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In March, the city council passed a new charter that would allow people to rent their main residence for 31 days or less during the peak tourist season between June 10 and September 10. They also have to obtain a $300 license from the city and meet previous requirements to register in the province.
Full-time Airbnb units operated by commercial businesses are still allowed in certain parts of the city, but only in a few streets and areas.
Councilman Despina Sourias, who is in charge of housing, said the previous rules were difficult to enforce because they allowed some property owners to avoid fines by saying renting out property, which is their primary residence.
She said the new rules would shift the burden of proof to listed owners rather than inspectors.
“Until then, we have to go out and catch people, we have to roam the streets,” she said in a telephone interview.
Sourias said it is banning short-term rentals in major homes for nine months a year, making fines easier. “You don’t have a license, you get a ticket,” she said. “If you do it outside of the time you allow it, you get a ticket.”
The new rules are the next step in a gradual crackdown across the province, which began to be killed in a fire in an old Montreal building in March 2023, with six victims living in Airbnb rents, and the mayor confirmed the city would not allow the city.
After the fire, the provincial government introduced new legislation requiring platforms such as Airbnb to display only advertisements including travel permit numbers and expiration dates. The city also hired a group of inspectors to try to strike.
Before the new charter, it is easier for people to rent major homes for a short period of time, such as during holidays.
This has led some people to use different plans to mistakenly declare full-time rents as their primary residence and force inspectors to conduct a lengthy investigation to prove otherwise, the city said.
The mayor of Montreal said in January that despite provincial laws, more than half of the 4,000 units on short-term rental platforms do not comply with the rules.
The new regulations have been pushed back by the provincial tourism ministry and platforms such as Airbnb, claiming they will damage the city’s economy and will not help improve housing affordability.
Airbnb’s policy-responsible Alex Howell calls on New York City to reverse what she calls “extreme and shortsighted” rules.
“This well-thought-out decision will drive hotel prices and make travel more expensive for Quebecs, who lived in Airbnb in Montreal last year – and weakened Montreal’s ability to attract visitors to major events in the fuel tourism industry throughout the year,” she said in a statement.
Saif Yousif, property manager at Park Place Properties, believes the new rules are too restrictive. Yousif manages about 80 short-term rentals in the Montreal and Monterey Bandrant areas, including many clients owning many who want to rent a property while traveling.
Yousif believes that the existing rules are strict enough to prevent people from wrongly claiming that investment property is the primary place of residence. He said the regulations “make it difficult for (homeowners) to take a leave or leave and leave the city” and are unlikely to cause units to return to long-term rental pools.
He added that the best way to keep your rental price is to build more housing.
Similarly, the province’s tourism ministry said the new regulations would not cause a termination of illegal rents or housing crisis.
“Instead, they can even worsen the situation by pushing more operators toward illegality, allowing Montreal to return to the wild network before reform,” it said in a statement to Canadian media.
But David Wachsmuth, president of McGill University’s research on urban governance, believes Montreal may succeed, while other cities fail to break illegal rents.
He said the platform left it to the city to track the rules, which forced city officials to “play detectives” and figure out who are actually the main residents and who are not.
Under these rules, enforcement will be easier because anyone running Airbnb outside of a designated full-time rental area can be automatically fined outside of the summer.
“Anyone running Airbnb in March, if you’re not in those very few corridors and you can (legally) do that, then there’s a guarantee that you’re breaking the law,” he said. “So, this is just a real fundamental shift in the overall process where a short-term rental moderator will interact with Montreal’s law.”
Most Montreal people who want to rent a main residence may do so primarily in the summer, he said. Therefore, these rules will only inconvenience for legitimate home suppliers while making full-time unauthorized rents even more difficult.
Wachsmuth also dismissed any claim that limiting short-term rentals would not help relieve housing pressure, saying the study showed that “beyond any shattering of doubt” and was about to extend communities with short-term rental rules, seeing their rents rise slowly than those that do not.
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Last modified: June 3, 2025
