The Airbnb Ban Is Not in the Code

If you want to know whether you can rent a house out by the night in a given New York town, the obvious move is to go find the town's short-term rental law, and the obvious move fails about half the time, because there isn't one. You can read the whole zoning code, search it for "short-term," "transient," "vacation rental," "Airbnb," and come up with nothing at all, which feels like a green light and is one of the more expensive assumptions a buyer can make up here.

The Town of Greenburgh, in Westchester, is the version of this that stopped me. Ninety thousand people, no short-term rental chapter anywhere in the code, nothing to find if you go looking - and the Town's own position is that a short-term rental is not a permitted use in any residential zoning district. Both things are true at once. There is no local law, and the answer is still no.

So we counted

There is a great deal written about the crackdown and not much that adds it up, so here is the count, as of 30 September 2026, across 367 municipalities in 15 New York counties - towns, cities and villages, each one its own jurisdiction with its own answer, which is why the number runs so far ahead of what fifteen counties sounds like.

What the code says	Municipalities	Share
Allowed	10	2.7%
Allowed with conditions	137	37.3%
Prohibited	14	3.8%
No local law found	187	51.0%
Nobody has read it	19	5.2%
Total	367	100%

The headline is the fourth row. Slightly more than half of these municipalities - 187 of 367 - have no short-term rental ordinance on the books at all, which is not what you would guess from the coverage, and the number that ban the use outright is 14, which is fewer than the number of towns in Orange County alone that allow it with a condition attached. The crackdown is real, it is just much narrower and much more local than the volume of writing about it suggests.

The other thing worth sitting with is the second row. Of the 147 municipalities that permit a short-term rental in some form, 137 of them attach something to it, and only 10 allow the use with nothing narrowing it - no ceiling on nights, no requirement that you live in the house, no board that can turn the permit down. Six of those ten are in Ulster County, which is also the county that has written the most rules, and that is not the contradiction it looks like.

No local law is not permission

Which brings up the thing that makes the count worth having rather than just interesting, and it is the one line in here to take away if you take away nothing else: the absence of a short-term rental ordinance is not permission to run a short-term rental.

A town does not need to write an STR chapter to stop you. Most zoning codes work off a list of uses each district allows, and in a closed list, a use that is not named is not permitted, which means a town can bar renting by the night without ever using the words, simply by never adding them. The Town of Sidney, in Delaware County, is the mechanism stated out loud: a short-term rental is not listed as a use in any of its five base districts, and under § 503 no building permit may issue for an unlisted use until the Town Board amends the zoning law. There is no permit route to it, and there is also no ordinance banning it. The Village of Scottsville, in Monroe County, is the same shape - no local law, and a use table that is a closed list with no short-term rental use in it.

Eight of the 187 show it in the code itself, and thirteen more reach short stays through a rental-registration or rental-permit chapter that never says "short-term rental" anywhere in it, which is its own trap if you searched for the phrase and stopped there. For the remaining towns there is no evidence either way, and that is the honest position rather than a hedge: the code carried no short-term rental ordinance on the date it was read, which is a real, dated, re-checkable finding, and is not a yes.

That is why "No local law found" is its own row above rather than being folded in with the towns that allow it. Counting it as permission would have been the smaller change and it would have put a green light on 187 municipalities we never verified, in the one field where a wrong green light costs somebody the deal.

Where the rules actually are

Broken out by county, the pattern is less about region than about pressure. Ulster, which contains Woodstock and most of the Catskills tourist economy, has written rules almost everywhere - 3 of its 20 municipalities have no local law, or 15%. Saratoga is at 25 of 28, which is 89%, and Rensselaer is at 15 of 17. Regulation tracks where the rentals went, which is not a surprising finding so much as a useful one, because it means the towns most likely to write a new law in the next two years are the ones where bookings are climbing and the code is still silent.

The 14 prohibitions are worth naming, partly because there are few enough to name and partly because they are not where you would look for them. Six of the 14 are in Rockland County - the Town of Clarkstown, the Town of Haverstraw, the Town of Stony Point, and the Villages of Grand View-on-Hudson, Montebello and Pomona - with the rest spread across Delaware (Sidney), Erie (the City of Lackawanna and the Town of Grand Island), Monroe (the Town and Village of Webster), Orange (the Villages of South Blooming Grove and Tuxedo Park) and Westchester (the Town of Mount Pleasant). None of them are in the Catskills. The places that get written about as the front line of the short-term rental fight, Woodstock and Hudson and Kingston, have all chosen to regulate the use rather than to end it, and the outright bans cluster in commuter suburbs where the rental economy was never the point.

