Oregon Coast High Desert STR Rules in 2026 a Town By Town Guide

Jul 17

16 min read

Updated: Aug 28

If you're trying to figure out whether you can legally run a short-term rental in a specific Oregon town, the honest answer is: it depends entirely on which side of a city limit sign your property sits on. Oregon has no statewide short-term rental law , no state permit, no state cap, no state registry governing whether you can list a house on Airbnb or VRBO. Every rule that actually matters , whether you need a license, whether there's a waiting list, whether you have to live on the property yourself, whether the town has quietly capped vacation rentals for good , is decided city by city and county by county, sometimes block by block within the same town.

That patchwork is a genuine research burden, and it's compounded by something we noticed repeatedly while doing outreach across the Oregon coast for this pilot: unlike short-term rental markets in a lot of other states, Oregon's small coastal towns are close to uniformly dead zones for host-community Facebook groups. We looked. Search after search across Yachats, Neskowin, Pacific City, Gold Beach, Brookings, Bandon, and the rest turned up little to no active, locally-specific groups where hosts trade notes on permitting, waitlists, or code changes. That's not a claim that zero such groups exist anywhere , it's an observation from where our own research kept coming up empty.

The practical effect: a host in Yachats has almost nowhere informal to ask, "Did the license cap change again?" That's exactly why a citation-grade, town-by-town reference is useful , for a lot of these towns, organic search is genuinely the most likely way an owner or buyer ever encounters the actual rule, rather than a rumor about it.

This guide covers the coast and the high desert around Bend, town by town, citing ordinance language, city and county primary sources, and court and land-use board records directly wherever we could find and verify them. Where the record is genuinely thin, we say so instead of inventing a number to fill the gap.

The State-Level Baseline: What Applies Everywhere

Before the town-by-town breakdown, it's worth being precise about what Oregon does and doesn't regulate centrally, because this hasn't changed for 2026 despite periodic chatter.

There is still no statewide short-term rental law in Oregon as of this writing. The legislature has floated ideas in recent sessions , requiring platforms to display a permit number on every listing, or setting baseline statewide safety standards , but nothing resembling a statewide cap, registry, or preemption of local control has passed. Regulatory authority rests almost entirely with cities and counties, and that is expected to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

The one thing that does apply everywhere is tax. Oregon levies a 1.5% state Transient Lodging Tax on the room charge for any stay of fewer than 30 consecutive nights, collected by the Department of Revenue and used in part to fund the Oregon Tourism Commission. That's on top of whatever city or county lodging tax already applies locally , Yachats collects 9%, Bend 10.4%, and so on. Every Oregon host registers for and remits the state tax in addition to the local one; there's no exemption based on which town you're in.

Town-by-Town: The Oregon Coast

Yachats: Oregon's Only Hard Numeric Cap

Yachats has the most specific, quantified short-term rental rule of any town in Oregon, and it's worth reading the current municipal code directly rather than a summary, because the number is reported inconsistently elsewhere. Yachats Municipal Code Section 4.08.040(D) states plainly: "A total of one hundred twenty-five (125) licenses will be available at any one time." That's a fixed citywide ceiling, not a range, and not tied to a percentage of housing stock. Once all 125 are issued, the city runs a formal waitlist by application date (Section 4.08.040(E)); in council discussions in the months leading up to the March 2026 ordinance, City Manager Bobbi Price described the waitlist as short and "moving quickly," and the city's own program page currently shows the waitlist as open.

The license itself is explicitly non-transferable. Section 4.08.030 provides that a vacation rental license is issued to the dwelling owner, that a license holder can't hold an interest in more than one licensed property, and , critically , that vacation rental licenses are non-transferable. That last point has driven years of local debate, since it means a license doesn't automatically pass to an heir when an owner dies, nor is it conveyed with a sale. On March 18, 2026, the council adopted Ordinance No. 380 to clarify , not eliminate , that rule after months of hearings. It created a narrow workaround rather than a transfer right: an intended heir can be added to the deed (or named as a beneficiary of a trust) while the current owner is alive, then apply for a new joint license once a waitlist opening becomes available, and surrender the original. The old license doesn't carry forward automatically; the family effectively re-enters the queue as a joint applicant.

