Miami’s short-stay regime is not the Bay Area model, and it is not the Northeast model. Three overlapping jurisdictions write the rules every Miami-Dade operator has to track: the City of Miami’s own short-term rental ordinance (and, inside Miami Beach city limits, the resort-tier surtax that sits on top of it), Miami-Dade County’s vacation-rental licensing and permit caps, and the Florida state layer — DBPR registration for transient public lodging and the 13% tourist development tax remitted on FL DR-308. The operator of record across all three is a human, and the human stays the human the city, the county, and the state reach when something goes wrong.
City of Miami STR ordinance and the 30-day residential-zone minimum
The City of Miami’s short-term rental ordinance requires every operator of a dwelling used for stays under 30 days to register with the city and to operate under a valid city STR license. In residential zones, the ordinance tightens that further: a non-primary residence in a residential zone cannot be rented for fewer than 30 days at a time. The rule is property-specific — it tracks the zoning class on the parcel, not the booking platform the listing sits on — which is why duplicating or omitting the city registration across platforms is the most common cause of a de-listing.
The ordinance was shaped by the Mayor’s Working Group on short-term rentals, whose guidance the city continues to reference when enforcement questions arise. Operators who can answer the working group’s three questions — is this the operator’s primary residence, is the zoning class compatible with short stays, is the city registration current — are the ones who survive a complaint-driven audit without an escalation. RentaraAI tracks each of those three signals per address and surfaces the answer before a booking is accepted, not after.
Miami-Dade vacation-rental licensing and permit caps
County-level enforcement runs through the Miami-Dade vacation-rental license, which is issued for a specific property address and attaches to that address for the life of the license. The county publishes the active license list, every major booking platform pulls it, and a lapse triggers automatic de-listing on each platform that does. Where the county has set permit caps, those caps bind at the license layer — once a cap is reached, new licenses are not issued until the cap moves, regardless of how many operators are ready to register.
Most host-side exposure on the county layer is renewal-lapse exposure, not missing-the-license-entirely exposure. The lapse happens during a quiet renewal quarter, on a unit that paid out normally the month before, and is only noticed when a platform quietly disables the listing. The fix is a renewal radar that fires before the lapse, tied to the address and reconciled against the city STR portal record rather than tracked as two unrelated deadlines.
Active STR license via the city’s STR portal
The city’s STR portal is a separate layer from Miami-Dade county licensing and from Florida DBPR registration. The portal is where the operator produces the artifacts the city requires to keep an STR license active: proof of primary-residence status (or, where the ordinance allows, a residential-zone exemption), the active vacation-rental license number from the county, liability insurance on file, and any inspections the city has flagged for that parcel. A license is only “active” on the portal when every artifact is current — a renewal in transit is not the same as an active status.
The renewal cadence is annual, and a license that lapses on the portal takes the listing off every platform that pulls the city’s status feed. The portal’s status field is the source of truth the booking platforms verify, which is why the operator’s posture has to be portal-first rather than calendar-first: a clean calendar on a lapsed portal is still a de-listed unit.
Occupancy limits
Miami-Dade and the City of Miami both enforce a per-unit occupancy ceiling, expressed as a maximum number of guests per bedroom (with a cap on unrelated guests regardless of bedroom count) and tied to the property’s sleeping facilities. The ceiling is enforced twice: at booking acceptance, when the platform checks the guest count against the published limit, and at complaint-driven audit, when the city cross-references the booking record against the unit’s posted sleeping capacity.
Over-booking against the occupancy ceiling is one of the fastest paths to a complaint, and a complaint is what brings an inspector to the door. The operator’s posture has to keep the per-reservation guest count inside the ceiling on every booking, not just on the ones the platform happens to flag — which is why a calendar that knows the per-address ceiling and refuses to propose a guest count above it is more useful than a static house-rule field.
Florida tourist development tax, the Miami Beach resort-tier surtax, and FL DR-308
Florida charges a 13% tourist development tax on every short-stay booking under six months, collected by the operator at the time of booking and remitted to the Florida Department of Revenue on a monthly cadence using the FL DR-308 return. Inside the City of Miami Beach city limits, a Miami-Dade convention and tourism surtax applies on top of the state TDT — the resort-tier surtax — which raises the effective rate a Miami Beach operator remits against the same booking. The Florida 6% state sales tax is collected alongside, and the per-reservation ledger that reconciles all three layers is the only artifact that survives a DOR audit without a manual rebuild.
Most host-side exposure on the tax layer is the channel-fee reconciliation trap: the operator pays a county or state tax on a gross booking total that includes cleaning, host-only fees, and platform commissions — revenue the operator never booked. A pre-filing reconciliation draft catches those differentials before the return goes out, but the named human operator is the one who signs and remits on FL DR-308. RentaraAI drafts the reconciliation, surfaces the per-line differential, and reserves the signature for the human on the permit.
What RentaraAI handles for you
City STR portal status, county license, DBPR registration, occupancy ceiling, permit cap, and the FL DR-308 reconciliation — tracked as one combined record per address rather than six unrelated deadlines. We do not sign filings in your name, register the parcel on your behalf, or consent to a cap-rule change with the city. Those steps stay with the human on the permit, and the tool makes sure the only decisions that reach you are ones a human is uniquely positioned to make.