Australian short-stay regulation in numbers

How many Australian jurisdictions cap short-stay nights?

10 of the 31 jurisdictions we track put a number on short-stay nights. 7 of those are hard caps you can breach. 2 are approval thresholds, where exceeding the number means you need development approval rather than that you must stop. 1 is an exemption threshold, where staying under it avoids a planning trigger. The remaining 21 have no fixed cap and regulate by another lever entirely.

The tightest limit in the country is Byron Shire at 60 nights/yr for non-hosted properties.

Three different things appear in the Limit column and the difference decides whether you are breaking a rule or filling in a form. Every figure is recorded by hand from the cited source, never parsed out of a sentence. Full detail and sources: night caps compared.

How many require registration, and what does it cost?

18 of 31 jurisdictions require a host or property to register, hold a licence, or obtain an approval before letting short-stay. A further 6 have a registration obligation that falls on the platform or exists only for tax purposes, which is not the same thing and is counted separately. 7 have no registration or licensing scheme at all.

Of the 18, 8 are councils that inherit the requirement from their state rather than running a scheme of their own, and 2 reach only some premises (Douglas Shire Council (Port Douglas), Gold Coast (City of Gold Coast)). We publish that split because "18 jurisdictions require registration" and "18, of which 8 inherit it" are different claims, and only one of them is the whole truth.

Where a host or property must register

What registration costs

13 published fees across the jurisdictions that require registration. Amounts are quoted exactly as the official source states them — several are set annually rather than published as a fixed figure, and we do not convert those into a number we cannot source.

Which jurisdictions charge a short-stay levy, and at what rate?

5 jurisdictions have a short-stay levy in force, at 5% and 7.5%. 2 more have one proposed but not yet law. 14 records state positively that no levy applies.

The Tasmanian levy is not law. It is widely reported as commencing in 2027; the Parliament's own material says it commences "on a date to be proclaimed". That is the single most misreported fact in this table. Separately, 10 of our records do not address a levy either way. We count those as unrecorded rather than as "no levy", because we have not verified the absence — see what we do and do not claim.

How many changed their rules in the last 12 months?

27 material rule changes were recorded across 16 of the 31 jurisdictions in the 12 months to 2026-07-24. That is 51% of the jurisdictions we track changing something in a single year, which is the reason a database without dates on it is worse than no database.

A further 3 changes are already legislated but have not yet commenced, so they are deliberately excluded from the count above: Queensland (2027-01-01), Australian Capital Territory (2027-07-01), Canberra (2027-07-01).

Showing the 20 most recent. The full log, with RSS, is at what's changed.

Which are the tightest and loosest regimes in the country?

Byron Shire is the most heavily restricted jurisdiction we track, scoring 8 on a published rubric, and Snowy Monaro Regional Council (Jindabyne) is the least, at 1. The rubric is arithmetic, not opinion: points for regulatory status, for the tightness of any night cap, and one each for registration, planning approval, a levy and an enforceable code of conduct.

The rubric lives in generate.py and is printed on the comparison page, so anyone can recompute this from our own data.

How these numbers are made

Each figure is computed at build time from the same verified records the jurisdiction pages render from, so this page cannot disagree with them. Nothing here is a hand-typed total, and nothing is derived by reading prose — counts come from explicit structured fields, because the first version of our national cap table derived numbers from sentences and was wrong in five places.

What these numbers do not mean: coverage is deliberately incomplete, and a jurisdiction we do not list is not a jurisdiction with no rules. Where we have not verified something, we count it as unrecorded rather than as an absence. The methodology page sets out the limits in full, including what last verified does and does not mean.

Checking one of these on deadline? Email us and we will send the primary source behind any figure on this page.