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Denver short-term rental license and Colorado mountain-town rules: primary residence, lodger’s tax and Breckenridge caps

Sergej Sitki · founder of ReceptionGO and host
Published October 31, 2026 · 5 min read

General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change often and vary by state, county and city — confirm your situation with the local agency or a CPA.

Denver allows a short-term rental only in your primary residence, for stays under 30 consecutive nights. You need a business license and a lodger’s tax license. The local lodger’s tax is 10.75%, and Colorado adds 4% sales tax on lodging. Mountain towns are a different market: Breckenridge licenses non-resident rentals, but caps them by zone.

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Denver’s rule is easy to say and annoying to fake: you may short-term rent the home you actually live in, and not the one you bought as an investment. The mountain towns an hour away often do the opposite — they license second homes, then cap how many. Hosts who treat “Colorado” as one law get licensed in the wrong place and taxed twice, or not at all.

Denver: what you file

A short-term rental is your primary residence, offered for less than 30 consecutive nights. Two licenses:

• a business license from Excise and Licenses;
• a lodger’s tax license from Finance.

Primary residence is defined in the code as the place your habitation is fixed and the place you usually return. The department can look at billing addresses, how many nights you rent the home out, military deployment, and whether some other address is the one on your license and your taxes. Claiming a homestead exemption is not, by itself, the test — and claiming it somewhere else is a problem.

You can have only one primary residence. A carriage house or a basement only works if it is part of that residence, not a second dwelling you never sleep in. Read the current application; the city has spent years closing the “but the LLC lives there” reading.

The 14.75% stack

Denver’s lodger’s tax is 10.75% of the stay. Colorado’s sales tax on lodging is 4%. Tax Guide Topic 97 (the city’s 2026 guide) is blunt about timing: you collect lodger’s tax when the guest pays, even if the night is months away. It is also blunt about platforms. A lodging platform remits Denver’s tax when it takes the payment and shows up as the merchant of record. Otherwise you do. Direct bookings are always yours — which is the gap in every market, spelled out in the occupancy tax guide.

Mountain towns are not Denver

Breckenridge requires a license for any unit rented under 30 days, however few nights you actually book. The town publishes license counts by zone. Zone 1’s cap is 1,680; when we checked the town’s own list it had 1,221 issued and no waitlist. Zones that are full use a waitlist. Buying “in Breckenridge” without the zone is how people discover the waitlist at closing.

Other resort towns — Vail, Aspen, Steamboat, the Summit County side of the same mountains — each have their own cap, zone or primary-residence rule, plus a local lodging tax on top of the state’s 4%. None of them honor a Denver license. The same split, on a lake instead of a ski town, is Lake Tahoe, where the California side and the Nevada side do not share a permit either.

What actually gets hosts in trouble

In Denver it is a second home wearing a primary-residence application, and a lodger’s-tax return that ignored direct bookings. In the mountains it is a purchase that assumed a license was available, and a HOA that banned nightly rentals after the town had already said yes. Private covenants stack on top of the license. The city-by-city pattern is in short-term rental laws by city.