For the first time, Salt Lake City has started to license short-term rentals — like those found on Airbnb and Vrbo. There now are strict rules and new fees associated with running those vacation properties.

The law took effect July 1 but, interestingly, applications for short-term rental licenses aren’t being processed until at least Aug. 8, according to the city’s website. There’s been a period of limbo as a result.

What impact will the new law have on Salt Lake City residents? Here’s a quick guide:

What are the changes?

My colleague Tony Semerad wrote an article on this when the changes were first enacted as the city approved its 2026-27 budget, so check that out for the full details. But basically:

• Renting a property for short-term rentals (defined as rentals under 30 days) now requires a license. The license fee is $198, plus a per-unit fee of $342. It requires annual renewal.

• Short-term rentals must be at least two days long and cannot be rented out for more than 200 days a year.

• Licensees must collect and remit transient room taxes.

• In a multifamily building, up to 10% of the units can be short-term rentals (with a minimum of one unit eligible).

• A short-term rental must have at least one off-street parking spot.

• Each rental must have a local contact available 24/7 who can respond to emergencies within two hours.

• There’s a $1,000 fine for every seven days for operating or advertising without a license. There’s also a three-strike policy on noise, nuisance or parking violations. A third strike means a suspended license.

These are significant barriers to entry, but it is not a total ban of short-term rentals, which has occurred in some cities across the U.S.

Are short-term rentals allowed in my neighborhood?

It depends on how your neighborhood is zoned. Exclusively residential zones aren’t allowed to have short-term rentals, but they are allowed in mixed-use and business districts, along with a few other assorted districts. The airport zoning district, for example, is included, though I don’t know of any housing there.

While Salt Lake City zoning maps are complicated, I distilled the information into one map. Zoom around and find your neighborhood and any others you might be curious about:

In all, 54% of Salt Lake City’s acreage is short-term rental eligible. But, as you’ve certainly noticed by now, much of that acreage is in decidedly unrentable areas: manufacturing districts, airport land and so on.

Fortunately, we can use census data to estimate how many housing units are in each category. I estimate about 25% of the city’s housing units are in those eligible zones.

Remember that there are eligibility restrictions well beyond zoning, so it’s fair to say that the vast majority of housing units in the city are no longer eligible to be short-term rentals.

How does Salt Lake City’s short-term rental market compare to others in the U.S.?

For this, I turned to AirROI, which collects cumulative data from Airbnb markets around the world. Overall, it tracks 185 cities in the lower 48 U.S. states, including two in Utah: Salt Lake City and Park City.

Park City’s short-term rental market is far bigger — and far more expensive — than that in Utah’s capital, even before the new restrictions. Scroll around this map to get an idea of how various short-term rental markets compare across the country:

Compared to the country overall, Salt Lake City ranked in the top half of listings in tracked markets, but near the bottom in terms of pricing — 178th out of the 185 we looked at at an average price of $177 a night.

Even so, the short-term rentals on the market were more often used in Salt Lake City than nearly everywhere else, ranking 13th at 46.5% occupancy. So Salt Lake City listings tended to be cheap and popular.

The average Airbnb on the market in the city had an annual revenue of $22,593, according to AirROI, so you can see why Salt Lake City believes it has room to charge fees.

What will the impact of the new regulations be?

From the AirROI data, the market was quite limited after July 1, when the new ordinance took hold.

In the new-regulation limbo, the Airbnb market in Salt Lake City was slashed in half or more. Occupancy rates fell to 20% as those without licenses chased longer-term rentals on Airbnb in order to stay compliant. Revenue for those landlords overall was also cut by more than half.

We know, of course, that Salt Lake City currently has a pause on processing short-term rental licenses and will until at least Aug. 8. Perhaps once the city is able to allow licensing, the market will rebound.

This is where the outcome of similar regulations around the country can be helpful to understand what might happen for Salt Lake City moving forward. The good news is that there is a ton of research on how these short-term rental ordinances impact their communities. The bad news is that no two short-term rental ordinances are the same.

Perhaps the closest case to Salt Lake City’s with significant research is Chicago’s ordinance, implemented in 2016. It, too, has a licensing process, with restricted residential zones. There, Airbnb listings ended up falling 16% overall, but those that remained were not too impacted in terms of revenue. Interestingly, there also was a small reduction in burglaries near the buildings that banned short-term rentals.

For regular non-Airbnb-owning Salt Lake City residents, an obvious question is: How will this impact the rental and real estate markets?

In cities or counties that outright banned short-term rentals, researchers found small impacts. For example, when an ordinance in Los Angeles County reduced listings by about 50%, housing prices and rents fell by about 2%. A full ban in Irvine, California, found a 2.7% reduction in rents. However, a similar study on Australian housing found no sustained change.

Maybe most useful for us, a national Airbnb study found that, for every 1% increase in Airbnb listings in an area, there was an associated 0.018% increase in rent and a 0.026% increase in housing prices.

So, let’s do some estimation math: If Salt Lake City’s Airbnb listings were to shrink at the same 16% rate as Chicago’s, we might see a 0.29% decrease in rent and a 0.42% change in housing prices. That would mean roughly $3 less for every $1,000 rent payment, or $2,100 off a $500,000 house.

It’s a small change, not a seismic one. We’ll check back after some time to see how this plays out in real life.