Can this property be a vacation rental?

What decides it

In unincorporated Marin, zoning is close to irrelevant. A license decides it. Marin County Code Chapter 5.41, adopted as Ordinance 3816 in May 2024, makes it unlawful to advertise or operate any rental under 30 days without a current short-term rental license. Licensing opened in December 2024. The first application window closed July 1, 2025. Licenses are capped countywide and again by township, and a license runs two years.

A city or town address is decided by that jurisdiction instead, and Marin’s eleven municipalities range from an outright ban to a registration program.

The license ends at the sale

Section 5.41.050(C): the term of the license expires immediately and automatically upon any change of ownership of the property. Change of ownership is defined by reference to Revenue and Taxation Code section 60 — the same test that triggers a property tax reassessment — rather than to any deed transfer. The one exception is a single transfer per property by inheritance to a spouse or children.

The consequence for a buyer is blunt. A listing marketed with a short-term rental license conveys nothing in unincorporated Marin. The buyer starts on the waiting list, and the income stops at close.

The caps

Section 5.41.070(A) limits unincorporated Marin to 1,200 licenses, excluding Dillon Beach and the Seadrift area of Stinson Beach, which carry their own numbers. Eighteen townships carry their own cap on top of that. Inland unincorporated areas — Tam Valley, Strawberry, Kentfield and their neighbors — have no township cap and count against the 1,200.

The county’s license status report dated August 31, 2026 lists 823 records: 745 issued and 78 under review. It does not include applications sitting on the waitlist. The county publishes no per-township headroom figure, so how much room remains in any single township has to be computed from its own records rather than read off a page.

How a buyer gets a license

By invitation, after waiting. The county’s own instruction is that you can only apply for a license if you have been invited to do so, and that everyone else applies for the waitlist. Waitlist registration is $50 a year. A new license is $600, or $300 where the home is the owner’s primary residence.

A lottery set the order among applications received in the first 30 days; everything after that is first come, first served. When an opening appears the county contacts the next applicant, who has 60 days to file. The county does not publish how long any township’s queue is. There is no route to a license at close of escrow.

Parcels that cannot qualify at all

• One license per owner. Owners legally running more than one on January 1, 2024 got a two-year grace period per property; after that only a single license renews.
• Condominiums and multi-family units. Only units legally operating as of January 1, 2024 were ever eligible, and their initial licenses cannot be renewed for a second two-year term. Those start expiring from late 2026.
• Statewide-exemption ADUs created or legalized after January 1, 2020, and other ADUs created or legalized after February 24, 2021.
• Anything under a recorded affordable housing, agricultural employee or farmworker housing restriction.
• Property with no existing legal residential unit, recreational vehicles, and structures without a foundation.

A hosted rental is one in the owner’s primary residence, which the county defines as occupancy at least six months a year. An unhosted rental carries no residency requirement — the constraint there is the cap and the license, not where the owner lives.

The cities and towns

• Sausalito — banned, and the ban was re-enacted and toughened in October 2025 and again in March 2026, which added platform reporting duties. Advertising is separately prohibited.
• Tiburon — banned. The town’s own guidance is that all rentals must be 30 days or longer.
• San Rafael — allowed only where the unit is the permanent resident’s primary residence, proven with three of five documents. Registration has been mandatory since January 2020.
• Novato — allowed only where the permanent resident occupies the property at least 60 days a year, under the same three-of-five proof standard.
• Fairfax — allowed with annual registration since April 2024, plus the town’s hotel user tax.
• Ross — does not regulate short-term rentals in single-family homes, and prohibits them in ADUs and JADUs. That position rests on a 2023 staff report and could change without much notice.
• Belvedere, Larkspur, Mill Valley, Corte Madera and San Anselmo — confirm directly with the city before you rely on anything. Their published positions could not be verified from the cities’ own current documents, and at least one widely repeated summary of San Anselmo appears to be wrong.

Transient occupancy tax is 10 percent in unincorporated Marin and 14 percent in West Marin, where a 2018 ballot measure added four points.