Ridgefield, CT Short-Term Rentals: Occupancy Limits (2026)

Section 2.2, Defined Terms, builds the town's short-term-rental rules around three linked definitions. Short-Term Rental covers an entire residential property, an entire Accessory Dwelling Unit, or one room within a Single-Family Dwelling offered as accommodation to only one Lodging Party at a time, with the owner allowed but not required to be onsite. Lodging Party is defined as one or more persons who together constitute a single reservation or booking for transient lodging accommodations, regardless of whether such persons are related, and the same subsection sets the hard cap: at a Bed & Breakfast or Short-Term Rental, a single Lodging Party may never exceed ten people.

The definitions also introduce Lodging Night, any 24-hour period a party is accommodated, and Lodging Stay, one or more successive Lodging Nights, terms that feed the separate time-and-frequency restrictions on Short-Term Rentals referenced in Section 8.11. Because a Short-Term Rental can only host one Lodging Party at a time, the ten-person cap functions as the property's total overnight-occupancy ceiling, not a per-room limit; a host cannot book two unrelated groups simultaneously to get around it. These definitions were adopted under amendment A-26-1 on June 23, 2026, part of the same 2026 short-term-rental overhaul that added the Zoning Permit and Special Permit tiers in Section 3.3.A.6 and the fee schedule in Section 10.1.