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NSW short-term rental register: the 180-day cap, Byron’s 60 days, and the fire safety tick

Sergej Sitki · founder of ReceptionGO and host
Published 28 October 2026 · 7 min read

General information, not legal, tax or insurance advice. Check your own case with your council, the ATO or the state revenue office, or an accountant. Rates and dates below were checked on the date shown — recheck the linked official page before you lodge, register or set a price from them.

In NSW a short-term rental dwelling must be on the STRA register. The fee is $65 for the first year and $25 to renew. Hosted stays have no day cap. Non-hosted stays are capped at 180 days in Greater Sydney, excluding the Central Coast, and at 60 days in most of Byron Shire. A booking of 21 nights or more does not count.

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If you let a house or a unit in New South Wales for short stays, the state already has a system, and it has had one since the planning rules started on 1 November 2021. It is not a licence in the Scottish sense. It is a register, a fire-safety declaration, a code of conduct, and — in some local government areas — a cap on how many days a non-hosted dwelling can be let. Get the cap wrong and the listing is the easy part to fix. The nights you have already sold are not.

Who is on the register

Short-term rental accommodation, in the planning policy, is a dwelling let for a short stay. Hosted means you reside there while the guest is in. Non-hosted means you do not. Both register. Hosted accommodation can run 365 days a year. Non-hosted accommodation can too, except where a day cap applies.

The exempt pathway is for a home that is already lawful. It does not invent a right to put guests in a shed. Where a council has already issued a development consent for the short-term use, that consent remains the approval: the day cap of the exempt pathway does not override it, and any limit written on the consent still binds you. You register anyway, and you upload the consent.

Stays sit outside the Residential Tenancies Act when they are three months or less. A booking that turns into someone living there is a different contract. Fair Trading is the place for that line, not a Facebook group.

Where the cap actually bites

Greater Sydney here is a list of councils — City of Sydney, Northern Beaches, Waverley, Woollahra, Inner West, Randwick, the Blue Mountains, and the rest of the metropolitan councils named in the FAQ — not a vibe about “Sydney”. The Central Coast is called out as outside that list. If your property is near a boundary, read the LGA, not the postcode’s reputation.

Byron is the strict outlier, and it has a map, not a slogan. Two precincts keep a 365-day non-hosted pathway. Everywhere else in the shire, the exempt pathway is 60 days. The rule took effect on 23 September 2024 for new registrations, and for existing ones at the next renewal on or after that date. How to run a place inside that cap is covered in Byron Bay holiday rentals. The Sydney version of the same problem is in Sydney holiday rentals.

What does not count

A booking of 21 consecutive days or more is excluded from the cap. That was written for locums, productions and corporate stays, and it is the cleanest way a capped dwelling still takes a long booking. Nights you block for family are not counted. The register is interested in guest transactions. The clock starts on registration day, not on New Year’s Day. A host who assumes “180 nights in the calendar year” will be early or late, and the council will be using the register’s clock.

What you actually do

1. Fire safety, then the declaration. Mains-powered or 10-year sealed smoke alarms to AS 3786, interconnected where there is more than one, on the bedroom level and on every other storey. An evacuation diagram at the entrance and in each bedroom, with 000 on it. In a class 2 or class 4 unit: an entry door that opens from the inside without a key, plus a fire extinguisher and a fire blanket in the kitchen. A heat alarm in the garage under a secondary dwelling — not under an ordinary house garage. You tick a declaration. You do not upload a certificate. The council enforces. The full standard is the one to print; the checklist version is in fire safety, pools and insurance.
2. Pay and record the number. $65, then $25 a year, on the figures in the September 2024 FAQ. Put the registration where you will find it at renewal.
3. Tell the building. The code of conduct expects you to inform the owners corporation and direct neighbours. A strata scheme can, by special resolution, stop short-term letting of a lot that is not the host’s principal place of residence. It cannot stop it where the lot is that residence. See strata by-laws.
4. Count nights across every channel. The register takes booking data from platforms such as Airbnb and Stayz. A direct booking is yours to reconcile. This is the practical reason a channel manager matters in a capped LGA: the cap does not care which site sold the night.

Penalties, without invented dollar figures

The FAQ says there are penalties for failing the fire safety standard, and that councils can take enforcement action on the planning rules. It does not publish a single fine in that document, so neither do we. A suspended registration number is the outcome that actually stops the listing. Fair Trading handles code-of-conduct complaints — noise, parties, the behaviour the neighbours ring about. The council handles days and alarms.

For how NSW sits next to Victoria’s levy and WA’s register, use the state-by-state comparison. Nothing on this page is the Victorian 7.5%. NSW did not introduce a guest levy of that kind.