Austin STR 1,000-Foot Rule: How Many Units One Operator Can Run in 2026

Four source classes, one job

The arbitrage is not a new statistic. It is the same operator-cap question answered from four official classes that do not replace each other.

The program page at austintexas.gov/department/short-term-rentals is the operational source, and it alone carries the formula: a two-unit cap on a single-family site, a 1,000-foot separation for any additional site, percentage caps of 25 for mixed-use and 10 for multi-family, the current fee totals, the tenant-with-landlord-permission sentence, and the July 1, 2026 platform-removal request. An article that copies the 2,910-row dataset and skips this page has no cap test at all, because the dataset contains no formula.

The April 30, 2026 Development Services memo does a narrower job. It names Ordinance No. 20250911-012, prints the FY2026 fee table, records the move from a one-year to a two-year license term, and reports the staff license and unlicensed-address counts. It never reprints the 1,000 feet. Use it to date the ordinance and the counts, then read the cap formula off the program page.

The September 11, 2025 Alter Motion 3 PDF is a council motion draft of section 4-23-31. It carries the 1,000-foot multi-site sentence, the two-unit language for sites with three or fewer housing units, a 25 percent rule for sites with four or more, an ownership requirement, and a 12-month nuisance ineligibility line. Strike-through artifacts remain on the page, so treat every line in it as draft language rather than enrolled code.

The open dataset 2fah-4p7e is a location table and nothing more. Its columns are case_number, str_type, prop_address, prop_city, prop_state, prop_zip, and council_district. There is no operator id and no distance field, which is the whole limitation in one sentence: the table can size the licensed stock, and it cannot run the 1,000-foot test.

Pasting one number from each class still fails the decision-binding check, because the host learns nothing about whether the next unit sits inside the cap. The procedure in this article is the join. Site class comes from observation, the cap from the program page, the stock snapshot from the dataset, the ordinance date from the memo, and the draft ownership and nuisance lines from the motion PDF. Unknowns stay unknown.

Three of the four pieces are reproducible without this article: a SODA count(*) on 2fah-4p7e with group-by queries on str_type, prop_zip, and council_district run on 2026-09-08, the program-page sentences fetched the same day, and greater-of arithmetic on 4, 8, 10, and 20 housing units. The 1,000-foot measurement is the piece nobody can rerun from the data, because the field does not exist.

The Austin host decision this article answers

The decision is this: given the Austin site type and unit count, should the operator stop at the units already licensed, add a second unit on the same site, or add a unit on a different site?

Candidate actions are keep the current count, add a second unit on the same single-family site, add a unit on another site, or hold. The decision metric is the official cap that applies to that site class. The answer flips when the next unit would exceed two units on a single-family site. It also flips when the next site would sit closer than 1,000 feet from another of the operator's STRs. It also flips when the next unit would exceed the mixed-use 25 percent or multi-family 10 percent cap.

A pasted city statistic that does not change that choice is trivia. The City of Austin Short-Term Rentals program page is the operational source for the three caps. The April 30, 2026 Development Services memo is the staff source that names Ordinance No. 20250911-012. The September 11, 2025 Alter Motion 3 PDF is a council motion draft, not the enrolled ordinance.

Official Austin caps, by site class

The program page states that short-term rentals are residences rented for less than 30 consecutive days. It then splits operator limits by site class. Use the row that matches the site. A blended average is the wrong row.

Austin worked examples: where the recommendation flips

The examples apply the program-page formulas to round unit counts. They are hypothetical site sizes, not named properties. The formula is official. The site sizes are labeled hypothetical.

If the site is single-family and on-site licensed STRs are fewer than 2, adding one more unit on that site stays inside the stated cap. If on-site licensed STRs already equal 2, stop adding on that site. Apply the 1,000-foot rule only if adding a different site. If the site is mixed-use with 4 or more residential units and at least one commercial use, the cap is the greater of 1 or 25 percent of the operator's units on that site. If the site is multi-family residential, the cap is the greater of 1 or 10 percent. If site class or distance is unknown, hold and email [email protected].

