Airbnb at the beaches? Three towns, three answers.

Florida law (Section 509.032(7)(b)) generally forbids cities from prohibiting vacation rentals or regulating how long or how often they rent — unless the city already had such an ordinance on the books by June 1, 2011, in which case the old rule is grandfathered and stays enforceable. That single date explains the whole map: Atlantic Beach and Neptune Beach had restrictive rules before the cutoff and kept them; Jacksonville Beach regulated later (2019), so its ordinance takes the only path still open to newer rules — registration and standards, not duration limits.

The state nearly redrew everything in 2024: CS/SB 280 would have created statewide vacation-rental registration and standardized oversight, and it passed both chambers — then Governor DeSantis vetoed it on June 27, 2024, objecting that it added state red tape and would have blocked local enforcement of existing ordinances. So the grandfathered patchwork stands, and as of this writing no further statewide preemption has passed. Rules like these are exactly what our fact-check cycle watches; if a council or the legislature moves, this page gets corrected.

Atlantic Beach prohibits residential rentals shorter than 90 consecutive days in every residential zone — the ordinance language reads "No person(s) shall offer or advertise a private home for rent or lease for a term or period of less than ninety (90) days." That is effectively a ban on the Airbnb model for houses and condos in residential districts; the well-known exception is the Coquina House near Beaches Town Center, legal only because it sits in a non-residential zoning district.

Enforcement is real but measured. Reporting in October 2025 found active Airbnb listings inside the city despite the code, and officials confirmed the practical limits: state law now bars investigating anonymous complaints, staff run monthly searches of the rental platforms, and historically violation notices alone have brought owners into compliance — complaint counts have run from three in 2013 to a peak of fifteen in 2017, with none ever reaching the Code Enforcement Board. At a November 2025 council discussion, staff made the stakes plain: the city’s framework survives only because it is grandfathered against state preemption — "if we tweak our code, then we lose our grandfathering status" — so the council changed nothing and kept enforcing.

Neptune Beach is the simplest of the three: per the city’s own Planning & Community Development guidance, short-term rentals and commercial activities (other than home-based businesses) are prohibited in all residential zoning districts. If the plan requires nightly or weekly rental income from a house in Neptune Beach’s residential blocks, the plan does not work.

One honesty note: the specific code-section number and its amendment history did not verify cleanly in our research, so I won’t quote one — for a purchase decision, the confirmation call goes to the city’s Planning & Community Development Department, and I make that call with clients before an offer is written, not after.

Jacksonville Beach took the opposite road: short-term vacation rentals are permitted in districts where residential uses are allowed, governed by a registration ordinance the city council adopted on September 16, 2019 — at a time when over 400 short-term rentals were already operating. The code defines an STVR as a single-family, duplex, or townhouse unit rented to guests more than three times a calendar year for periods under 30 days (or advertised as regularly rented), and caps occupancy at two persons per bedroom plus two, never more than 16 per unit.

The licensing stack is the part investors underestimate: a City of Jacksonville Beach STVR registration certificate, a county business tax receipt, a local business tax receipt, a Florida Department of Revenue registration, and a Florida DBPR license — plus a Duval County tourist-tax account and a fire marshal inspection. And one structural nuance changes the condo math entirely: units subject to HOA deed restrictions, condominium units, timeshares, and owner-occupied homes renting half or less are exempt from the city’s STVR code — which means for a condo, the association’s documents, not the city, are usually the binding rulebook. Two towers a block apart can have opposite rental policies. Jacksonville Beach condos — where the association is the law →