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Windham, Hunter, and Catskill Village: Three Different STR Rulebooks in the Same Ski Corridor

Updated: Aug 7

Catskill New York

If you're researching Greene County NY short-term rental permit rules because you're weighing a purchase near Hunter Mountain, here's the fact that trips up almost everyone: "the ski corridor" is not one regulatory zone. It's three, and they don't agree with each other.


Windham and Hunter sit less than fifteen minutes apart, both anchor towns for a mountain, both marketed in the same breath by real estate agents and vacation rental platforms as "Hunter Mountain area" listings. The Village of Catskill sits down at the valley floor, an entirely separate municipal government from both the Town of Catskill and the ski towns above it. Treat any one of these as a stand-in for "how STRs work up here" and you'll either overpay for compliance you don't need or get caught operating without a permit you didn't know existed.


This guide walks through what each jurisdiction actually requires, right now, sourced from the towns' and village's own published law text and application packets — not from forum threads repeating a rule that expired three years ago.


Windham: No Permit, No Fee, No Cap — For Now

Windham is the outlier, and it's worth understanding why, because the "why" tells you something about how durable this status is.


As of today, the Town of Windham has no short-term rental permit requirement, no registration fee, and no cap on the number of STRs operating within town limits. If you own or are buying a house in Windham, Hensonville, or Maplecrest, you can list it on Airbnb or Vrbo without applying for anything at the town level. That's genuinely unusual for a ski-adjacent Catskills market in 2026, where Hunter, Woodstock, and Kingston all run capped-permit systems.


It wasn't inevitable. In 2020, the Windham Town Board drafted a short-term rental law that would have been one of the strictest in the region: a cap of 150 total STR permits across Windham, Hensonville, and Maplecrest, combined with a 100-day-per-year limit on how many nights a property could be rented short-term. For context, that's a materially tighter combination than what Hunter eventually adopted three years later — Hunter's cap is higher (250) and it doesn't limit annual rental days at all.


The proposal didn't survive contact with Windham's STR-owning population. A petition opposing the draft law gathered more than 1,400 signatures — a significant number in a town of Windham's size — and the pushback was pointed enough that the Town Board pulled the law before it reached a final vote. The board withdrew the draft in November 2020, canceling a public hearing that had been scheduled for January 2021.


Nothing has been reintroduced since. That's five-plus years of an open regulatory environment in a town that, on paper, considered doing the opposite. If you're evaluating Windham as an acquisition target, that history matters for two reasons: first, it tells you the "no rules" status isn't an oversight — it's the result of a specific political fight that current owners won; second, it means you should not assume permanence. A town board can revisit a withdrawn law, especially if housing-availability pressure or neighbor complaints escalate. Check the Town of Windham's current announcements before closing on anything, and don't build a business model that assumes zero regulation forever.


Village of Catskill: Permit, Inspection, No Cap

Come down off the mountain to the Village of Catskill — the walkable, Hudson River-adjacent village, distinct from the surrounding Town of Catskill — and the rules change completely. Here, you need a permit before you can legally operate, and that permit is gated behind a mandatory safety inspection, not just a fee payment.


The mechanics, as currently published by village code enforcement:

  • Apply for a short-term rental permit through the Village of Catskill before listing or operating. The application is a straightforward form covering owner information, property details, and parking/occupancy specifics.

  • Pay the permit fee. The current fee is $500 for an initial permit and $200 for annual renewal. If you've read older blog posts, host forums, or even some third-party regulation-tracking sites citing $375 initial and $125 renewal, that was accurate as of roughly 2021 — the village has since raised both figures, and the $500/$200 structure is what's on the current official application. Don't budget off a stale number.

  • Schedule and pass a fire and safety inspection. After the application and fee are submitted, a village code enforcement officer contacts the owner to schedule a full inspection of the property. This isn't a formality — it's a substantive compliance check against village and state building/fire codes (smoke and CO detectors, egress, occupancy limits, and similar life-safety items).

  • Receive your permit, typically issued within about a week of a passed inspection.

  • Renew annually at the $200 renewal rate, which in most cases does not require a repeat full inspection unless the village flags a change in the property or a compliance issue.


Notably, the Village of Catskill does not cap the total number of STR permits it will issue. This is a permit-by-right system: if your property passes inspection and you pay the fee, you get a permit, regardless of how many other STRs already operate in the village. That makes the Village of Catskill meaningfully more predictable than Hunter for an investor weighing "can I even get in" risk — the barrier here is inspection-readiness, not a waiting list.


Practically, that means the highest-leverage move for a prospective Village of Catskill host is pre-inspection prep: walk the property against a basic fire/life-safety checklist (interconnected smoke and CO detectors, clearly marked egress, posted occupancy limits, fire extinguisher placement) before you ever submit the application, so the inspection doesn't turn into a multi-round back-and-forth that delays your first booking season.


