Reno

Operating rules

Primary residence

—

Min stay (nights)

—

Max nights / year

—

Max occupancy

—

Zoning-restricted

Yes

Cap on licenses

—

Zoning: Reno operates a permissive-list (closed) use code. RMC 18.03.201(f): 'Prohibited Uses A blank cell in Table 3-1, Table of Allowed Uses indicates that the use is prohibited in the respective zoning district.' RMC 18.03.204: 'All other uses not specifically listed are prohibited and shall be unlawful unless the Administrator has determined an appropriate use category and use type for the unlisted use pursuant to the procedure in Section 18.03.205, below.' Table 3-1's 'Lodging' category (adopted by Ord. No. 6692 § 1(Exh. A), 2025-01-08) contains only six use types — Bed and Breakfast Inn, Hotel-Condominium, Hotel, Hotel with Nonrestricted Gaming, Motel, Motel with Nonrestricted Gaming — and NO 'Short-Term Rental' use type. Hotel and Motel are blank (prohibited) across the single-family and multifamily residential districts; Hotel is 'P' only in the commercial/urban/mixed districts, Motel narrower still. The only Lodging use reaching SF districts is Bed and Breakfast Inn at 'M' (minor conditional use permit), gated on on-site operator residency, six guest rooms max, no guest-room kitchens, one-month-in-three occupancy limit, and (in SF-5, SF-8, MF-14, PO, NC) historic-register status. Net: Reno's zoning code nowhere authorizes short-term rental as a use, and its unlisted-use clause makes unlisted uses unlawful absent an Administrator determination.

• No city STR ordinance exists, therefore no primary-residence rule, no annual night cap, no STR-specific occupancy formula, no license cap, and no grandfathering clause exist at the city layer. All such fields are null because the instrument that would create them has not been adopted — not because they were unresearched.
• The recurring '28 days' figure in Reno-area STR discussion is a TAX boundary, not a minimum-stay mandate. RSCVA Regulations §1.32: a 'Transient Guest' is an occupant with right of occupancy 'for less than twenty-eight consecutive days'; §6.1 exempts rentals of 28+ consecutive days from the tax. RMC 4.04.008 independently uses the same 28-day line to define a 'residential dwelling unit'. Nothing in Reno law forbids a stay shorter than 28 days.
• Reno City Council has declined to regulate STRs on multiple occasions. In Sept 2025 it received a staff presentation on the residential/STR rental market and options, and directed staff to continue monitoring rather than adopt an ordinance. On 2025-10-08 it adopted the ADU ordinance after stripping the Planning Commission's proposed 28-day minimum rental term, expressly deferring STRs to a separate future ordinance — which, as of 2026-07-16, has not appeared in Municode's adopted-or-pending listings (Ord. 6733–6743, 2026-02-11 through 2026-06-03). Sourced from news reporting and council summaries, not primary code, and therefore NOT counted as quote-anchored evidence in sources[]; treat as background.
• A single-family home rented short-term is definitionally outside RMC 4.04.007(3)(b)'s 'Three or more residential dwelling units on one parcel' business trigger, because RMC 4.04.008 limits 'residential dwelling unit' to rentals 'for a period of 28 consecutive days or more'. Whether the general 'doing business' clause nonetheless captures an STR is unresolved in published city material.

Enforcement

Active enforcement

unknown

Fines

No City of Reno STR-specific penalty exists (no STR ordinance to violate). Two enforcement hooks are real: (1) RSCVA may assess $250.00 per day for operating a transient lodging business without a room tax license, each day deemed a separate violation, and may institute show-cause proceedings to revoke the Transient Lodging Tax License and/or suspend the business license where an operator is delinquent more than 60 days, has been delinquent twice in the preceding 12 months and is currently delinquent, fails to produce audit documents, or fails to pay an undisputed audit assessment within 30 days. (2) Under RMC 4.04.020, operating without a required city business license is 'a violation of this title for each and every day that such activities are carried on', and the violator 'must immediately cease all non-licensed operations' — but whether a single STR requires that license is itself unresolved (see requirements[]).

Notes

active_enforcement is deliberately null, not false. No published City of Reno STR enforcement program, complaint portal, hotline, code-enforcement guidance page, or citation record was located, and reno.gov's news/STR URLs surfaced in search now return HTTP 404 after a site redesign — so I could not confirm either active enforcement or its absence from an official source. Inferring 'no enforcement' from a 404 would be a guess. What IS documented is that RSCVA runs a genuine audit-and-revocation apparatus on the tax side (RSCVA Reg. §12), which is the practical enforcement risk facing a Reno STR operator. The zoning-side exposure under RMC 18.03.204 is theoretical on this record: no evidence was found that Reno has ever applied the unlisted-use prohibition against an STR host.