Walk the Austin decision in order

The sequence is the host-facing form of the data-to-knowledge procedure. Each step uses an official field, a computed value, or a labeled unknown. Skip a step and the next unit is a guess rather than a cap test.

1. Name the site class. Write single-family, mixed-use, or multi-family on the record. The program page uses those three rows. The open dataset 2fah-4p7e does not expose a site-class field in the columns returned on 2026-09-08. This step is an observation of the property, not a lookup in the location table.
2. Count housing units on the site. The mixed-use 25 percent cap and the multi-family 10 percent cap both need a unit count. If the count is unknown, stop. A missing denominator fails the cap test even when the 2-unit single-family row does not need it.
3. Count licensed STRs already on the site. Use the City license, not an Airbnb listing count. The program page regulates licensed short-term rental use. A listing without a City license is a different problem: the same page says the City begins requesting removal of unlicensed properties from platforms on 2026-07-01.
4. Select the matching official cap. Single-family: 2 on the site. Mixed-use with 4 or more residential units and at least one commercial use: the greater of 1 or 25 percent. Multi-family residential: the greater of 1 or 10 percent. Keep those three rows separate. The 1,000-foot sentence stays on the single-family row unless a later official page attaches it.
5. Test the next unit against that cap. If the next unit would stay at or under the cap, the on-site add is inside the stated rule. If it would go over, the on-site add is outside the stated rule. Hypothetical mixed-use with 4 housing units yields a cap of 1, because 25 percent of 4 is 1. Hypothetical mixed-use with 8 housing units yields a cap of 2. Hypothetical multi-family with 10 housing units yields a cap of 1. Hypothetical multi-family with 20 housing units yields a cap of 2.
6. If adding a different site from a single-family base, apply 1,000 feet. The program page places that distance on additional STRs elsewhere. The measurement method is unknown. If the operator cannot measure 1,000 feet, the off-site add is not decided here. Email [email protected] rather than inventing a GIS method.
7. Price the application only after the cap test. The program page new-license total is $836.30 ($789 plus $47.30 notification). Renewal is $385.30 ($338 plus $47.30). The April 30, 2026 memo table lists New $789 and Renewal $338 without the notification add-on. A fee paid on an ineligible third on-site unit does not create eligibility. The fee is a cost of a unit that already passed the cap test.
8. Record official fact, derived result, decision, and limitation as four separate lines. Official fact is a sentence on the program page, memo, motion draft, or dataset. Derived result is a share, a greater-of calculation, or a hypothetical cap. Decision is stop, add on-site, add off-site, or hold. Limitation is anything the sources do not establish, including enrolled ordinance text and the distance method.

The 2,910-row location table does not replace this sequence. ZIP 78702 has 572 rows and ZIP 78704 has 545 rows. District 9 has 726 rows and district 3 has 708 rows. Those concentrations tell the operator where licensed locations sit. They do not tell the operator whether a specific next unit is inside the cap, because the returned columns carry no operator id and no 1,000-foot field.

The April 30, 2026 memo reported 2,785 unlicensed addresses as of 2026-04-01. It also reported 65 notices of violation, 28 citations, and 32 new applications. That is staff-reported unlicensed inventory. It is not a count of operators over the 2-unit single-family cap. Use it only as context that unlicensed listings are a separate City workstream from the spacing rule.

Live registry snapshot, 2026-09-08

The City publishes Short Term Rental Locations as SODA dataset 2fah-4p7e. A count(*) query on 2026-09-08 returned 2,910 rows, while the April 30, 2026 memo reported 2,750 active licenses as of 2026-03-31. Those are different series and the 160-row gap is not a growth rate: the memo is a staff count of active licenses, and the dataset is a table of locations. Neither source reconciles the two definitions, so subtracting one from the other produces a number that means nothing.