Town of Hunter: Permit, Bond, Inspection — And a Cap Nobody Can Confirm Is Binding

This is the jurisdiction that gets confused with Windham constantly, because "Hunter Mountain" is the shared marketing name for the whole ski area, and plenty of listings physically closer to Windham's town line get advertised as "Hunter, NY" anyway. Legally, the Town of Hunter is a completely separate municipality with a completely separate — and considerably more demanding — regulatory scheme.


Hunter's Local Law No. 2 of 2023 has been in effect since July 26, 2023, and it stacks four requirements on top of each other:


1. A permit is mandatory before any short-term rental can legally operate in the Town of Hunter. 2. Permit fees run $500 for the initial application and $250 for annual renewal — both higher than the Village of Catskill's equivalent fees. 3. A $1,000 compliance bond is required per property, held by the town as a financial backstop against code violations — a mechanism Windham and the Village of Catskill don't have at all. 4. A passed fire and safety inspection is required, similar in substance to Catskill Village's process.


None of that is unusual by itself — it's a fairly standard "permit plus inspection plus financial assurance" framework, similar in spirit to what Woodstock and Kingston run elsewhere in the region. What makes Hunter different, and worth flagging carefully, is the fifth piece: Local Law No. 2 caps total STR permits townwide at 250. Once that ceiling is reached, no new permits are issued until an existing one lapses or is revoked — structurally the same scarcity mechanism used in Woodstock and Kingston, where waitlists have become a real barrier to entry.


Here's the genuinely uncertain part, and it's important enough that we're not going to paper over it with a confident-sounding number: how close Hunter actually is to that 250-permit ceiling depends entirely on which data source you trust, and the sources disagree by close to 10x. One tracking source puts active Hunter STR permits at roughly 55 — nowhere near the cap. A broader market dataset (AirDNA, using a wider geographic definition of "Hunter" that likely sweeps in nearby unincorporated areas and crosses into what people colloquially call "the Hunter Mountain market") shows around 453 listings — a figure that, if it reflected permits issued strictly within Hunter's town limits, would already be nearly double the legal cap, which isn't possible under the law as written. The gap almost certainly comes down to definitional scope: total online listings in a loosely-drawn "Hunter area" versus permits actually issued by the Town of Hunter government within its legal boundaries.


We're not going to guess which number is closer to reality, and neither should you. If you're evaluating a Hunter property on the assumption that permits are readily available, verify that directly with the Town of Hunter Building Inspector's office at (518) 589-6150 before you rely on it. Ask specifically: how many active STR permits are currently issued, and is the town accepting new applications right now, or is there a waitlist. That's a five-minute phone call that can save you from a purchase contingent on a permit that may not exist to be issued.


The Footnote Everyone Skips: Town of Catskill Is Not Village of Catskill

One more jurisdictional trap, separate from the "Windham vs. Hunter" confusion above: the Town of Catskill (the township, which surrounds the village and extends well beyond it) is a distinct government from the Village of Catskill, with its own separate short-term rental ordinance — Local Law No. 1-2022, most recently amended in March 2025. If your property sits in the town but outside the village boundary — a large share of Catskill-area listings, especially anything off Route 23A or toward Kaaterskill Clove — the village's $500/$200 permit-and-inspection rules do not apply to you; you're under the town's separate ordinance instead. One caveat worth flagging honestly: some secondary sources describe the town's ordinance as "amended March 2025," but we could not confirm a specific March 2025 amendment against the town's own published code or meeting records — if that date matters to your decision, confirm directly with the Town of Catskill Code Enforcement Officer or Town Clerk before relying on it. Confirm with the county tax map or local assessor's office which municipality actually has jurisdiction over your address — town and village boundaries here don't always follow what a GPS pin or real estate listing implies.


The Layer Above All Three Towns: County Registry and State Law

Underneath all of this town-by-town variation sits a two-tier system that applies no matter which of these jurisdictions your property is in.


Greene County's registry is free and non-mandatory at the county level. Enabled by state legislation (S820/A5686), Greene County operates an online Customer Portal where STR owners can register their units. This registry is administrative — it helps the county understand STR density and supports local tax administration — but registering does not substitute for whatever permit your specific town or village requires, and skipping it does not exempt you from state sales tax obligations either way.


Separately, and non-optionally, New York State's registry-verification law is now live statewide. Signed in December 2024 as S885C/A4130C and finalized via a Chapter 99 amendment in early 2025, this law requires booking platforms — Airbnb, Vrbo, and comparable sites — to verify a valid county registry number before a listing is allowed to go live anywhere covered by a participating county's registry. This is the mechanism with teeth: it's not the county portal itself, but the requirement that platforms check against it before publishing your listing.


