Research study
Can you short-term rent an ADU? The rule stopped being optional
The permission a city used to have is now an obligation it carries. Most published guidance on this question is describing the law as it stood before 1 January 2026.
Written by HyreADU Research Desk Primary-source research and data analysis
Audited by HyreADU Research Desk Statutory citation and retrieval-date audit
The finding
Generally no — and the reason changed on 1 January 2026. For most of the modern ADU era the position was permissive: Government Code section 66315 preserves a local agency’s power to “require that the property may be used for rentals of terms 30 days or longer”, and a city that did not exercise that power left the door open.
Section 66323(e) now removes the choice. For the accessory dwelling units a local agency must ministerially approve under section 66323, the section provides that “A local agency shall require that a rental of the accessory dwelling unit … be for a term longer than 30 days.” Shall, not may.
That language is in the section as amended by SB 543 (Stats. 2025, Ch. 520, § 6), effective 1 January 2026.
Junior ADUs went the same way on the same day. AB 1154 (Carrillo, Stats. 2025, Ch. 507) requires a JADU ordinance to “[r]equire that a rental of a junior accessory dwelling unit be for a term longer than 30 days.” Before 2026 there was no statutory minimum term for a JADU at all.
Note the wording gap, because it is not cosmetic. Section 66315 preserves “terms 30 days or longer”. Sections 66323(e) and 66333(g) require “a term longer than 30 days.” A thirty-day letting satisfies the first and fails the second.
The local layer can be stricter still, and in Oakland it is structural. Oakland has no separate short-term rental use category: a stay under 30 consecutive days is “Transient Habitation”, a different land use that is not permitted in most residential zones, with a 14 per cent transient occupancy tax under municipal code chapter 4.24 on top.
What we could not do is publish a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction table. Codified municipal text was not retrievable on this date, and we will not present aggregator summaries as ordinances. Not legal advice.
Read this first
- Nothing here is legal advice, and the local ordinance is what decides it
This page sets out state statutory text as retrieved on 5 September 2026 and what we could verify about one city.
Whether you may let a particular unit for a particular period turns on your jurisdiction’s ordinance, your zoning district, any recorded covenant, your CC&Rs and your insurance — none of which a webpage can see.
Short-term letting in breach of a local ordinance carries penalties that are usually per-night and can be substantial.
- We could not retrieve codified municipal text for any city
library.municode.com returned HTTP 403 to every automated request, mirrors timed out, and Oakland’s Planning Code PDF exceeded the fetch size limit. City .gov pages were reachable; the codes behind them were not. No verbatim municipal code sentence appears on this page. Where we describe Oakland’s treatment we say what corroborated it and how strongly.
- The contract for this page asked for a jurisdiction table. We are not shipping one
The page contract anticipated recording the minimum-term provision and the separate short-term rental ordinance for each jurisdiction in the tracker.
With municode blocked and web search unavailable for this retrieval, the only way to produce that table would have been to copy numbers out of commercial ADU-marketing sites. A table of unverified ordinance terms on a question with per-night penalties attached is worse than no table.
We have published the state rule, which is verified in full, and named the gap.
- A “30-day minimum” is not one rule, and the difference is a day
Three separate provisions use two different formulations. Section 66315 preserves a local power over “rentals of terms 30 days or longer”. Sections 66323(e) and 66333(g) require a term “longer than 30 days”. A one-day gap sounds pedantic until a lease is drafted to exactly thirty days on the strength of the wrong sentence.
Why the answer people find online is usually out of date
The short-term rental question is the first one asked by anyone approaching an ADU as an investment, because the nightly-rate arithmetic looks so much better than the monthly-rent arithmetic.
It is also the question where published guidance has aged worst, and for a specific reason: for six years the honest answer was "it depends on your city", and that answer was correct.
It stopped being correct on 1 January 2026. Two bills chaptered on the same day in October 2025 converted the local option into a state obligation — SB 543 for accessory dwelling units and AB 1154 for junior accessory dwelling units. Anything written before that, however carefully, describes a permissive regime that no longer exists.
HyreADU analysis: the shift is worth noticing for what it says about legislative intent.
The whole architecture of state ADU law is preemptive in the permissive direction — cities are stopped from imposing parking, owner-occupancy and size minimums.
The minimum rental term is one of the very few places the state pushes in the restrictive direction, and it has now pushed twice.