Montebello is the cleanest example of a real ban, for anyone who wants one: offering any dwelling unit for compensation for 29 consecutive nights or less is unlawful under § 195-11M, village-wide, with no permit path. That is what prohibited means in this dataset, and it is a much smaller category than the conversation implies.

What we have not read

A census that hides its holes is not much use to anyone checking it, so here are ours.

Nineteen municipalities are in the "Nobody has read it" band. Nothing is established there either way, and they are not spread evenly: seven of the 19 are Rockland County villages, and Rockland is also where six of the 14 prohibitions sit, so the county with the most bans is also the county we have read least completely. The other twelve are in Albany, Columbia, Erie, Monroe, Putnam, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester. These are a research gap, not a finding, and they are counted in the 367 rather than dropped out of it so the denominator stays honest.

Forty-two more municipalities sit inside counties we cover and are not in the 367 at all, because we hold no record for them. Eighteen of those are in Delaware County, which we have only partly read. Twenty of the 42 publish no zoning code online at all, and for those the fastest route is still a phone call to the building department.

One municipality is in the count and not on the map. The Village of Gowanda sits on the Erie/Cattaraugus county line and we do not have a boundary outline for it, so the map draws 366 while the dataset holds 367. Gowanda is in the "No local law found" band.

And the general caveat, which matters more here than the specific ones: a reading is only as current as its date. Several of these towns revised their rules in the last two years, a few adopted a first law while we were reading their neighbours, and the ones sitting in "No local law found" today are the likeliest to move.

Method

What was read: the municipal zoning code, and where one exists the standalone short-term rental local law, for each of the 367 municipalities, taken from the municipality's own published code rather than from a summary, a listing platform, or another aggregator. Most codes came from the municipality's ecode360 or General Code library; where a town publishes only PDFs we read those; where a town publishes nothing we hold no record and it is in the 42, not the 367.

When it was read: the individual readings carry individual dates, which are published per municipality on the map, and they run from February 2026 to 26 September 2026, with most taken between June and September 2026. The counts in this post were pulled from the live dataset on 30 September 2026 and will drift as counties land and towns adopt laws, so cite the date with the number.

What the five bands mean, and what they do not:

• Allowed - the code permits a short-term rental and nothing in it narrows the use. A registration and a fee still count here, because a filing requirement is not a restriction. It does not mean the use is open in every district of that town.
• Allowed with conditions - there is a path, and something real attaches to it: a ceiling on nights per year, a requirement that the owner live in the house, an occupancy cap, a permit cap or waitlist, or a discretionary approval a board can turn down. A permit path is a yes with strings, not a no.
• Prohibited - the code bars renting short-term and there is no permit that gets you there, under any condition.
• No local law found - somebody read this code on the stated date and found no short-term rental ordinance in it. This is a dated, re-checkable finding. It is not permission and it must not be reported as permission, because a town can bar the use by leaving it off the list of uses its districts allow, or catch short stays under a rental-registration chapter that never uses the phrase.
• Nobody has read it - we have not opened this code. No status is established, in either direction.

What is not in here: enforcement. Whether a town that regulates actually inspects, whether a town with no law would turn you down at the counter, and how many unpermitted rentals are operating in either kind of town are all real questions and none of them are answerable from a code. This is what the law says, which is a smaller claim than what happens.

The per-municipality detail - the status, the section number, the condition, the date it was read, and the building department's phone number - is on the short-term rental map, and the underlying file behind that map is public. If you are writing about this and want the whole set as data, or want to check a number in here, the numbers came from that file and we will walk anyone through how a given town got its status.

If you are the one buying

This post is a census, not advice on a parcel. If you are weighing a specific property and the nightly income is carrying the deal, the town-by-town version of what to confirm before you close - the night caps, the owner-occupancy split, the permit waitlists, what registration actually costs - is in Short-Term Rental Rules in the Hudson Valley, which goes through the Ulster County towns one at a time.

The one thing I would carry over from the counting into a purchase is that the reassuring answer and the dangerous answer look identical from the outside. A code with no short-term rental chapter in it reads, to anyone who searched it honestly, exactly like a town that does not care, and about half the time that is what it is, and the rest of the time it is Greenburgh. The distinction lives in the use table, or in a rental chapter filed three hundred sections away from anything with "rental" in the heading, or in what the building inspector says when you call and ask, which remains free and takes about four minutes.

Everything here is decision-support and not legal advice, we are not a licensed architect or engineer or your attorney, and on a question this local the town's own building department is the authority. Verify with them before you commit capital, and where real money is on the line, with a local land-use attorney too.