One claim worth correcting: it's sometimes reported that Yachats requires the license holder to occupy the dwelling as a primary residence for at least 6 months per year. We checked this multiple ways , the city's own current Vacation Rentals program page, the full standards text of Section 4.08.030 as reproduced in council packets and ordinance PDFs, and years of Lincoln Chronicle/Yachats News coverage of the license-cap and heir-transfer debate, which would be exactly the reporting most likely to mention a residency rule if one existed , and found no such requirement anywhere. The only source making this claim is a single, uncited third-party "investment guide" aggregator site, not the city or local press. Yachats does require a local contact person within 10 miles, available by phone 8 a.m.-11 p.m. with a two-hour response window, and, as of the March 2026 amendment, city water and sewer connection , septic properties no longer qualify. But owner residency is not a standard here. If you've heard otherwise, that's most likely a conflation with Hood River's rule (below), which we independently confirmed does have one, enforced with actual documentation requirements.

Other Yachats specifics: licenses in residential zones are capped at four bedrooms; one on-property parking space is required per bedroom, with a two-space minimum regardless of bedroom count; maximum occupancy is two people per sleeping area plus two; and licenses lapse if the holder doesn't report occupancy tax for two consecutive years, since unused licenses sitting on the books cost the city real transient lodging tax revenue. The city separately caps overnight vehicles at the number of surfaced parking spaces on the property or six, whichever is less. The original ordinance dates to 1992, with the code amended repeatedly since , including in 2010, 2012, 2014, and now 2026 , to reach its current form; that list isn't necessarily exhaustive, since Yachats has revisited this chapter often enough that older amendments are easy to miss.

Neskowin & Pacific City (Tillamook County)

Tillamook County regulates short-term rentals in its unincorporated coastal villages , including Neskowin and Pacific City/Woods , under Ordinance #84, most recently amended by Ordinance 84 Amendment 2, which commissioners approved at their July 19, 2023, meeting. Unlike Yachats's single fixed number, the ordinance sets subarea-specific caps: each unincorporated community's cap was set at 1% above the number of licenses already active in that subarea when the 2023 ordinance took effect , a growth-management formula, not a hard ceiling. County and local press coverage from 2023 put the practical effect at roughly 100-plus new licenses added across all subareas combined, with Pacific City and Neskowin each getting about 11 additional slots and Oceanside about 10 before their caps were reached.

What is directly confirmed: the county maintains separate waitlists for six subareas , Neskowin, Pacific City/Woods, the Nehalem and Rockaway Beach urban growth boundaries, Oceanside, and Netarts , meaning all six have reached their caps and new applicants are queued rather than approved outright. Also confirmed: in January 2025, commissioners created a cap-exemption zone within Pacific City, from the Nestucca River to the ocean and from Alder Street south to Bob Straub State Park, after residents there supported exempting that historically vacation-rental-heavy stretch. Neskowin has no comparable carve-out; residents have only discussed removing condos from its cap calculation.

The practical takeaway: in most of Neskowin and Pacific City/Woods outside that carved-out strip, a new license isn't something you simply apply for , you're getting on a list behind everyone already waiting, with no county estimate of how fast it moves.

Gold Beach & Brookings (Curry County)

Curry County doesn't have a single clean, quotable ordinance the way Yachats does, but it has two contentious regulatory episodes, both verified against primary records rather than secondary summaries.

First, the land-use fight. In August 2022, Curry County commissioners adopted Ordinance 22-04, authorizing short-term rental use across a wide range of residential and rural residential zones near Gold Beach, Brookings, and Port Orford. Oregon Coast Alliance, former commissioner Peg Reagan, and resident Penny Suess petitioned the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals to overturn it, arguing it conflicted with the county's comprehensive plan and would strain water, affordable housing, and fire-suppression capacity near Port Orford. We pulled the actual opinion: LUBA No. 2022-088, Oregon Coast Alliance, Peg Reagan, and Penny Suess v. Curry County, decided June 23, 2023 , AFFIRMED, meaning LUBA upheld the county and denied the challenge. Ordinance 22-04 stands as adopted; STRs remain authorized in the named zones and still barred on land zoned for forestry or grazing.