That is a legislature protecting the housing rationale for the entire ADU program: a unit built under a ministerial approval designed to add housing supply is not to become a hotel room.
The three provisions, and how they differ
All three are live at once and they do not say the same thing. Quoted as retrieved on 2026-09-05.
| Provision | Applies to | Obligation | Operative text as retrieved | Currency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gov. Code § 66315 | Any ADU on a lot with a proposed or existing single-family dwelling. | Permissive. The city may. | After barring additional standards including an owner-occupant requirement: “except that a local agency may require that the property may be used for rentals of terms 30 days or longer.” This is the one thing § 66315 expressly preserves to the city. | Added by Stats. 2024, Ch. 7, § 20 (SB 477). Number unchanged by SB 543. |
| Gov. Code § 66323(e) | The ADU categories a local agency must ministerially approve under § 66323 — the 800 square foot detached unit, the ADU-plus-JADU combination, and the multifamily conversions. | Mandatory. The city shall. | “A local agency shall require that a rental of the accessory dwelling unit … be for a term longer than 30 days.” | Amended by Stats. 2025, Ch. 520, § 6 (SB 543). Effective 1 January 2026. |
| Gov. Code § 66333(g) | Junior accessory dwelling units, through the required contents of a local JADU ordinance. | Mandatory. The ordinance must contain it. | A JADU ordinance must “[r]equire that a rental of a junior accessory dwelling unit be for a term longer than 30 days.” | Added by AB 1154 (Carrillo), Stats. 2025, Ch. 507. Effective 1 January 2026. There was no statutory minimum term for a JADU before this. |
The California minimum rental term provisions for accessory dwelling units, as they stand after the two bills chaptered on 10 October 2025 took effect. Source: California Government Code, retrieved from leginfo.legislature.ca.gov on 2026-09-05.
HyreADU analysis, offered as analysis and not as legal conclusion: §§ 66315 and 66323(e) are not in conflict — one preserves a general power and the other imposes a specific duty for the ministerial categories.
But they use different thresholds, and a city that wrote its ordinance to the § 66315 formulation before 2026 has an ordinance that permits a thirty-day letting where § 66323(e) requires thirty-one.
Whether that gap matters on any given lot is a question for a lawyer, and we do not answer it.
How the rule hardened
Six years of "it depends on your city", ended by two bills signed on the same day.
-
1 January 2020
The 2019 package takes effect, and leaves the term to the cityAB 68, AB 881 and SB 13 rebuilt state ADU law and preserved a local power to require rentals of 30 days or longer. The power was optional, so the answer to "can I Airbnb my ADU" genuinely varied by jurisdiction, and did.
-
25 March 2024
SB 477 recodifies, and the preserved power lands in § 66315SB 477 (Stats. 2024, Ch. 7) repealed the 65852 series and created Chapter 13. The permissive minimum-term clause becomes the exception at the end of § 66315. Substance unchanged; the citation everyone had been using stops working.
-
10 October 2025
AB 1154 and SB 543 are chaptered on the same dayFour ADU bills were signed together: AB 462 (Ch. 491), AB 1154 (Ch. 507), SB 9 (Arreguín, Ch. 510) and SB 543 (Ch. 520). Two of them touch this page. AB 1154 adds the JADU minimum term; SB 543 amends § 66323, in which subdivision (e) carries the mandatory ADU minimum term.
-
1 January 2026
“May” becomes “shall”Both take effect. A local agency is now required to impose a minimum rental term longer than 30 days on the ADU categories it must ministerially approve, and a JADU ordinance is required to contain the same term.
The short-term rental question stops being a local-option question and becomes a state-law question with a local overlay.
-
5 September 2026
Most published guidance has not caught upEight months after the change. HyreADU analysis: the pattern is the same one we documented on owner-occupancy — a rule changes, the section number moves at the same time, and secondary commentary keeps repeating a correct-when-written answer under a citation that no longer resolves.
Oakland: the strictest structure we could verify
Worth setting out because it shows how a city can be far more restrictive than the state minimum without ever writing an ADU-specific short-term rental rule. Everything here is flagged for confidence.
Under 30 days is a different land use, not a regulated version of the same one
Oakland has no distinct short-term rental use category. A stay of under 30 consecutive days falls into “Transient Habitation”, which is a separate use classification under the Planning Code — and Transient Habitation is not a permitted use in most residential and commercial zones.