The type breakdown, the ZIP and council-district concentrations, and the computed shares all live in austin-str-registry-2026-09-08-r2.csv, with the findings and their limits in the accompanying JSON. Two things in that file change how you should read it.

First, the str_type field does not map to the site classes the cap formula uses. Nothing in the data links Type 1 to single-family, Type 2 to mixed-use, or Type 3 to multi-family, so the type counts are a size-of-market snapshot and never a count of operators sitting on the 1,000-foot boundary.

Second, licensed locations concentrate heavily. Council districts 9 and 3 together hold 1,434 rows, which is 49.3 percent of the 2,910. That is an observation about where licensed locations sit. It is not evidence that spacing is harder there, because without an operator id the rows cannot be grouped by who runs them.

What the Austin 1,000-foot rule does not cover

The program page attaches the 1,000-foot distance to additional STRs elsewhere from a single-family site. It does not attach that distance to the mixed-use 25 percent row or the multi-family 10 percent row. The April 30, 2026 memo describes spacing requirements between STRs at single-family sites and does not reprint the 1,000-foot number.

The motion draft applies 1,000 feet when an individual operates STRs on more than one site, except as provided in its subsection (D) for sites with 4 or more housing units. That draft also says an operator must own the housing unit. The later program page says tenants may operate STRs with landlord permission. Those two statements are not reconciled here.

The program page also says that on July 1, 2026 the City will begin requesting removal of unlicensed properties from STR platforms. Platforms must display a license field. Platforms must remove unlicensed listings upon city request. The memo says delist notices would be paused for 6 months after the new licensing system launch. That launch was scheduled for 2026-05-18. Those facts are adjacent context for unlicensed inventory. They are not a substitute for the on-site cap.

The Austin license-term contradiction

The program page New Licensee/Operator Responsibilities section says licenses are valid for 2 years instead of 1 year. The same page How to Apply approval text says STR licenses are valid for 1 year from the date of issuance. The April 30, 2026 memo says Austin Development Services extended license expiration from 1 year to 2 years as part of the FY2026 budget process. This article reports all three sentences. It does not pick a winner.

The program page gives a new-license total of $836.30, described there as a $789 license fee plus a $47.30 notification fee, and a renewal total of $385.30, described as $338 plus the same $47.30. The memo FY2026 table lists New $789 and Renewal $338 without the notification add-on. Quote the page total when discussing what an applicant pays on that page. Quote the memo table when discussing the staff fee schedule.

Evidence accepted for this guide

Official facts below are copied from pages fetched on 2026-09-08. Derived results are labeled computed. Hypothetical unit counts are labeled hypothetical.

• Official: STRs are residences rented for less than 30 consecutive days (program page).
• Official: single-family cap of 2 units on a site, with additional STRs elsewhere at least 1,000 feet apart (program page).
• Official: mixed-use cap of the greater of 1 unit or 25 percent. Multi-family cap of the greater of 1 unit or 10 percent (program page).
• Official: new license $836.30 and renewal $385.30 on the program page. Memo FY2026 table New $789 and Renewal $338.
• Official: Ordinance No. 20250911-012 adopted 2025-09-11 per the April 30, 2026 memo, enacting per-site limits and single-family spacing.
• Official: 2,785 unlicensed addresses identified as of 2026-04-01 per the memo, with 65 notices, 28 citations, and 32 new applications.
• Official: 2,750 active licenses as of 2026-03-31 per the memo.
• Official: 2,910 location rows in dataset 2fah-4p7e on 2026-09-08.
• Computed: Type 1 family combined 1,052 rows (36.2 percent of 2,910). Type 2 Residential 37.7 percent. Type 3 25.4 percent.
• Limitation: enrolled ordinance text of 20250911-012 was not fetched. The motion PDF is a draft. Distance measurement method is unknown. The open dataset has no operator-id field in the returned columns.

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