Second, the moratorium. On August 7, 2024, commissioners unanimously imposed a 180-day moratorium on new vacation rental permits countywide, on counsel's recommendation, citing both the difficulty of administering the existing land-use-permit approach and resident complaints about the process. The goal was to study conflicts with other land-use rules and to explore hotel-style regulation rather than case-by-case permits. That moratorium would have run out around early February 2025. We didn't find a news article announcing it was lifted or extended, but the county's own Planning Division currently posts a "STR Application (revised 2025)" along with active STR regulations, a fire district sign-off form, and an STR FAQ , with no moratorium notice anywhere on the page, and an explicit statement that operating an STR without a permit is prohibited. That points to normal permitting having resumed on schedule under the original Ordinance 22-04 framework (as affirmed by LUBA) rather than being replaced by a new ordinance, but we found no public record of the moratorium formally being lifted or of a superseding ordinance. If you're evaluating a property in unincorporated Curry County today, confirm current permitting status directly with the county rather than relying on 2022-2024 reporting.

Separately, the cities of Gold Beach and Brookings run their own layers of regulation inside city limits. Gold Beach requires a city business license for STR owners, with an ordinance that explicitly gives the council authority to cap the number issued , though we found no evidence that a numeric cap has actually been set. Gold Beach now also requires booking platforms to collect and remit its 7% lodging tax (up from 6% in 2016) directly. Brookings requires a Conditional Use Permit, registration on the city's STR registry, an annual inspection, and a local representative within the Brookings urban growth boundary who is authorized to handle repairs or disputes.

Bandon (Coos County)

Bandon does have a real, specific, currently-enforced ordinance , more than just "an ordinance exists." Vacation Rental Dwellings (VRDs) are a conditional use limited to four zones: CD-1, CD-2, CD-3, and C-3. The binding constraint isn't a citywide numeric cap but a neighborhood density formula the city calls a "saturation rate": to get a VRD permit, less than 30% of the single-family detached dwellings within 250 feet of your property (in a zone where VRDs are allowed) can already be VRDs. The city will run that saturation calculation for a fee upon request, or you can pull the current VRD list yourself. The operative rule is Ordinance 1654, approved by the city council on March 6, 2023, and effective April 5, 2023, which amended Bandon Municipal Code Chapter 16.12; VRDs must also be at least three years old (measured from certificate of occupancy) to qualify. Coos County layers on its own requirement: a Coos Health & Wellness license under County Code Section 07.06.050 and ORS 446.320, requiring written confirmation of appropriate zoning plus sewage and water documentation.

Bend

Bend's system is more developed than the coast towns' and is easy to oversimplify. Bend Development Code 3.6.500 and Bend Code Chapter 7.16 define Type I and Type II short-term rentals as the two categories almost every host will fall into. Type I covers owner-occupied rentals of up to two bedrooms, plus "infrequent use" whole-house rentals capped at 30 days or four rental periods a year; Type I isn't subject to any density restriction. Type II covers whole-house rentals with no owner on-site, including short-term ADUs, and requires 500 feet of separation from any other Type II rental in residential zones and Mixed-Use Riverfront outside the Old Mill District. There is a third, much narrower process , a Type III "short-term rental development designation," decided by the Planning Commission rather than staff , but it isn't a third individual-permit category, as Type I and II are. It lets all owners in a defined area (a subdivision or group of adjacent properties) jointly apply to have the entire area designated as an STR development, exempt from the 500-foot concentration limit; individual units within an approved development are still processed as Type I thereafter. For a single host evaluating one property, Type I and Type II are the two designations that matter. Every short-term rental besides infrequent-use Type I pays a 10.4% room tax on gross revenue. Land use permit fees run $1,380.26 for Type I and $3,840.31 for Type II, both plus a 4% planning surcharge, and the city added a Transportation Fee Supplement in mid-2025 ($204.80/year whole-house, $110.59/year others).

Town-by-Town: North Coast and Northeast Oregon

The brief version of this story treats several north coast towns and the Wallowa Lake area as undocumented. Independent research for this guide found real, current regulatory detail in most of them.