In the zones where it is contemplated, it requires a major conditional use permit.
Why this is stricter than a cap: a city that regulates short-term rentals with a license and a night cap is saying the use is lawful and limited. A city that classifies it as a different use is saying it is the wrong activity for the zone. There is no permit count to argue about.
The 30-day line also appears in the secondary unit section
Oakland Planning Code section 17.103.080 governs “One-Family Dwelling with Secondary Unit Residential Facilities”.
This is our best-corroborated Oakland finding — three independent results agreed that section 17.103.080(A)(2) carries a 30-day minimum rental term, and one described it as: secondary units “cannot be rented for periods of less than 30 consecutive days, according to their Planning Code Section 17.103.080.”
Confidence, stated honestly: we did not retrieve a literal sentence of that section. Municode returned 403 on every attempt and the Planning Code PDF exceeded our fetch size limit. Three sources agreeing on a section number and a threshold is good corroboration and is not the code.
And a transient occupancy tax on top
Oakland Municipal Code chapter 4.24 imposes a transient occupancy tax at 14 per cent on stays of 30 days or fewer. We did not fetch chapter 4.24 — it is on the same platform that returned 403 throughout — so treat the rate as unverified.
The structural point survives the uncertainty about the rate: the tax exists precisely because a stay of 30 days or fewer is a transient occupancy, which is the same line the use classification draws. The city’s tax code and its planning code agree with each other and with § 66323(e) about where the boundary sits.
What we could not check
Oakland’s own short-term rental regulations page failed to load — the certificate had expired at the time of retrieval. So the city’s current published position on short-term rentals generally, as distinct from ADUs, is not something we can report.
HyreADU recommendation: in Oakland, the question to ask the planning department is not “can I short-term rent my ADU” but “what use classification applies to a stay of under 30 days at this address, and in this zone”.
That is the question the code actually answers, and it is answered by zone rather than by unit.
The words that decide the answer
- “Terms 30 days or longer” (§ 66315)
- The permissive formulation. Preserves a local power to require lettings of at least thirty days. A letting of exactly thirty days complies. This is the wording most existing California ADU ordinances were written to, because it is the wording that has been in the statute since 2020.
- “A term longer than 30 days” (§§ 66323(e), 66333(g))
- The mandatory formulation, operative from 1 January 2026. Requires the city to impose it, and a letting of exactly thirty days does not satisfy it. One day of difference, two different obligations, and two different actors — the first constrains the tenant’s term, the second constrains the city’s ordinance.
- Transient occupancy
- A tax and land-use concept rather than an ADU concept. A stay short enough to be treated as lodging rather than tenancy, with the boundary commonly drawn at 30 days. It is the reason the 30-day line recurs across statutes that have nothing to do with each other: it is where hotel-like use is deemed to begin.
- Ministerial approval categories (§ 66323)
- The set of ADUs a local agency must approve without discretionary review whatever its own ordinance says — including one detached new-construction ADU with four-foot side and rear setbacks and an optional 800 square foot floor area limit, an ADU-plus-JADU combination, and conversions within existing multifamily structures. Subdivision (e) attaches the mandatory minimum rental term to this set.
How to establish the answer for your own unit
Four steps, in this order. Step two is the one that catches people, because the ordinance may be written to the pre-2026 formulation.
- 1 Establish which state provision your approval sits under
If the unit was or will be approved under one of the § 66323 ministerial categories, § 66323(e) applies and the minimum term is mandatory rather than optional.
If it is a junior ADU, § 66333(g) applies through your city’s JADU ordinance. This is a factual question about your approval pathway and the planning counter can answer it.
- 2 Read your city’s ADU ordinance for the minimum-term sentence, and check which formulation it uses
An ordinance adopted before 2026 will most likely track the § 66315 wording — “30 days or longer” — because that is what state law said when it was written.
Copy the sentence verbatim and note the ordinance’s adoption date. The gap between that wording and § 66323(e) is exactly the sort of thing that gets resolved at your expense rather than in advance.
- 3 Ask the separate short-term rental question, in land-use terms
Many California cities regulate short-term rentals in a chapter that has nothing to do with ADUs — registration, night caps, primary-residence requirements, transient occupancy tax. Some, like Oakland, do not have a short-term rental category at all and instead treat a short stay as a different use.
