Osceola County, FL Short-Term Rentals: Night Caps (2026)

032, preempts the regulation of public lodging establishments, including vacation rentals, to the state, and paragraph (b) specifically bars any 'local law, ordinance, or regulation' from prohibiting vacation rentals or regulating the 'duration or frequency of rental' of a vacation rental. That single sentence is what stops Osceola County from writing a rule that says a short-term rental can only be booked a set number of nights a year, or that owners must leave it vacant between bookings. The preemption has one grandfather date: it 'does not apply to any local law, ordinance, or regulation adopted on or before June 1, 2011,' so a county or city that already had a night-cap or frequency rule on the books before that date can keep enforcing it.

Paragraph (c) adds a narrow carve-out for local rules that use property valuation as a criterion for vacation-rental status, but only where that rule needs state land-planning-agency approval under an area-of-critical-state-concern designation, which doesn't describe Osceola County. Nothing in the local code reviewed shows Osceola ever adopted a pre-2011 unincorporated-area night-cap ordinance; the closest local text, the Chapter 24 definition used for the reduced educational impact fee, caps an individual guest's stay at 30 days to qualify a unit as transient for fee purposes, which is a fee-eligibility test, not an annual rental-night limit on the property. Enforcement of public-lodging licensing itself runs through the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation's Division of Hotels and Restaurants, not the county.