Stanislaus County, CA Accessory Structures: ADU Rental Restrictions (2026)

Every accessory dwelling or junior accessory dwelling built in the unincorporated county comes with a permanent rental restriction. 050 requires the property owner to sign a restrictive covenant and pay to have it recorded with the county recorder. Subsection (C) of that covenant fixes the rule: any rental of the accessory dwelling or junior accessory dwelling must be for a term longer than thirty days, which as a practical matter forecloses nightly and weekly short-term rentals of ADUs through platforms like Airbnb or VRBO wherever the covenant applies.

The restriction does not expire when the property changes hands, subsection (D) makes the thirty-day minimum, along with the covenant's other limits on separate sale and unit modification, binding on every assign, successor in interest, personal representative, estate and heir of the original owner. Because the covenant is recorded against the parcel rather than tied to a person, a new buyer inherits the same thirty-day rental floor automatically and cannot rent the ADU short-term even if the covenant is not restated in the sale paperwork.

The rule applies uniformly to both full ADUs and junior ADUs built inside an existing house, and it operates independent of the separate-conveyance restriction in subsection (A), which keeps the ADU from being sold off as its own parcel.