Ask which use classification applies to a stay under 30 days in your zoning district; that question has an answer where "can I Airbnb it" often does not.
- 4 Check the private restrictions, which state preemption does not touch
CC&Rs, a homeowners association, a lender’s occupancy covenant and your insurer all have views on short-term letting, and none of them is displaced by state ADU law.
Civil Code sections 714.3 and 4751 protect the construction and use of an ADU against unreasonable CC&R restriction; they are not a license to run a short-term rental business in breach of a covenant. Read the documents.
Where we stop
We will not tell you that short-term letting is lawful or unlawful at a particular address.
That conclusion needs the ordinance, the zone, the approval pathway, the recorded documents and the covenants, and it carries per-night penalties if it is wrong.
What we can tell you with confidence is what the state statutes say and when they started saying it, because we retrieved them and dated them.
HyreADU recommendation: if a short-term rental income assumption is load-bearing in your project model, resolve it in writing with the planning department before you commit capital, not after.
The state floor moved on 1 January 2026 in the restrictive direction, and a pro forma built on nightly rates now needs the city to be more permissive than the state — which is the opposite of the assumption most ADU financial models are built on.
Not investment advice. Our ROI calculator declines to output a single number on purpose, and it does not model short-term rental income at all.
What we could not verify
The per-jurisdiction table the contract asked for. Named as the largest gap on this page. Producing it requires codified municipal text, and library.municode.com returned HTTP 403 to every automated request across both cities we attempted.
Web search was unavailable for this retrieval, so we could not find alternative hosts. We publish the state rule, which we verified in full, rather than an unverified table on a question that carries per-night penalties.
Any literal sentence of Oakland Planning Code § 17.103.080. Three independent sources agree on the section number and the 30-day threshold, which is good corroboration. It is not the code, and we do not present it as the code.
The 14 per cent Oakland transient occupancy tax rate. Attributed to Oakland Municipal Code chapter 4.24, not fetched, on the same 403 pattern. The existence of a transient occupancy tax at the 30-day boundary is well established structurally; the specific rate is unverified here.
Oakland’s own short-term rental regulations page. Failed to load on retrieval with an expired certificate. We therefore cannot report the city’s current published position on short-term rentals generally.
Whether any city has amended its ordinance to the § 66323(e) formulation. This is the most useful thing to check in the next edition, and it is a question about ordinance adoption dates after 1 January 2026. We could not survey it here.
HCD’s current view. hcd.ca.gov returned HTTP 403 and a scheduled-maintenance notice throughout this retrieval, so we could not consult the current ADU Handbook edition. The January 2025 edition, which we do hold, predates both SB 543 and AB 1154 and therefore predates everything this page is about.
Questions
Can I put my ADU on Airbnb in California?
Is it a 30-day minimum or a 31-day minimum?
When did the rule change?
Was there a minimum rental term for junior ADUs before 2026?
Can I short-term rent an ADU in Oakland?
Does the minimum-term rule apply to an ADU I already built?
Can a city ban short-term rental of an ADU entirely?
What about a mid-term or corporate letting of two or three months?
Written and audited by
HyreADU Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a builder. We read the permit extract, the statute, the HCD return or the fee schedule ourselves, and publish each figure with its source and retrieval date.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we leave it out and say what we could not verify. Our store-based claims cover California only.
- CA
- the only state this desk will make store-based claims about
- 5
- jurisdictions with extracted ADU permit evidence
- 735
- CSLB-verified companies in the California store
- 0
- national claims from a one-state store
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Permit counts come from the city or county that issued the permit. Production counts come from HCD’s Annual Progress Report. Rents come from HUD or the Census. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we download the source and compute the figure ourselves.
- This is a California site. The company store is 734 California firms and one New Mexico firm. Permit evidence exists for five named jurisdictions: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San José and unincorporated Marin. A number from that store is titled to those places, never to the United States.
- A permit is not a completion, and a license is not an ADU grade. California licenses no ADU classification. Being named on an ADU permit is evidence of engagement in that jurisdiction, not of quality, completion, or work anywhere else. Owner-builder permits are excluded from contractor counts.
- Calculation is labeled as calculation. Figures we derive are never presented as something HCD, HUD, the Census or a city published. Terner Center research is cited as Terner’s, never restated as ours.
