the instrument or authority it came from. For anything load-bearing, follow the link.

Corrections

If you find something out of date, tell us. Corrections are re-verified against the official source and logged. We'd rather be corrected than confidently wrong. Confidently wrong is what the other databases do.

Independence

Some pages carry clearly-marked referral links to software or insurance relevant to compliance. Referral partners never see, influence or pay for the rules we report, and no rule content is ever altered for commercial reasons.

Who is accountable

Short Stay Rules is edited by Mark Jeanes, who is responsible for what appears on it. Contact details and what we can help with are on the press page.

Reusing this data

Everything here is published under CC BY 4.0. Quote it, republish it, build on it, with attribution and a link. See the data licence.

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.