Can a Florida City Ban Your Short Term Rental? State Law Decides

Most Florida cities cannot stop you from using your home as a short term rental. A few can, and they are allowed to because of one date written into state law in 2011.

This is the question owners ask us before every purchase, and the answers they find online are often wrong. Nearly every guide describes West Palm Beach as a six-month-minimum city; it has no minimum at all. The same guides call Delray Beach wide open, even though a home in Delray’s single-family zoning districts cannot legally turn over more than six times a year.

Here is the actual test, and how it plays out in three cities in the counties we serve.

Can a Florida city ban short term rentals?

Usually no. Florida Statute 509.032(7)(b) bars a local government from prohibiting vacation rentals or regulating how long or how often they rent. The one exception is an ordinance the city adopted on or before June 1, 2011. Those stay enforceable.

A city that already had rules on the books before that date keeps them. A city that did not cannot write them now.

The preemption covers three things a city might otherwise try: banning vacation rentals outright, setting a minimum stay, and capping how many times a year a home can turn over. If a city passed any of those after June 1, 2011, it is unenforceable, no matter what the code still says on the page.

What the statute does not touch

This is the part that gets owners in trouble, so it comes before the city list.

• Your HOA or condo association. State preemption limits governments. It does not reach private associations. A condo declaration requiring a 30-day, six-month, or one-year minimum stay is fully enforceable, and it is now the most common reason a Florida deal falls apart. Downtown condo and loft buildings carry these constantly. Read the recorded covenants, conditions, and restrictions before you buy, not after.
• Ordinary rental licensing. A city can require a rental certificate, a business tax receipt, a code inspection, and a local contact who can receive notices, as long as it asks the same of every rental property. Those rules are not aimed at vacation rentals, so the statute does not disturb them.
• Rules that apply to everyone. Noise ordinances, parking limits, trash schedules, and building occupancy caps all still apply.
• State and county obligations. You still need a Florida DBPR vacation rental license in the owner’s name, and you still owe the county tourist development tax, which Airbnb does not collect in Palm Beach, Martin, or St Lucie counties.

So “my city cannot restrict me” is not the same as “I can list.” It means the city is not the layer that will stop you. The association, the county tax registration, or the state license still can.

How the rule plays out in three cities

Delray Beach is the one most people get wrong. There is no vacation rental permit program, so guides conclude the city is unrestricted. It is not. Delray regulates through zoning, as a “Transient Residential Use” under Land Development Regulations 4.3.3(ZZZ). In Single Family, Rural Residential, and Planned Residential Development districts, turning a home over more than six times in a year is presumed transient use and prohibited. In Medium Density Residential, it is a permitted principal use. Before buying in Delray, confirm which district the parcel sits in, because neither the street address nor the state license settles it.

Sewall’s Point, in Martin County, is the case that nearly fooled us, and it earns its place here for that reason. The prohibition sits in Chapter 14, Article V of the town’s Code of Ordinances: Section 14-163 defines a short-term rental as any rental under an initial term of 180 days, and Section 14-165(e) flatly bars owners from entering one. When we first pulled the current code, every section of that article carried the history note “Ord. No. 369, adopted June 12, 2012.” A year past the cutoff. For a few hours we believed, and briefly published, that the town’s rule was preempted.

It is not, and the reason is a trap worth knowing. A code’s history notes cite the ordinance that enacted the current text of a section, not the ordinance that created the rule. The town’s code comparative table shows Ordinance No. 352, adopted September 22, 2009, added the entire rental article, and the archived code as of February 2011 contains the same 180-day prohibition word for word. Ord. 369 in 2012 was a reenactment, and under the Attorney General opinion discussed below, reenacted provisions keep their grandfathered status. So the 180-day minimum stands on 2009 footing, and Sewall’s Point is closed to short stays. If you take one method point from this article: a history note is not an adoption date. Trace the rule to the ordinance that first created it.

West Palm Beach is the opposite error. Nearly every guide claims a minimum of six months and one day in residential zones. We could not find that rule in any primary source, so we asked the City. On August 6, 2026, the Development Services Department answered in writing:

“Short term rentals are regulated by the State of Florida, not by municipalities.”

West Palm Beach has no grandfathered vacation rental ordinance, so it has no room to restrict. What it does require is a rental tax certificate for any rental property, short term or not, plus a zoning review, a code compliance inspection, and a local resident agent. That is ordinary landlord licensing, which is exactly why it survives preemption. On the city layer alone, West Palm Beach now asks less of an owner than Tequesta, Wellington, or North Palm Beach.