- We do not design, permit or build ADUs, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention. Pages that look like rankings are not: they publish public-record counts and let the reader decide.
- Nothing here is legal, tax or financial advice. Zoning, underwriting and appraisal practice vary by jurisdiction, lender and appraiser. The useful next step on a specific lot is the planning counter and a licensed professional.
Data as of Government Code §§ 66315, 66323 and 66333 retrieved from leginfo.legislature.ca.gov 2026-09-05; Oakland treatment from secondary sources and the city’s own pages, with codified text unretrievable. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.
Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
- California Government Code § 66323 — ministerially approved ADU categories, and the mandatory minimum rental term , Retrieved 2026-09-05. Subdivision (e) as retrieved: “A local agency shall require that a rental of the accessory dwelling unit … be for a term longer than 30 days.” Subdivision (a) sets out the categories: one ADU and one JADU per lot with expansion “of not more than 150 square feet”; one detached new-construction ADU with “four-foot side and rear yard setbacks” and an optional “total floor area limitation of not more than 800 square feet”; conversions within existing multifamily structures, at least one and “up to 25 percent of the existing multifamily dwelling units”; and detached units on multifamily lots. Enactment line: “Amended by Stats. 2025, Ch. 520, Sec. 6. (SB 543) Effective January 1, 2026.” Retrieved 2026-09-05.
- California Government Code § 66315 — the permissive minimum-term power , Retrieved language: no standards beyond § 66314 “shall be used or imposed, including an owner-occupant requirement, except that a local agency may require that the property may be used for rentals of terms 30 days or longer.” Added by Stats. 2024, Ch. 7, § 20 (SB 477), effective 25 March 2024. The formulation most pre-2026 municipal ordinances were written to. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
- AB 1154 (Carrillo, 2025) — Junior accessory dwelling units. Stats. 2025, Ch. 507 , Chaptered 10 October 2025, operative 1 January 2026. Amends Gov. Code § 66333 to require that a JADU ordinance “[r]equire that a rental of a junior accessory dwelling unit be for a term longer than 30 days”, and narrows the JADU owner-occupancy requirement to cases where the JADU shares sanitation facilities with the existing structure. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
- SB 543 (McNerney, 2025) — Accessory dwelling units. Stats. 2025, Ch. 520 , Chaptered 10 October 2025, operative 1 January 2026. Section 6 amends § 66323. The bill also renumbered § 66324 to § 66311.5 and § 66332 to § 66311.7, which is why citations in this area published before 2026 frequently no longer resolve. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
- California Government Code § 66313 — definitions , Retrieved for the definitions this page relies on, including junior accessory dwelling unit at subdivision (d): “a unit that is no more than 500 square feet of interior livable space in size and contained entirely within a single-family residence.” Amended by Stats. 2025, Ch. 520, Sec. 2 (SB 543), effective 1 January 2026. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
- Steadily — Oakland secondary unit minimum rental term (secondary source, corroboration only) , One of three independent results attributing a 30-day minimum rental term for secondary units to Oakland Planning Code § 17.103.080(A)(2). As retrieved: secondary units “cannot be rented for periods of less than 30 consecutive days, according to their Planning Code Section 17.103.080.” Cited as corroboration of a section number and threshold, not as a source of statutory language. No literal sentence of the Oakland Planning Code was retrievable: library.municode.com returned HTTP 403 on every attempt and the Planning Code PDF exceeded the fetch size limit. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
If nightly income is load-bearing in your model, resolve it first
The state floor moved in the restrictive direction on 1 January 2026, which means a short-term rental pro forma now needs your city to be more permissive than the state. Get the answer from the planning department in writing before you commit capital — and run the conventional-letting numbers alongside it.
HyreADU does not design, permit or build accessory dwelling units and does not practice law. This page is informational and is not legal advice, tax advice or investment advice.
It describes California statutory text as retrieved on 5 September 2026 and does not tell you whether short-term letting is lawful at any particular address — that depends on your city’s ordinance, your zoning district, your conditions of approval, recorded covenants, CC&Rs and your insurance, and breach commonly carries per-night penalties.
No codified municipal text could be retrieved for this edition; where a local rule is described, its confidence level is stated on the page. Statutes change: the two that govern this question changed on 1 January 2026.
The useful next step is the planning department, in writing, and — where capital is at stake — a licensed land-use attorney.