Wilmington

Operating rules

Primary residence

No

Min stay (nights)

—

Max nights / year

—

Max occupancy

Homestay lodging: "The maximum number of guest rooms allowed shall be one less than the total number of bedrooms in the dwelling unit, not to exceed three guest rooms." Whole-house lodging: no explicit occupancy cap located in LDC Sec. 18-157; occupancy is constrained indirectly by the one-off-street-parking-space-per-bedroom requirement and by NC State Building Code / fire code / environmental health regulations "for the level of occupancy of the lodging". Homestay in R-15/R-10/R-7/R-5/R-3/HD/HD-R/HDMU is further limited to no more than three patron motor vehicles on site at any time.

Zoning-restricted

Yes

Cap on licenses

No

Grandfathering: Buildings existing as of March 1, 2019 are exempt from the ground-floor street-facing-facade prohibition in the O&I, CB, RB, CBD and UMX districts, and pre-existing improved parking surfaces as of March 1, 2019 remain usable for homestay guest parking. In HD, HD-MU and HD-R only curb cuts existing as of March 1, 2019 may be used to provide off-street parking. Separately (bed and breakfast use only): "Any bed and breakfast lodging establishments existing at the time of the adoption of this ordinance and conforming with the regulations effective prior to adoption of this section for which a zoning permit cannot be issued due to separation requirements shall be considered legal, nonconforming uses."

Zoning: STRs are regulated as zoning uses. In the LDC universal use table (Table 18-19.2), "Homestay" and "Whole house" lodging are marked "C" (permitted with prescribed conditions, subject to the use-specific standards of Sec. 18-157) in a defined subset of districts; a blank cell means the use is prohibited in that district. The exact district-by-district matrix was not transcribed with full column alignment in this pass and should be read directly from Table 18-19.2 before relying on it for a specific parcel. Sec. 18-157 itself references homestay and whole-house lodging standards in (a) the O&I, CB, RB, CBD and UMX districts, where both uses are prohibited on the ground floor of street-facing facades except in buildings existing as of March 1, 2019, and (b) the residential and historic districts (R-15, R-10, R-7, R-5, R-3, HD, HD-R, HDMU are named in the homestay parking provision). Schroeder expressly upheld "the restriction of whole-house lodging to certain zoning districts" as not preempted. Use provisions of Sec. 18-157 are not subject to variance by the board of adjustment. Hotel/motel is a separate use; bed and breakfast lodging is a separate use that DOES still carry a zoning permit and a 400-foot separation requirement under Sec. 18-157.A.

• NO CAP AND NO SEPARATION DISTANCE APPLY TO STRs. The former 2%-of-residentially-zoned-parcels cap and 400-foot separation for whole-house lodging were held preempted in Schroeder: the court invalidated "(1) the cap and distance requirements and their predicate registration provisions, i.e., the entirety of Secs. 18-331.2 and 18-331.4". The 400-foot separation that remains in the current LDC applies only to BED AND BREAKFAST lodging (Sec. 18-157.A.2), a distinct use.
• NO REGISTRATION, NO LICENSE, NO LOTTERY, NO ANNUAL RENEWAL for homestay or whole-house lodging. The current LDC Sec. 18-157 contains "Zoning permits" subsections only for Bed and breakfast lodging (A.3) and Campground (B.3) — there is no corresponding permit/registration subsection under Homestay lodging (C) or Whole-house lodging (D), consistent with the Schroeder holding.
• PUBLISHED-CODE CONFLICT (material): Municode publishes two Wilmington products. The operative one is the standalone "Land Development Code" (productId 15998, Supp. No. 9, updated 2026-06-10), the rewrite adopted 2021 and effective December 1, 2021, containing Sec. 18-157. The separate "Code of Ordinances" product (productId 14101, Supp. No. 41, codified through Ord. No. O-2026-10 enacted March 24, 2026) STILL publishes legacy Chapter 18 Secs. 18-329/18-330/18-331 (Ord. No. O-2018-47, eff. 3-1-2019) with the annual registration, lottery, 400-ft separation, 2% cap and 1-registration-per-person language. That legacy text is the exact text Schroeder invalidated and is superseded by the new LDC; it must not be treated as current law.
• SOURCE-POISONING WARNING for downstream ingestion: web search for "Wilmington short term rental ordinance" surfaces Wilmington, DELAWARE materials — notably Ordinance #0509, "An Ordinance to Amend Chapter 34 of the City Code to Establish Short-Term Residential Rental Regulations" (first/second reading November 21, 2024) on wilmingtoncitycouncil.com, which imposes a short-term rental owner permit, a $75.00 annual permit fee, a 2% lodging tax, and 2-guests-per-bedroom occupancy. That ordinance is Delaware law — it recites "Governor John C. Carney, Jr." and defines rent by reference to "30 Del. C. §6201(2)a.-g." It has NO application to Wilmington, North Carolina and was excluded from this record.
• THIRD-PARTY SEO CLAIMS REJECTED: sites including propertyzoned.com, strprofitmap.com and bnbcalc.com assert a "$100/year Short-Term Rental permit from Development Services", a mandatory "life safety inspection", a "24/7 responsible party within 30 miles", and "$500 per day for operating without STR permit". None of these are supported by any primary source; a city STR permit is preempted under Schroeder, and the LDC's operator-proximity figure is 25 miles, not 30. These claims were not adopted.
• Both STR use types are defined by a maximum continuous rental period of 29 days. There is no minimum-stay requirement and no annual night cap.

Enforcement

Active enforcement

unknown

Fines

—

Notes

NOT VERIFIED — deliberately left null rather than guessed. No STR-specific civil penalty schedule was located in any primary source: a targeted search of the operative Land Development Code (productId 15998) for civil penalty / per-day fine language returned zero hits, and no LDC enforcement fine amount could be quote-anchored. The City of Wilmington's own Short Term Lodging and Zoning Compliance pages (wilmingtonnc.gov) are hard-blocked by an Akamai 403 to automated fetches, so the City's own statement of enforcement practice could not be read. Third-party claims of '$500 per day for operating without STR permit' and '$250 fine per violation' (propertyzoned.com, strprofitmap.com) are unsupported and internally implausible — there is no STR permit to operate without, since Schroeder preempted the permit/registration regime — and were rejected. What IS quote-anchored: (1) the LDC's Sec. 18-157 use provisions 'are not subject to variance by the board of adjustment'; (2) New Hanover County warns that late occupancy tax reports 'are subject to civil and criminal penalties'; and (3) enforcement of the surviving conditions is complaint-driven by design — the Schroeder court reasoned that the parking condition 'does not require registration to be effective or enforceable; a customer may rent a short-term rental assuming compliance with this provision and inform Wilmington of a violation should parking prove inadequate.' A follow-up pass should retrieve LDC Article 7 (Administrative Provisions) enforcement/penalty sections and the City's STR page via a non-blocked channel.