Two Florida cities, two opposite answers on whether condo rentals need a city licence
Two Florida cities, two opposite answers on whether condo rentals need a city licence
2026-09-10 · Florida · Compliance
What happened. Two Florida municipalities adopted rental rules within months of each other, and they treat condominium units in opposite ways. The contrast is the clearest available illustration of a point that catches owners constantly: local rental regulation and your association's leasing rules are two separate compliance tracks, and satisfying one does not satisfy the other.
Cape Coral: condominium units are covered
The City of Cape Coral overhauled its Residential Rental Registration Program by Ordinance 53-25 and Resolution 279-25, effective 1 January 2026. Registration and annual renewal are mandatory, with renewal keyed to each property's anniversary date rather than a uniform January deadline.1
Covered properties are single-family homes, duplexes, multi-family dwellings, and condominiums leased to tenants.
Fees are $35 a year for long-term rentals (over six months) and $350 a year for short-term (six months or less). Penalties are $50 for failure to register and $50 for late renewal within 30 days, with escalating violation fines of $250 first and $500 repeat for long-term, and $500 first and $1,000 repeat for short-term, plus referral to Code Compliance.
The obligation lands on the individual unit owner who leases, entirely independently of what the declaration says.
Sarasota: condominiums and cooperatives are exempt
The City of Sarasota rewrote its vacation rental rules by Ordinance 25-5560, adopted 21 July 2025, amending Chapter 34.5 of the city code.2
Every vacation rental in the city must hold a Sarasota Vacation Rental Certificate, display the certificate number in all advertised listings, state accurate maximum occupancy in advertising, observe a minimum seven-day stay, and pass an inspection before issuance. Fees run to $500 for the initial application and $350 for annual renewal. Occupancy is capped at 10 people in Residential Single-Family and 12 in Residential Multi-Family. Suspensions escalate from 30 to 60 to 90 days and up to 360, with each day a separate violation.
But the city's own compliance page states that registration does not apply to “condominiums, cooperatives, or properties rented for 30 consecutive days or more.”
So in Sarasota, a condominium short-term rental is governed by the declaration, not by the city certificate.
Why cities regulate operations rather than banning rentals
The pattern behind both ordinances is Florida's partial preemption of vacation rental regulation in s. 509.032(7)(b), which limits a local government's ability to prohibit vacation rentals or to regulate their duration or frequency.
What cities do instead is regulate the operational surface: registration, licensing, fees, inspections, occupancy limits, advertising requirements, safety features and code compliance. Cape Coral and Sarasota are two applications of the same strategy, differing in whether they reach condominium units at all.
That preemption framework was not amended in the 2026 session. Our review of every 2026 bill touching vacation or short-term rentals found only pool and water-safety licensing measures — SB 608, CS/CS/SB 658 and CS/HB 79 — and all of them died. No 2026 bill proposed preempting local government or association regulation of short-term rentals.3
What the association can still do, regardless of the city
This is the half owners most often get wrong. A city certificate is not permission from your association, and an exemption from city registration is not permission either.
Section 720.306(1)(h)2 provides that a homeowners' association “may amend its governing documents to prohibit or regulate rental agreements for a term of less than 6 months and may prohibit the rental of a parcel for more than three times in a calendar year,” applying to all parcel owners. That is existing law, and it was not changed this session — HB 657, which died in Senate Rules, touched that paragraph only with a cross-reference correction.
Condominium leasing restrictions run through the declaration and Chapter 718. Neither chapter's rental provisions were amended in the 2025 or 2026 regular sessions.
The four-question test for an owner who leases
- Does my association permit this rental at all? Check the declaration and any amendments for minimum-term restrictions, frequency limits, approval requirements and guest rules.
- Does my city require registration, and does it reach condominium units? The answer differs by municipality, as these two ordinances show.
- What does the state require? A public lodging licence for transient rentals, plus tax registration.
- What does my county require? Tourist development tax collection and remittance, which is separate again.
Four questions, four different answers, and satisfying any one of them is no defence to the others.
A settlement that was not in the governing documents
One reported Miami-Dade case is worth flagging as a cautionary lead, though we could not verify it directly. Seven unit owners at two Fontainebleau condo-hotels sued over rules that they said would effectively force them back into the hotel rental programme, relying on a 2012 agreement. The suit was reportedly dismissed in May 2026 on standing grounds, with reporting attributing the outcome to the associations' failure to incorporate the settlement agreements into the governing documents.
We could not open the primary reporting or the docket, so this is single-chain sourcing and we do not present the reasoning as established. If it holds, the category rule is a useful one to check today: a side agreement or settlement that was never recorded into the declaration may not be enforceable by individual unit owners at all.
A negative finding worth publishing
Owners are increasingly told that Florida's “missing middle” zoning reforms override association restrictions on accessory dwelling units. For Florida in this period, that is wrong.
Under s. 163.31771 a local government may authorise ADUs in single-family zones but is not required to. The statewide ADU mandate in CS/CS/SB 48 passed the Senate 38-0 and died in House Messages on 13 March 2026, and the ADU language was removed from CS/CS/HB 1389, the affordable-housing bill that did become law as Chapter 2026-179. No Florida law preempts recorded covenants, and Florida courts uphold recorded deed restrictions over municipal zoning permission.
Municipal permission to build is not association permission to build. That is the same two-track structure as the rental rules above.
What to watch next
Cape Coral's first renewal cycle runs on property anniversary dates through 2026, so the first enforcement wave arrives on a rolling basis rather than at a single deadline. And with no 2027 bill filed on rentals or preemption — the filing window runs to noon on 2 March 2027 — the action for the next several months is municipal rather than legislative.
Related Florida HOA Topics
- City of Cape Coral, Residential Rental Registration Program — Ordinance 53-25 and Resolution 279-25, effective 1 January 2026 ↩
- City of Sarasota, Vacation Rental Registration and Compliance — Ordinance 25-5560 ↩
- CS/CS/SB 658 (2026), Water Safety Requirements for the Rental of Residential and Vacation Properties — died in House Messages ↩
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