Kent, WA Short-Term Rentals: Primary-Residence-Only Rule (2026)

030(34). 01 KCC. The core occupancy rule, subsection (34)(b), requires that "the home shall be occupied by the owner or a nontransient tenant for at least six months of each year," which blocks pure investment-only short-term rentals where no one lives at the property most of the year. The code also caps the scale of the rental: subsection (34)(c) allows no more than three rooms within the home or an accessory structure to be offered as short-term rentals, so an operator can rent bedrooms in an occupied house but cannot convert the whole property, or an unoccupied accessory dwelling, into a stand-alone rental business.

37 RCW, which layers state registration and insurance duties on top of these local conditions. Because the occupancy and room-count conditions sit in the residential land use development conditions table that governs every zoning district allowing dwellings, they apply citywide wherever a short-term rental is proposed, not just in a single zone. The city's Economic and Community Development Department administers zoning compliance and business licensing together, so a rental found to be operating without the required owner or tenant residency, or exceeding the three-room limit, is both a zoning violation and a business license compliance issue.