Bend STR Licensing: The Rules a Cleaner Sees Broken Most
Bend renews rental operating licenses yearly at $255 plus a transportation fee, and one missed 30-day window can void a Type II permit for good.
Two separate approvals let you rent a Bend house nightly: a land use permit under Bend Development Code 3.6.500, and an operating license under Chapter 7.16 of the city code. They're applied for separately, paid for separately, and only the second one renews every year. The renewal is where owners lose houses, and it isn't close.
Type I, Type II, and why the distinction is worth thousands
Type I covers an owner-occupied home where you rent up to two bedrooms for as many nights as you like, plus infrequent whole-house use capped at 30 days or four rental periods a year. No spacing rule applies to it.
Type II is the whole house, not your primary residence, and it's the one investors want. In October 2022 the separation between Type II properties went from 250 feet to 500, measured radially from your property boundary and catching every parcel wholly or partly inside the circle. One approved whole-house rental in there and yours doesn't get approved. Not appealed, not waived. The map decides.
Check the city's eligibility map before you write an offer, not after closing. If it comes back no, no cleaner, property manager or consultant changes that answer, and we'd rather say so now than take the call in September.
The money, roughly: the land use permit is about $1,314 for Type I and $3,657 for Type II with a 4 percent surcharge on top, and takes around 30 days to process. The operating license is $350 to open and $255 to renew, plus a transportation fee of $200 a year on a whole house and $108 otherwise.
The renewal trap
File early, and file complete. If the city finds something missing you get 30 days to supply it. Blow that window and the application is withdrawn, your fee comes back, and the land use permit goes void.
Void isn't the same as expired, and that difference is the whole ballgame. You reapply as a brand-new Type II, and now the 500-foot circle gets measured against everything approved in the years since you got yours. On the denser blocks, the streets off Galveston or the older grid near downtown, that's usually the end of the rental. A $255 line item turns into a house worth less than it was on Tuesday.
One more thing worth checking: permits issued after April 15, 2015 are generally tied to the owner and don't travel with a sale. If you're buying an operating vacation rental, confirm what actually transfers before you price the income into your offer.
The 250 feet that still matters
The old buffer distance survives as the notification radius. Every year you have to put 24/7 contact information in the hands of property owners within 250 feet, and the city's Good Neighbor Guidelines have to be posted inside the house.
That circle is also, in practice, your enforcement risk. The city doesn't patrol for violations, it responds to complaints, and complaints come from the people who got your letter. A neighbor holding a working phone number calls you at eleven at night. A neighbor without one calls the city.
The standards a turnover actually touches
- Occupancy: two per bedroom plus two. A three-bedroom is eight people. Cleaners see evidence a listing never will, like nine used towels, an air mattress deflated in a closet, a second set of bedding in the wash.
- Parking. On-site spaces have to be at least 20 feet deep and 9 feet wide, paved if newly created, with a parking diagram posted in the house. Those diagrams vanish off refrigerators constantly. Keep spares.
- Smoke alarms. Oregon wants them under ten years old, and there's a manufacture date printed on the back of every one. A dying battery chirping in an empty house is among the more reliable ways to generate a 3 a.m. neighbor call.
- Carbon monoxide alarms. Required inside each bedroom or within 15 feet of the bedroom door where the home has a fuel-burning appliance, was built after 2011, or was remodeled under permit.
- Extinguisher. Gauge in the green, mounted where the safety checklist says it is, and physically looked at instead of assumed.
- Egress. Bedroom windows that open, with nothing stacked in front of them. Guests move furniture and don't move it back.
None of that takes long. All of it is easier to catch on a turn than during a complaint investigation, which is why we photograph it and send the images with the turnover report instead of mentioning it verbally and hoping.
Taxes, and the line where city rules stop
Bend takes 10.4 percent of gross rental receipts as room tax. The state transient lodging tax sits on top of that and went from 1.5 to 2.5 percent on January 1, 2026. You file monthly or quarterly depending on volume, and a month with no bookings still needs a return filed at zero.
Cross the city limit and it's a different rulebook. Deschutes County collects 8 percent in unincorporated areas, and homes in Tumalo, Deschutes River Woods or Sunriver answer to county code, plus the owners association in Sunriver's case, rather than to BDC 3.6.500. The cleaning is identical. The paperwork isn't, and people who own on both sides of that line mix them up more often than you'd expect.
We're not your compliance consultant and none of this is legal advice. The Planning Division at 541-388-5580 gives better answers than any blog post will. What we can do is be in the building every week and tell you what we found. If you'd like that documented rather than assumed, ask us about a standing account.