NSW short-term rental compliance pack

Nine documents. Every requirement traced to the section it comes from, and every place the law and the regulator disagree shown as both, not decided for you.

New South Wales only. This pack does not cover Victoria, Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmania, the ACT or the NT. If your property is in one of those, this is not the product for you and you should not buy it.

What you get

Registration walkthrough Everyone
The STRA Register end to end: who must register (including hosted stays), fees, the renewal window, the Property ID question, and the declaration you owe on every single booking.
Fire safety checklist, class 1a Houses, townhouses, row houses
Your fire safety obligations, and the evacuation diagram in full. Note what is NOT required for a house.
Fire safety checklist, class 2 and class 4 parts Apartments
As above, plus the key-free egress door, the extinguisher and the fire blanket, which apply to apartments only.
Night cap: working out yours Everyone, briefly
Five questions to find your cap. Most people finish in one. Includes both definitions of hosted, and all 33 Greater Sydney councils.
Night cap tracker (spreadsheet) Anyone with a cap
One row per booking, with the counting rules built into the file.
Guest emergency information template Everyone
A fill-in sheet to print and leave in the property. Read its first page: it is not legally required, and we explain why we include it anyway.
House rules that are backed by law Everyone
What the Code of Conduct actually requires of guests, the four things it does NOT contain, and how to make your own rules enforceable.
What non-compliance costs Read once
Every penalty with its section, separating court maximums from on-the-spot fines, and which duties carry no fine at all.
Sources and verification Read if you want to check us
Every provision this pack relies on, with a link to the instrument. Generated from the other documents, so it cannot fall out of step with them.

Three things in here that most sources get wrong

A house does not need a fire extinguisher

The Fire Safety Standard puts the extinguisher and fire blanket in section 5, which governs apartments. Section 4, which governs houses, has no such clause. planning.nsw.gov.au's own summary states them as universal. We show both positions, the cost of the safe option, and what we would do. The pack ships two fire safety checklists so you read the one for your building class.

The emergency booklet is not required by law

The Department's factsheet and FAQ both say a host “must” provide an information booklet, printed inside a table headed as the fire safety standards. It is not in the Standard. We include the template anyway, and we tell you which it is.

The $2,200 registration fine is the smallest of three

Non-registration is not even an on-the-spot fine, so a council must prosecute. But the loss of exempt development status it causes IS — $1,500 for a house, $3,000 for an apartment, issuable by council officers and police, under a provision no host-facing guide mentions.

What it looks like

These are actual pages from the pack, not mock-ups.

The start-here page, listing the nine documents and who each is for — Start here

The class 1a fire safety checklist, showing a requirement with its clause citation and a watch-out note — Fire safety, class 1a

The night cap document, showing the five-question decision list — Night cap

Price

A$39 one payment, no subscription. No GST applies.

Updates are included for 12 months. That matters more here than it sounds: the NSW Fire Safety Standard is incorporated “as in force from time to time” and is not a legislative instrument, so the Department can change what you must do by replacing a PDF, with no amendment and no notice. We fingerprint that document, the Department's FAQ and the Code of Conduct every week, and reissue the pack when any of them moves.

Buy the NSW pack — A$39

Your card statement will read MARK JEANES, not Short Stay Rules. This site is run by Mark Jeanes as a sole trader, ABN 11 229 027 126. No GST is charged: we are under the registration threshold, so the price is the whole price. The pack is emailed to your payment address, usually within a few hours and always within one business day. If it has not arrived, email hello@shortstayrules.com and we will send it by hand.

What this is not

It is not legal advice. It is general information about published rules, with sources. We are not lawyers.
It does not make you compliant. It tells you what the rules say and where to check them. You remain responsible for your own property.
It does not account for your council's local environmental plan, your strata scheme's registered by-laws, or any development consent on your land.
Where the law is genuinely unclear, we say so rather than picking the answer that reads better. There are places in this pack where the honest answer is “this is unsettled, here is both readings”.

Refunds: see our refund policy. Australian Consumer Law guarantees apply and we do not try to exclude them.

The underlying rules stay free. Every jurisdiction page on this site is published under CC BY 4.0 and always will be. You are paying for the documents, the cross-referencing and the update loop, not for access to the law.