Which Florida cities are grandfathered?

There is no official statewide list, which is worth knowing before you trust one you find online. Miami Beach and Key West come up most often in statewide coverage, though we have not pulled their ordinances ourselves and would check the adoption dates before relying on either.

Three we have verified against the primary records: Delray Beach (Ord. 29-09, July 7, 2009), Sewall’s Point (Ord. 352, September 22, 2009), and, smallest of the three, the Town of Lake Park (Ord. 12-2009, September 16, 2009), whose cap of two turnovers a year in its main residential districts is the tightest we have found in Palm Beach County. All three are 2009 ordinances, which is not a coincidence: cities that saw the vacation rental wave coming regulated before the state closed the door. Any Florida city can be on this list, including small ones nobody writes about, and tracing the specific ordinance to its adoption date is the only reliable way to find out. As the Sewall’s Point case above shows, the tracing has to reach the ordinance that created the rule, not just the most recent one to touch it.

Amending an old ordinance does not reset the clock

Cities do amend their pre-2011 rules, which raises an obvious question: does touching the ordinance forfeit the protection?

The Florida Attorney General addressed this in an opinion issued August 16, 2019, at the request of the City of Crystal River. Amending a pre-2011 ordinance does not invalidate the grandfathering for the provisions that are reenacted. New provisions that regulate duration or frequency are still preempted.

Delray Beach is a clean illustration. The city tightened its 2009 six-turnover threshold down to three in 2012, through Ordinances 03-12 and 40-12. Both postdate the cutoff, so both regulated frequency without protection. In 2026, Ordinance 21-26 repealed the 2012 provisions as preempted and reverted to the 2009 rule. The city gave up ground it never legally held.

Sewall’s Point runs the same mechanism in the other direction. Its 2012 reenactment (Ord. 369) carried forward the 2009 prohibition (Ord. 352) without adding new duration limits, so the protection carried forward with it. The reenactment is also why the current code’s history notes show 2012, which is what nearly misled us.

The practical reading: an old ordinance’s original terms survive amendment, but anything a city bolts on afterward to further limit duration or frequency does not.

Why so many guides get this wrong

The West Palm Beach error has a mundane cause worth understanding, because it repeats elsewhere.

The city publishes its code in two places. The general Code of Ordinances on Municode explicitly excludes Chapter 94, which is the zoning code, and that chapter lives on a different platform entirely. Anyone who downloads “the West Palm Beach code,” searches it for vacation rental rules, and finds nothing then repeats whatever they read on another blog. The six-month figure has circulated for years without a code section attached to it.

Delray is the same failure pointed the other way. Because the city runs no permit program, and because it eliminated its landlord permits in 2023 under separate state legislation, third-party sources report “no requirements” and stop. They never reach the zoning definition that does the actual work.

Both errors share a root: citing a city while quoting nothing. When a source tells you a Florida city bans or allows nightly rental, look for the ordinance number and the adoption date. If neither appears, treat the claim as unverified and go to the code yourself.

One more source of stale guidance: articles written during the 2024 session, when Senate Bill 280 looked set to rewrite these rules. It passed the legislature and Governor DeSantis vetoed it in June 2024, so the June 1, 2011 line still governs. Anything that assumes SB 280 became law is describing rules that never took effect.

How to check any Florida city yourself

Five steps, in order:

1. Find the ordinance. Search the city’s municipal code for “vacation rental” and “transient.” Check whether the zoning code is published separately from the general code, since that is where the West Palm Beach confusion starts. If the property sits in an unincorporated area, run the same search on the county code, because counties can hold grandfathered ordinances too.
2. Check the adoption date, and trace it to the ordinance that created the rule. Anything adopted after June 1, 2011 that limits duration or frequency is preempted. Anything on or before it is enforceable. Do not stop at the history note under the code section: it cites the most recent reenactment, which can be years later than the original adoption. The code comparative table, published with most municipal codes, maps each section to the ordinance that first added it. Also keep in mind that preempted is a legal status, not a practical one: a town can keep enforcing a post-cutoff rule until someone challenges it, as Delray did for 14 years.
3. Check what the ordinance actually regulates. Registration, inspection, and licensing survive regardless of date. Only bans, minimum stays, and turnover caps are preempted.
4. Get the city’s answer in writing. Email planning or code compliance and keep the reply. We did this with West Palm Beach, and the written answer settled a question years of blog posts had not.
5. Read the HOA or condo declaration. No statute protects you here, and this is the layer most likely to end the deal.

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