Portage County, WI Short-Term Rentals: Occupancy Limits (2026)

Sec. 4.3 of the Portage County Code regulates hotels, motels, bed and breakfast establishments and tourist rooming houses under authority the state delegates through Wis. Stats. § 254.69. Sec. 4.3.3(1) defines a bed and breakfast narrowly: it can offer no more than eight rooms for rent, and those rooms together may not serve more than 20 tourists or transients at once. To qualify at all, the establishment must serve no meal besides breakfast, and only to its own renters; it must be the owner's personal residence, occupied by the owner at the time of rental; and it must have originally been built and occupied as a single-family home, or converted to one, before being used for lodging.

Sec. 4.3.3(1)(f) also freezes the building's footprint: any structural addition to the original dimensions had to be completed before May 11, 1990, though a renovation staying within those original dimensions is allowed afterward. By contrast, Sec. 4.3.3(4) defines a hotel as five or more rooms offered to transients, with no cap on total guests, and Sec. 4.3.3(8) defines a tourist rooming house as any other lodging place, cabin or cottage offering paid sleeping accommodations to tourists, again without a numeric occupancy ceiling. So the 20-tourist, eight-room ceiling is specific to the bed and breakfast category and does not apply to a hotel, motel or tourist rooming house operating under the same section.