Press and media

Checking an Australian short-stay rule on deadline? Email hello@shortstayrules.com and we will send you the legislation, council page or regulator notice the figure comes from. No registration, no paywall, no conditions.

That offer is the point of this page. Compliance reporting goes wrong because the person writing it cannot get to the primary source in the time they have. We keep the sources, so ask us for them.

Who is behind this

Mark Jeanes

Editor, Short Stay Rules

Short Stay Rules is an independent Australian publication. Mark Jeanes is responsible for what appears on it, including the errors. Every rule is read from the primary instrument or the responsible authority's own page, recorded with the date it was checked, and re-checked on a fortnightly schedule.

Happy to be quoted, on the record, by name. Also happy to be told we have something wrong, which is a faster route to a correction than most.

hello@shortstayrules.com

Description you can paste

Use this verbatim if it is useful:

Short Stay Rules is an independent Australian database of short-term rental regulation, covering 31 state, territory and council jurisdictions. Every rule cites the legislation, government or council page it came from and carries the date it was last re-verified against that source.

What the dataset covers

31 jurisdictions: 8 state and territory frameworks, plus 23 councils and cities that set rules of their own.
217 individual rules, each with its own source link, effective date and confidence rating.
115 distinct primary sources: legislation, state government pages, council pages and regulators. No blogs, no news articles, no other databases.
A dated rule-change log with an RSS feed, so you can watch the law move rather than asking us.
Free to republish under CC BY 4.0. See the data licence.

How we verify, in one paragraph

A fact is published only when it can be anchored to legislation, a state government page, a council page or a regulator. Every source URL is re-fetched on a fortnightly schedule and compared against what we hold. The "last verified" date on a page moves only when the sources behind it were actually re-read that day, never in bulk, and a page ships only with at least four jurisdiction-specific rules drawn from at least two primary sources. The full method, and its limits, are on the methodology page.

What we can help with

The primary source behind any figure on the site, usually the same day.
Whether a rule you have been given is current, and what it actually says.
National context for a local story: how many Australian councils cap nights, where a given council sits against the rest, which jurisdictions charge a levy.
Reading an instrument. Several of these rules are widely reported wrongly because almost nobody opens the regulation, and the commencement clause is where the story usually is.

What we will not do

Give legal advice, or comment on whether a specific property is compliant.
Assert a fact we cannot link to a primary source, including off the record.
Provide a figure for another database's coverage or page count. Their published numbers and our own counts disagree, so we will not quote either.
Speculate about pending legislation beyond what the parliamentary record says.

Corrections

If we are wrong, tell us. Corrections are re-verified against the official source, fixed here, and recorded in the public rule-change log with the date. We would rather be corrected than confidently wrong.

Independence and how this is funded

Some pages carry clearly marked referral links to property-management software relevant to compliance. Referral partners do not see, influence or pay for the rules we report, and no rule content has ever been altered for a commercial reason. We are telling you this here rather than letting you find it on the way to a story.