New Hanover County

Operating rules

Primary residence

No

Min stay (nights)

—

Max nights / year

—

Max occupancy

—

Zoning-restricted

No

Cap on licenses

—

Zoning: New Hanover County's Unified Development Ordinance (Updated October 06, 2025) does not regulate short-term rentals as a use. Full-text extraction of all 521 pages found ZERO occurrences of 'short-term rental', 'short term rental', 'short-term lodging', 'vacation rental', 'whole house', 'whole-house', 'tourist home', or 'homestay'. Table 4.2.1 (Principal Use Table) 'Lodging' category contains only three uses: (1) Bed and Breakfast Inn — 'S*' (Special Use Permit + specific use standards) in RA, AR, R-20S, R-20, R-15; 'P' in B-1; defined as 'A place of lodging that located in a single family detached dwelling unit with a resident manager that provides 5 or fewer guest rooms and breakfast for transient occupants'; its only use-specific standard in RA/AR/R-20S/R-20/R-15 is 'No lighting beyond normal residential lighting is allowed' (UDO 4.3.4.E.1, dated [11-16-2020][10-06-2025]); (2) Campground/Recreational Vehicle (RV) Park; (3) Hotel or Motel — 'A building or a group of buildings in which six or more sleeping units are offered to the public and intended primarily for use by transient persons or tourists on an overnight or short-term lodging basis.' A typical whole-house STR is neither a Bed and Breakfast Inn (no resident manager/breakfast) nor a Hotel or Motel (fewer than six sleeping units), and so is treated as an ordinary 'Dwelling' — 'Any building, structure, manufactured home, or mobile home, or part thereof, used and occupied for human habitation or intended to be so used' — subject only to the generally applicable standards of its zoning district. The UDO's 'Dwelling' and 'Dwelling Unit' definitions contain no prohibition on transient occupancy.

• SCOPE: This record covers UNINCORPORATED New Hanover County only. The City of Wilmington, Town of Wrightsville Beach, Town of Carolina Beach, and Town of Kure Beach are separate jurisdictions with their own land-use ordinances and their own separate 6% room occupancy taxes; each requires its own record.
• No county-level primary-residence requirement, minimum-stay requirement, annual night cap, occupancy formula, license cap, or separation/density requirement exists — because the county has no STR ordinance at all. These fields are null as a matter of ordinance absence, not missing data.
• State law preempts a county STR registry: G.S. 160D-1207(c)(i) applies to any 'local government' (which includes counties), and bars requiring an owner/manager of rental property to obtain any permit/permission to lease or rent residential real property or to register rental property, except for individual properties with more than four verified violations in a rolling 12-month period, two or more verified violations in a rolling 30-day period, or in the top ten percent (10%) of properties with crime or disorder problems.
• G.S. 160D-1207(c) also bars a local government from levying 'a special fee or tax on residential rental property that is not also levied against other commercial and residential properties' (with a narrow exception capped at $500.00 in any 12-month period for a property with verified violations), from making a rental registration violation a criminal offense, and from requiring an inspection before receiving local-government utility service.
• The 400-foot separation and 2%-of-residential-parcels cap discussed in Schroeder v. City of Wilmington were provisions of the CITY OF WILMINGTON's ordinance, not New Hanover County's. Do not attribute them to the county.
• Tax-base exemptions relevant to STR hosts (G.S. 105-164.4F(e)), which flow through to the county room occupancy tax because G.S. 153A-155(c) provides the ROT 'applies to the same gross receipts as the State sales tax on accommodations and is calculated in the same manner as that tax': (1) 'A private residence, cottage, or similar accommodation that is rented for fewer than 15 days in a calendar year unless the rental of the accommodation is made by an accommodation facilitator.' (2) 'An accommodation supplied to the same person for a period of 90 or more continuous days.' (3) 'An accommodation arranged or provided to a person by a school, camp, or similar entity where a tuition or fee is charged to the person for enrollment.' Note the 15-day exemption is LOST when the rental is made through a facilitator such as Airbnb or Vrbo.
• New Hanover County is expressly named in the G.S. 153A-155(g) applicability list (as both 'New Hanover' County and 'New Hanover County District U', the Wilmington Convention Center District), so the full uniform room occupancy tax section — including the 20th-day filing deadline in (d) and the G.S. 105-236 penalties in (e) — applies to the county, not merely subsection (c).
• NOT EXAMINED: the NC Vacation Rental Act (G.S. Chapter 42A), which governs written vacation rental agreements for residential property rented through a real estate broker/agent, was not fetched or quote-verified in this research pass and is therefore deliberately excluded from requirements[] rather than asserted. It is a state-layer landlord-tenant obligation, not a county permitting rule.

Enforcement

Active enforcement

no

Fines

There are NO county STR-ordinance fines, because New Hanover County has no short-term rental ordinance to enforce. The only enforcement exposure specific to STR operation is room occupancy tax non-compliance: failure or refusal to file a return or pay the 6% county room occupancy tax is subject to the civil and criminal penalties set by G.S. 105-236 (the State sales and use tax penalty schedule), per G.S. 153A-155(e). The county Board of Commissioners has the same authority to waive ROT penalties that the Secretary of Revenue has for State sales and use taxes. Separately, G.S. 160D-1207(c)(iv) bars any local government from making a violation of a rental registration ordinance a criminal offense, and (iii) caps any special fee on an individual violating rental property at $500.00 in any 12-month period.

Notes

active_enforcement is set to FALSE in the STR-regulatory sense: no county STR registration, inspection, or complaint-response program exists or can lawfully exist under G.S. 160D-1207(c). This should NOT be read as 'taxes are not collected' — the county operates a live Room Occupancy Tax portal (HdL) with a stated monthly filing deadline and published civil/criminal penalty exposure, and platforms (accommodation facilitators) bear statutory remittance liability, so tax collection is real and largely automated at the platform layer. No evidence of a county STR-specific enforcement program, fine schedule, or citation history was found in any primary source; rather than guess at one, this field records the ordinance-absence fact. Generally applicable county regulations (building, housing, nuisance, noise, septic, floodplain) still apply to any dwelling and are enforced through ordinary channels, but they are not STR-specific and were not separately researched in this pass.