Boulder, CO Short-Term Rentals: Host Platform Liability (2026)

Boulder Revised Code Chapter 8-11 lets neighborhoods of lodging businesses, including short-term rentals, form a Lodging Business Assessment Area (LBAA) and impose a fee or assessment on room revenue. Section 8-11-19, "Hosting Platforms," applies that fee structure to every short-term rental accommodation and hosting platform doing business inside an LBAA's boundaries. A hosting platform is defined in Section 8-11-2 as any person who collects or receives a fee, directly or indirectly, for conducting a booking transaction through any medium of facilitation, including an internet-based platform.

Under Subsection (b), once a short-term rental accommodation uses a hosting platform to collect lodger funds, the accommodation must first tell the platform that the collected total includes the LBAA fee, and the platform must then set aside that amount and remit it to the city. That duty attaches regardless of whether the accommodation itself has complied with its own notice obligation, unless the platform holds the written exemption statement described in Subsection (a). Subsection (b)(3) makes clear the accommodation is not off the hook either: if the platform fails to remit, the accommodation still owes the LBAA fee.

In practice this creates overlapping liability between the property and the booking site collecting on its behalf, with the written perjury-backed statement as the only way to shift collection duty entirely onto the accommodation.