Astoria

Astoria splits short-term rentals into Home Stay Lodging (owner on-site, one or two spare bedrooms) and Vacation Rental (owner off-site, whole unit), with only the Vacation Rental category subject to a citywide cap. That cap is 50 licenses citywide, adopted as part of a new licensing program that the city council gave initial approval to in May 2025; as of that spring, roughly 43 of the 50 slots had already been issued, mostly to properties that had been operating before a December 2022 cutoff date. This is a genuinely new program , if you're researching Astoria based on older material, be aware that the licensing structure itself only took its current form in 2025.

Cannon Beach

As of mid-2026, Cannon Beach has not yet finalized a numeric cap, but one is actively in progress. Today, new applicants in the city's RVL, RL, R1, R2, R3, MP, and RAM zones can apply for a 14-day short-term rental permit (STRs are not allowed in accessory dwelling units at all), while a smaller number of "lifetime unlimited" permits exist from before the current system. The city has been openly working through a formal cap ordinance (Draft Ordinance ZO 26-01) since at least February 2026, with planning commission drafts, a public notice mailing in June 2026, and a public hearing scheduled for the July 23, 2026, council meeting , a hard cap could land later this year, but hadn't as of this writing. The number itself is still moving: at a July 1, 2026 work session, councilors floated figures ranging from 125 to 195 against a current count of roughly 195 active short-term rentals, so don't treat any specific cap number as final until after that hearing. Separately, unincorporated Clatsop County (the area around, but not inside, Cannon Beach and Manzanita) adopted its own cap under Ordinance No. 24-19, effective January 22, 2025: short-term rentals west of Highway 101 (plus the AC-RCR zone) are capped at 10% of existing single-family dwellings per zone, which county planning materials put at a combined total of roughly 149 units across the affected area at the number already licensed when the cap took effect. That county ordinance does not apply inside incorporated cities.

Manzanita

Manzanita's short-term rental cap applies only in its R2, R3, and SR-R zones, under a structure established by city Ordinance 95-04; the R4, C-1, and LC zones carry no cap and no waitlist. As of the city's own September 2025 posting, 13 applicants were on the waiting list for the capped zones, with no estimate offered for how quickly that list moves.

Hood River

Hood River is the one north Oregon town that imposes an explicit owner-occupancy rule, confirmed directly from the city's own current program page. In its residential zones (R-1, R-2, R-3), a short-term rental license , "Hosted Homeshare" (owner present) or "Vacation Home Rental" (owner not present) , is only issued if the dwelling is the owner's primary residence, verified with voter registration, an Oregon driver's license, and a redacted federal tax return, and use is capped at 90 days a year. Neither rule applies in the city's C-1 and C-2 commercial zones. Ten Hood River property owners (Panabaker et al. City of Hood River) challenged the residency requirement in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, arguing the ordinance discriminates against out-of-state owners under the Dormant Commerce Clause. On April 7, 2025, Judge Adrienne Nelson upheld the ordinance, ruling the plaintiffs hadn't met the threshold showing that the residency requirement imposes a substantial burden on interstate commerce. (A separate, unrelated federal case, Wilson v. City of Hood River, also touches Hood River's short-term rental rules , don't confuse the two.)

Wallowa Lake and Joseph

This is the one corner of the guide where we have to be as honest about the gap as the rest of the piece is about the detail. The City of Joseph's own published ordinance list does not show a dedicated short-term rental ordinance, and multiple independent searches turned up nothing suggesting the city currently requires a specific STR permit within city limits , which, if accurate, puts Joseph in a genuinely different regulatory category from nearly every coastal town here. For unincorporated Wallowa Lake, we pulled the county's own Land Development Ordinance directly: the matching section above (the Commercial Recreation, or CR-2, zone) does require a zone permit for short-term rental use, confirming that a permitting layer exists. But it does not set a fixed occupancy number, as some secondary sources claim , occupancy is instead "limited to the number of overnight guests authorized in the permit," meaning it's set on a case-by-case basis rather than capped at a specific headcount for every property. If you're evaluating a property in Joseph or around Wallowa Lake, confirm current permit terms by phone with Wallowa County Planning before relying on any secondhand occupancy figure.

