What are the short-term rental rules in Hurricane?

Hurricane allows short-term rentals in some places and prohibits them in most. What separates the two is a city business license, not anything you can see from the street.

That distinction is the whole post. A listing can say “short-term rental allowed,” the neighbor can have been renting nightly for years, and the property can still be one you cannot legally rent after you buy it. That goes wrong expensively, because the income the purchase was underwritten on turns out not to exist.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and this is the Washington County question with the largest gap between what buyers assume and what the code says.

How Hurricane defines the thing it regulates

The city code treats stays of one to 30 days as transient lodging. That is the trigger. It does not matter whether you call it a vacation rental, a nightly rental, a short-term rental or a guest stay. If the occupancy is 30 days or less, the transient lodging rules apply.

Two parts of the code work together:

The licensing requirement. No transient lodging facility may be used as a short-term vacation rental until the owner has obtained a city business license. The license is the permission. Everything else follows from whether it exists and is current.

The residential prohibition. Renting a dwelling unit in a multi-family, single-family residential or residential agricultural zone for 30 days or less is prohibited, with an exception for a single-family home whose owner holds and keeps in good standing a business license.

Read together, those say the default in residential Hurricane is no, and the license is the way out of the default. Not the HOA’s opinion, not precedent on the street, not what the seller has been doing.

Hurricane City Code Title 3, Chapters 9 and 10, checked November 2026. The code is amended from time to time and the city is the authority on its current text.

The licenses have been limited, which is the part that bites

An older city ordinance limited the number of short-term vacation rental licenses available in single-family zones, tying the number to city population, and capped occupancy at ten persons per licensed dwelling.

Whether those exact provisions are still in force is a question for the city rather than for me, and I would not rely on a document of that age without confirming it. But the mechanism matters even if the numbers have moved, because a capped licensing scheme behaves differently from an open one in two ways buyers rarely anticipate.

First, availability is finite. A property can be in a permitted zone, meet every standard, and still not get a license because none are available.

Second, and more important, a license is generally tied to the owner, not to the land. The seller’s license does not come with the house like a water heater. The purchaser applies in their own name, and if the scheme is capped, the seller surrendering one does not mean the buyer receives one. Ask the city directly how transfer works for the specific property, and get the answer before the due diligence period closes.

Where nightly rental actually happens in Hurricane

The resort areas are the practical answer, and Sand Hollow is the well-known one. Zoning built around resort and recreation use is where nightly rental is contemplated by design rather than tolerated by exception.

The historic core, the bench subdivisions and most of the standard residential neighborhoods are not that. Properties in those areas are in the default-prohibited category, license or no license.

I am deliberately not publishing a list of approved subdivisions, because that list is exactly the kind of thing that is right the day it is written and wrong a year later, and a buyer acting on a stale list is worse off than one who made a phone call. The zoning map and the business licensing office are the authority. Call them about the parcel.

If what you are weighing is the area generally rather than a specific property, what it is like living near Sand Hollow covers the day-to-day reality of a neighborhood with a lot of visitor turnover, which is its own consideration.

The HOA layer sits on top

A city license permits the use. It does not override a recorded covenant.

An HOA can prohibit short-term rental outright, impose a minimum lease term that defeats nightly use, require board approval, or cap the number of rentals in the community. Those restrictions are private, they run with the land, and the association enforces them independently of the city.

In practice this is where more deals come apart than at the city level, because buyers check the zoning and skip the covenants. How to read CC&Rs before buying covers finding the clause, which is often written as a minimum lease term rather than as the words short-term rental.

What I would verify, in order, before writing an offer

One. Zoning for the parcel, from the city, by parcel number rather than by subdivision name.

Two. Whether a license currently exists on the property, whether it is in good standing, and exactly what happens to it at sale. Get this from the licensing office, not from the seller.

Three. Whether new licenses are available in that zone right now.

Four. The recorded covenants, read in full, looking for minimum lease terms and rental caps.

Five. What the operating costs actually are, because the gross figure in a listing is not the number that matters.

Every one of those is free and takes a phone call. All five are far cheaper before closing than after.

The honest caveat

Demand is also seasonal in a county whose winter and summer visitors are different crowds, and what closes in southern Utah in the winter covers that rhythm. Short-term rental rules across Washington County have been tightening rather than loosening for several years, and nothing stops a city from changing its scheme after you buy. Underwriting a purchase on nightly income assumes a regulatory environment that is not certain to persist.

That is not an argument against doing it. Plenty of people operate legally and profitably here. It is an argument for buying a property that still makes sense if the rules change, rather than one that only works if they do not.

If you are already holding one and thinking about the exit, how to sell a short-term rental covers what buyers will want to see.

And if you are evaluating a specific Hurricane property with nightly income in the plan, send me the address before you write the offer. The verification above is quick, and I would rather do it with you than explain afterward why it mattered.