On top of the registry law, a tax-collection change took effect March 25, 2025: platforms are now required to collect and remit New York State's 4% sales tax directly to the state Department of Taxation and Finance, which then distributes the local share back to counties. Before this, individual hosts calculated and filed that tax themselves. If you were self-remitting as of early 2025, check your platform's current tax settings — double-remittance is a real risk if your bookkeeping hasn't caught up to the March 2025 change.


Put together, the practical sequence for a new Greene County host: secure whatever permit applies to your specific address, register with the Greene County portal, and confirm your booking platform has your registry number on file and is correctly applying the 4% state sales tax at checkout.


Work with Crest & Cove Creative

Three towns, three rulebooks, one Airbnb search results page that doesn't care which one you're in — guests booking a Hunter Mountain ski weekend don't distinguish between Windham's open market, Hunter's capped-permit system, and the Village of Catskill's inspection process. What they see is your listing, your photos, and whether your direct-booking site gives them a reason to skip the platform fees. If you're navigating Greene County's compliance patchwork and want a marketing partner who treats regulatory reality as the foundation for positioning rather than an afterthought, reach out at crestcove.co, email info@crestcove.co, or call (256) 998-7502.


Frequently Asked Questions

Does Windham, NY require a short-term rental permit? No. As of 2026, the Town of Windham has no STR permit requirement, no associated fee, and no cap on the number of short-term rentals operating in town. A 2020 draft law would have introduced a 150-permit cap and a 100-day annual rental limit, but the town board withdrew it in November 2020 after a petition drew more than 1,400 signatures, and nothing has been reintroduced since.


Is the Town of Hunter's short-term rental permit capped? Yes, by law — Local Law No. 2 of 2023 sets a townwide ceiling of 250 STR permits. Whether that cap is currently binding (i.e., whether Hunter is near or at 250 active permits) is unconfirmed from public sources: one tracking source cites roughly 55 active permits, while a broader market dataset shows around 453 listings under a wider geographic definition of "Hunter" that likely extends beyond the town's legal boundary. Call the Town of Hunter Building Inspector at (518) 589-6150 to confirm current permit availability before assuming space is open.


What does a Village of Catskill rental permit cost? The current fee is $500 for an initial permit and $200 for annual renewal. Some older sources cite $375/$125, which was accurate as of around 2021 but is now out of date — verify the current fee directly with village code enforcement before budgeting.


Does the Village of Catskill cap the number of STR permits it issues? No. Unlike Hunter, the Village of Catskill runs a permit-by-right system — any property that passes the required safety inspection and pays the fee can receive a permit, with no numeric ceiling on total permits issued.


Is the Town of Catskill the same as the Village of Catskill for STR rules? No, and this is a common point of confusion. The Town of Catskill is a separate municipal government from the Village of Catskill, with its own ordinance — Local Law No. 1-2022 (adopted April 2022). Some secondary sources describe this ordinance as having been amended in March 2025, but that specific amendment date is unconfirmed against the town's own published code and meeting records as of this writing — verify directly with the Town of Catskill Code Enforcement Officer before assuming the March 2025 date is accurate. Properties outside the village boundary but within the broader town fall under the town's rules, not the village's $500/$200 permit-and-inspection process.


Do I need to register with Greene County in addition to my town or village permit? Registering with Greene County's online Customer Portal is currently free and non-mandatory at the county level, but it's separate from your local town or village permit requirement and does not replace it. Given that New York State now requires platforms to verify a county registry number before a listing can go live, registering is increasingly a practical necessity even where the county hasn't made it legally mandatory.


Who collects sales tax on my short-term rental now — me or the platform? As of March 25, 2025, booking platforms are required to collect and remit New York State's 4% sales tax directly to the state, which then distributes the local share to counties. Before that date, hosts were generally responsible for calculating and filing this tax themselves. Check your platform's current tax settings to make sure you're not still manually remitting tax the platform is now already collecting.


Which of the three ski-corridor towns is easiest to get into as a new host? Windham currently has the lowest regulatory barrier — no permit process at all. The Village of Catskill is moderate: a defined permit-and-inspection process, but no cap on total permits, so approval is predictable if the property passes inspection. The Town of Hunter is the most complex, combining a permit, a $1,000 bond, a fire/safety inspection, and a 250-permit townwide cap whose current binding status is not confirmed from public data — treat Hunter as the jurisdiction requiring the most upfront verification before you commit to a purchase.


About the Authors

Crest & Cove Creative is a short-term rental marketing agency founded by Thomas Garner and Jacob Mishalanie. We build direct-booking brands, listing optimization systems, and market-specific content strategies for independent STR operators nationwide, including emerging corridors like New York.


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