What This Means If You're Evaluating a Property

The pattern across every town here is the same: proximity tells you almost nothing. Yachats and Waldport sit a few miles apart on the same stretch of Highway 101, but one runs a hard 125-license citywide cap with a waitlist, and the other doesn't show up in this research with a comparable rule at all. Pacific City has a carved-out, cap-free zone a short walk from parts of unincorporated Tillamook County still working through a waitlist. Bend's Type I/Type II system has nothing in common with Hood River's primary-residence requirement, ninety minutes up the Gorge. None of that is available secondhand through a Facebook group in most of these towns , verify against the current ordinance or the city/county planning department directly before you buy, list, or renew, because "the town twenty minutes away allows it" is not evidence for your specific address.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does Oregon have a statewide short-term rental law?

No. Oregon has no statewide short-term rental permit, cap, or registry as of this writing; regulatory authority rests almost entirely with cities and counties, and rules vary block by block in some towns. The one thing that does apply everywhere is tax: a 1.5% state Transient Lodging Tax on stays under 30 nights, on top of whatever local lodging tax already applies.

What is Yachats' short-term rental cap?

Yachats Municipal Code Section 4.08.040(D) fixes a citywide ceiling of 125 vacation rental licenses at any one time, not a percentage or a range. Once all 125 are issued, the city runs a formal waitlist by application date, and as of recent council discussions the waitlist was described as short and moving quickly.

Can a Yachats vacation rental license be transferred to an heir?

Not automatically. Yachats licenses are explicitly non-transferable and tied to the dwelling owner, so a license does not pass with an inheritance or a sale. A March 2026 ordinance created a workaround: an intended heir can be added to the deed or named a trust beneficiary while the current owner is alive, then apply for a new joint license once a waitlist opening becomes available.

Does Yachats require the owner to live in the short-term rental?

No. This is a commonly repeated but incorrect claim. Multiple sources, including the city's own program page, the code text, and years of local press coverage of the license-cap debate, show no residency requirement in Yachats. That claim is most likely a conflation with Hood River, which does have a confirmed owner-occupancy rule.

Does Hood River require owners to live in their short-term rental?

Yes. In Hood River's residential zones, a short-term rental license is only issued if the dwelling is the owner's primary residence, verified with voter registration, a driver's license, and a redacted tax return, and use is capped at 90 days a year. Ten property owners challenged the rule in federal court, and a judge upheld the ordinance in April 2025.

What are the short-term rental rules in Bend, Oregon?

Bend splits short-term rentals into Type I (owner-occupied, up to two bedrooms, no density limit) and Type II (whole-house, no owner on-site, requiring 500 feet of separation from another Type II rental in residential zones). Every short-term rental besides infrequent-use Type I pays a 10.4% room tax, and land use permit fees run $1,380.26 for Type I and $3,840.31 for Type II, plus a planning surcharge.

What is Bandon's vacation rental "saturation rate" rule?

Bandon limits vacation rental dwellings to four zones and caps them with a neighborhood density formula rather than a citywide number: less than 30% of the single-family detached dwellings within 250 feet of a property can already be vacation rentals for a new permit to qualify. Properties must also be at least three years old, measured from certificate of occupancy.

Are short-term rentals capped in Tillamook County's coastal villages like Neskowin and Pacific City?

Yes. Tillamook County set subarea-specific caps under Ordinance #84, and all six subareas, including Neskowin and Pacific City/Woods, have reached their caps, so new applicants join a waitlist rather than being approved outright. In January 2025 the county created a cap-exemption zone within part of Pacific City; Neskowin has no comparable carve-out.

What happened with Curry County's short-term rental moratorium?

Commissioners imposed a 180-day moratorium on new vacation rental permits in unincorporated Curry County starting August 7, 2024, to study conflicts with other land-use rules. That moratorium would have run out around early February 2025, and while no public record confirms it was formally lifted, the county's current planning materials show active STR applications and regulations with no moratorium notice, suggesting normal permitting has resumed.

Does Cannon Beach have a numeric cap on short-term rentals?

Not yet, as of mid-2026, though one is actively in progress. New applicants can currently apply for a 14-day permit in several residential zones, and the city has been working through a draft cap ordinance since early 2026, with councilors floating figures between 125 and 195 against a current count of roughly 195 active short-term rentals.

Work with Crest & Cove Creative

Yachats caps STR permits by hard number, while Bend, Hood River, and Cannon Beach each run their own separate rule set. One coastwide pitch can't cover all of it.

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