The Short-Term Rental Complaint Census (2026)

Every figure on this page was pulled directly from the cities' own open data portals in July 2026. Query definitions, dataset names, and retrieval dates are documented in the methodology.

The census: six cities, one comparison table

There is no federal registry of short-term rental complaints. Every one is filed with a city, logged in that city's system, and defined by that city's rules. That fragmentation is exactly why no one has compiled these numbers side by side. We pulled complaint records from six municipal open data portals that each expose a short-term-rental complaint category, then counted them by city and by year.

According to the six portals we queried in July 2026, the picture looks like this. "Peak year" is the single calendar year with the most complaints; the trend arrow compares the most recent full year (2025) to the prior one. Bars are a within-city sparkline; the striped 2026 bar is a partial year.

The single biggest takeaway is how uneven the landscape is. According to Austin's 311 data, Austin has logged more short-term rental complaints than the other five cities combined, by a factor of three. That is partly a real signal (Austin was an early, contentious STR-regulation battleground) and partly an artifact of how aggressively Austin's Code Department logs and routes these complaints. San Francisco, a city with a famously large STR fight, shows only 190 in its 311 feed, because it sends the bulk of its complaints somewhere else entirely. More on that in the methodology.

The trajectory: mostly up, with one telling exception

Year-over-year direction matters more than any single total, because it tells a journalist or a policymaker whether a city's problem is growing. Four of the six cities show a clear upward climb over their available window. Here is the year-by-year shape for the four cities with the cleanest multi-year records.

Austin is the instructive outlier. Its complaints spiked to 3,620 in 2019, at the height of a legal and regulatory fight over the city's STR ordinance, and have fallen steadily since. According to Austin's 311 data, 2025 complaints (909) were down roughly 75 percent from that 2019 peak. Chicago, Kansas City, and Boston each dipped in their most recent full year after a 2024 high, while Norfolk, a newer entrant to STR regulation, has risen every year on record. The overall shape is a market where enforcement infrastructure is still catching up, and where a city's complaint count often says as much about its rules and its logging as about the rentals themselves.

What residents actually complain about

This is the question everyone asks and almost no dataset answers. Most 311 systems file a short-term rental complaint under a single label ("Short Term Rental," "Shared Housing/Vacation Rental Complaint") with no nuisance subtype, so the noise-versus-trash-versus-parking breakdown that people want simply is not recorded. Kansas City is the exception in our set: its dedicated dataset captures an "issue or problem" field on the subset of complaints filed against registered properties.

According to Kansas City's Short-Term Rental 311 Complaints dataset (retrieved July 2026), among the 129 complaints that carry a categorized reason, the breakdown is below. A single complaint can name more than one issue, so the shares sum to more than 100 percent.

Share of the 129 Kansas City complaints that recorded a categorized reason. Complaints may cite multiple issues. Kansas City's remaining STR records are registration checks and internal investigations, which carry no nuisance category.

The shape is consistent with what enforcement offices describe elsewhere: the loudest complaints (literally) are about parties and packed houses, followed by parking spillover and trash. It is a useful, if partial, window, and it lines up with why cities cap guest counts and require local contacts in the first place.

Why most of these complaints are operations problems

Read the category list again and notice what it is not. It is not, for the most part, complaints about the building itself. Parties, over-occupancy, parking, and trash are all downstream of how a property is operated on the day of a turnover and during a stay: whether the house rules are set and enforced, whether occupancy is verified, whether bins are out and the exterior is guest-ready. Property maintenance, the fifth category, is the one that a good documentation habit catches earliest, before a broken fixture or an overflowing bin becomes the reason a neighbor picks up the phone.

That is the connection to the work we do at RapidEye. Systematic turnover documentation, the photos and video a professional operator already captures between guests, is the record that shows whether a unit left the last turnover in a condition that invites complaints or avoids them. A trash pile that a cleaner missed, exterior clutter, a maintenance issue building over several stays: these are visible in turnover imagery long before they reach 311. The complaint census is a reminder that neighbor relations, guest experience, and property condition are one problem, and that the operators who document and review their turnovers rigorously are the ones least likely to show up in a city's dataset.

Methodology

This census counts complaint records that each city's own open data portal labels as short-term rental related. We queried every portal directly (via each Socrata portal's SoQL API, and Boston's CKAN datastore) between July 12 and July 14, 2026. No estimates, no modeling: every number is a live record count returned by the city's system. Because each city defines and files these complaints differently, the totals are not strictly one-to-one comparable. Here is exactly what each number represents.

• Austin, TX: "Austin 311 Public Data" dataset (id xwdj-i9he). We counted service requests whose type description contains "Short Term Rental Complaint" (across the Austin Code, DSD, and ACD variants), excluding STR appointment request types. 17,092 records, 2015–2026.
• Chicago, IL: "311 Service Requests" dataset (id v6vf-nfxy). We counted the single request type "Shared Housing/Vacation Rental Complaint." 2,850 records, 2018–2026.
• Kansas City, MO: "Short-Term Rental 311 Complaints" dataset (id 6cgx-tx5z), a dedicated STR dataset. 1,508 records, 2022–2026. This dataset mixes resident nuisance complaints with registration checks and internal investigations, so it is the broadest definition in our set. The category breakdown uses only the 129 records with a populated "issue or problem" field.
• Boston, MA: "311 Service Requests" (data.boston.gov, CKAN). We counted the request type "Short Term Rental" across the yearly resources. 1,089 records, 2021–2026.
• Norfolk, VA: "Complaints" dataset (id m9m3-wk2s), a code-enforcement dataset. We counted the complaint type "Short-Term Rental" (both spellings the city uses). 736 records, 2023–2026.
• San Francisco, CA: "311 Cases" dataset (id vw6y-z8j6). We counted the service name "General Request - SHORT TERM RENTALS." 190 records, 2016–2024. This dramatically undercounts SF's true complaint volume, because San Francisco routes most short-term rental complaints through its Office of Short-Term Rentals and a dedicated complaint form, not 311. We include SF precisely to make that routing caveat visible.

Comparability caveats. Three things vary city to city and should temper any cross-city ranking. First, definition: a code-department service request (Austin), a 311 nuisance type (Chicago, Boston), a dedicated dataset that includes registration checks (Kansas City), and a code-enforcement case (Norfolk) are not the same unit. Second, routing: cities like San Francisco divert STR complaints to a specialized office, so their 311 feed captures only a sliver. Third, time windows differ, because cities began logging STR complaints in different years. For those reasons we report each city's own count and window rather than normalizing to a single rate. The 2026 figures are partial (data through mid-July 2026) and are marked as such throughout.

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