Milpitas, CA Short-Term Rentals: Host Presence Rule (2026)

Subsection C.6 of Milpitas's Short-Term Rental ordinance draws a hard line between hosted and un-hosted rentals. The text permits only a hosted rental, where an owner or operator is living and present in the dwelling unit during the short-term rental period, and it separately prohibits un-hosted rentals, where an owner or operator is not living and present in the primary dwelling unit during the short-term rental period. Because the Section also confines STRs to primary dwelling units under Subsection B.3, an operator cannot satisfy the host-presence rule by staying in an ADU, a converted garage, or a recreational vehicle while renting out the main house; the host must be present in the same primary dwelling unit that is being rented.

The rule works together with the one-rental-per-dwelling cap in Subsection C.3 and the maximum-occupancy formula in Subsection C.7, since a hosted rental by definition counts the host among the occupants sharing the unit during the STR period. The Purpose clause in Subsection A explains the policy behind the host-presence requirement: the City intends the ordinance to preserve the residential character of neighborhoods and to prevent long-term residential uses from being replaced with STRs, and a resident host physically on site is the mechanism the ordinance relies on to keep an STR from becoming a standalone rental business rather than a homeowner's occasional room or home rental.