Separating the two halves of each programme

This is the analysis that matters, and it is why “the state killed the Fishers rental cap” is too blunt to be useful.

Each city built two things at once: a registration and permitting regime, and a numerical cap. The statute treats them differently.

So the likely trajectory is not that these programmes disappear. It is that they survive as registries and lose their teeth — the cities keep knowing who the landlords are, and lose the power to say there are too many.

One caution on the boundary: a registration scheme operated so as to produce a cap — by refusing permits once a threshold is reached, for instance — would be a cap by another name. Where the line falls has not been tested.

What this means for an Indiana association

Here is the shift that matters, and it is easy to miss because it is spread across two sections of the same act.

Communities in Fishers, Carmel and anywhere else that has been relying on a municipal cap to hold down investor ownership are on a clock. After the end of 2027, that protection is gone.

What replaces it, if anything, is the association's own recorded covenants. And the same session made that route considerably more workable:

• The amendment consent ceiling fell to two-thirds, so a rental restriction is easier to pass than it was.
• Only homestead-occupying members may vote on rental restrictions, effective from 12 March 2026 — which removes the investor bloc from the electorate on precisely this question.

The legislature has, in one act, taken this decision away from city councils and handed it to resident owners voting through their associations. An Indiana community that wants a rental limit after 2027 now has one route to it, and roughly fifteen months to work out whether it wants to take it.

The practical timeline

1. Now through 2027. Existing municipal caps remain enforceable. Associations have time to consider whether to act.
2. Before starting an amendment campaign, establish homestead status across the membership. It determines the electorate and it takes time to assemble.
3. Model the arithmetic honestly. Two-thirds of the resident-owner electorate is the target. A community that is already heavily investor-owned may find the restriction achievable now precisely because those owners no longer vote on it.
4. Decide what a restriction should actually say. A cap on the number of rented homes, a minimum lease term, a prohibition on short lets, an owner-occupancy period after purchase, or grandfathering for existing landlords are all different instruments with different consequences.
5. 1 January 2028. Non-conforming municipal caps become unenforceable.

A note on the short-term rental exemption

The carve-out for pre-2018 short-term rental ordinances under IC 36-1-24 is narrow and worth reading carefully rather than assuming it covers a city's STR programme. Indiana's 2018 framework already constrained municipal authority over short-term rentals, and this act's exemption preserves ordinances that predate it. A short-term rental ordinance adopted after that framework does not obviously sit inside the exemption.

We flag one further point as unresolved rather than settled: reporting in spring 2026 indicated Carmel dropped a pending enforcement action against a short-term rental operator after the act passed, on the basis that its older ordinance had been affected. We were not able to review the underlying litigation, and readers should not treat the effect on any particular municipal STR ordinance as determined.

What to watch

Whether Fishers and Carmel amend their ordinances before the deadline or let the caps lapse, and whether either tests the boundary between a preserved registration scheme and a prohibited cap. Also whether other Indiana municipalities that were considering similar programmes now abandon them — the statute forecloses new ones immediately, with no grace period for anything adopted from 2026 onward.