Short-Term Rental Rules in the Hudson Valley (2026)
A while back someone showed me the numbers on a cabin they were about to buy up in the Catskills. The land penciled, the build penciled, and the whole thing worked because of one line at the bottom of the spreadsheet: nightly rental income. They were going to Airbnb it when they weren't using it, and that number was carrying the deal. The one thing they hadn't checked was whether the town would actually let them.
That's the trap with short-term rental income in the Hudson Valley. It's the assumption people build the entire deal around, and it's the one governed by rules that change every time you cross a town line. So before you underwrite a parcel on nightly income, here's what short-term rental rules actually look like across the region, and what to confirm before you close.
The rules change at the town line, sometimes drastically
There's no single Hudson Valley short-term rental law. Every town writes its own, and the spread is wider than most people expect. Pulling from the town-by-town zoning and STR data we keep in Aldo, here's what that range looks like just inside Ulster County.
In the Town of Woodstock, short-term rentals are allowed with an annual registration - about $150 a year under Local Law No. 2 of 2022 - but you're capped at 120 rented nights per calendar year, and there's no owner-occupancy requirement. The City of Kingston runs a similar 120-night cap with a registration permit. Saugerties wants an operating permit with a $250 initial application fee, plus you register with Ulster County for occupancy tax.
Then it tightens. The Town of Hurley bans non-owner-occupied short-term rentals outright - if you don't live there, you can't rent it short-term, full stop. Owner-occupied ones may be allowed, but that's a different business than a pure rental cabin. The Town of Olive caps rentals at 180 nights and has permit caps in effect, meaning new applications may not even be accepted right now. Shandaken caps non-owner-occupied permits at 150 total across the whole town, so new investors can land on a waitlist, while owner-occupied permits have no cap. Rochester also caps new non-owner-occupied permits and requires a local host within 30 minutes of the property.
A few towns make you go ask permission every time. In the Town of Lloyd, a short-term rental needs a Special Use Permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals - a discretionary approval, which means it's a decision, not a checkbox, and it can go either way. Shawangunk requires a Safety and Inspection License under a 2025 local law, with a safety inspection and fines up to $5,000 for running one without it.
And then some towns barely regulate it at all. Plattekill has no local short-term rental law on the books as of early 2026 - you just register for the county occupancy tax and go. Same story in a couple of the Dutchess County towns across the river.
Ten towns, and you've got everything from "register and you're fine" to "it's banned" to "you're on a waitlist" to "the zoning board decides." That's the whole point. The rules aren't regional. They're hyper-local.
Owner-occupied versus not is usually the real question
If you read back through that list, one distinction keeps doing the heavy lifting: whether you live in the place. Hurley bans the non-owner-occupied version. Shandaken caps it. Rochester caps it and wants a nearby host. Over and over, the strict rule falls on the investor buying a cabin purely to rent, and the softer rule falls on the owner who lives there and rents a room or the whole place while they're away.
That matters for how you think about a parcel. A cabin you'll use yourself and rent on the side is a very different regulatory animal than a pure income property, and a lot of towns have written their laws specifically to tell those two apart. If your plan is the pure-rental version, that's exactly the plan the strictest towns are aiming at.
What to actually check before you close
Here's the honest version of the advice: don't put a nightly rental number in your spreadsheet until you've confirmed the town allows the thing you're picturing. A few minutes up front beats finding out after you own the land.
Before you make an offer, get clear on four things for that specific town. First, is any short-term rental use even permitted, or is the non-owner-occupied version restricted or banned? Second, is there a night cap - 120, 180, something else - because that quietly sets a ceiling on your annual income no matter how good the location is. Third, is there a permit cap or waitlist, which can mean the answer is "not right now" even where it's technically legal. And fourth, what does registration actually cost and require - a fee, a safety inspection, a local host, county occupancy tax.
You can pull the current short-term rental status, along with the zoning and setback rules that decide what you can build in the first place, on our Ulster County zoning pages, town by town. When you're weighing a specific parcel, you can run a free zoning read on it through Aldo, which pulls the town's short-term rental posture into the same report as the buildability picture - so the income assumption and the build assumption sit on one page instead of two guesses.
None of this is a reason to write off short-term rental income. Plenty of Hudson Valley towns still welcome it, and a cabin that pencils on your own use with rental as upside is a much sturdier deal than one that only works if every night books. It's just a reason to confirm the rule before you commit the capital, so the number at the bottom of your spreadsheet is real.
One caveat, and we mean it: everything here is decision-support, not legal advice, and short-term rental laws in the Hudson Valley are changing fast - several of these towns revised their rules in the last two years. Verify the current law with the town building department and, where money's on the line, a local attorney before you rely on any of it.