Key Takeaways

  • With no statewide rules, Vermont towns are writing their own short-term rental laws, from hard caps to registries to no oversight at all
  • Stowe is set to cap short-term rentals at 850 units, freezing new ones until attrition brings the number down
  • Short-term rentals are just 3 percent of Vermont housing statewide, but top 20 percent in ski towns like Stowe and Ludlow

Vermont has no single rulebook for short-term rentals, so its towns are writing their own, and the results look nothing alike from one town line to the next.

According to a Seven Days report, the state’s housing chief has gone out of his way to say vacation rentals are not what broke Vermont housing. Statewide, they make up just 3 percent of homes, roughly 11,000 units, per AirDNA data. But that average hides the real story. In ski towns like Stowe and Ludlow, the concentration now tops 20 percent.

That gap is why the fight has gone local. A statewide registry bill stalled in committee this session, and Gov. Phil Scott vetoed an earlier version, so towns are left to sort it out themselves.

“There’s a reason you don’t hear us at the state level saying short-term rentals are the problem that is driving our housing shortage,” said Vermont Housing Commissioner Alex Farrell, per the outlet. “Because they are not. Short-term rentals have become a bogeyman that distracts attention from Vermont’s failure to build enough homes.”

Taking a deep dive into the state’s varying regulations, the outlet grouped four of them into four very different playbooks.

Stowe went hardest. Officials moved to cap short-term rentals at 850, letting current owners keep operating until they sell, effectively freezing new entries. When the plan went public, spooked homeowners flooded the registry, ballooning it from about 1,000 to more than 1,600, nearly 40 percent of the town’s housing.

The registry also revealed nearly 80 percent of Stowe rentals are owned by people who live somewhere else, with almost as many owners in Massachusetts as Vermont.

Related: Charleston South Carolina property owners speak out as city moves closer to eight-guest cap on short-term rentals

Same state, four different rulebooks

Burlington took a different route.

The state’s largest city requires most hosts to live on the property they rent and tacks a 9 percent local tax onto every booking, money that feeds its housing trust fund.

Short-term rentals sit under 2 percent of the city’s housing there, yet listings still climbed from about 200 in 2022 to roughly 300 now, which rental advocates cite as proof the rules failed. A dozen owners sued the city in 2022, and four years later the case is still unresolved while those rentals keep operating.

Meanwhile, Woodstock has been at this since 2002, amending its rules over and over rather than setting one and walking away.

The village runs a cap near 100 rentals and even paid landlords up to $9,000 to convert units to long-term housing. Ludlow, where roughly one in five homes is a vacation rental, has mostly skipped the brawl entirely, debating a registry and safety rules rather than any hard limit on numbers.

Airbnb has not sat quietly. The platform spent more than $76,000 lobbying in Vermont across 2025 and early 2026, up sharply from prior years, and emailed Stowe hosts urging them to fight the cap. The bigger question splitting these towns stays unsettled. Whether capping rentals actually returns homes to residents, or just moves the money to the next town over, is playing out one selectboard vote at a time.

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