Scroll through any Holland vacation forum long enough and you will find someone convinced the city banned short-term rentals outright. They booked here for years, tried again this summer, found nothing, and concluded the town turned unfriendly to visitors. They are half right. Something did change. They just have the wrong villain.
Holland did not ban short-term rentals. What actually happened is stranger and more useful to understand if you are shopping for a lakeshore property with rental income in mind: the address on the listing sheet sits inside one of three separate governments, and each one wrote its own answer to the same question. One caps the practice at a number it already hit. One allows it only if you live there yourself. One does not allow it at all. The zoning line between them runs through neighborhoods that look identical from the street, and a buyer who assumes "Holland" means one set of rules is going to be wrong about a third of the time.
One Name, Three Zoning Authorities
The City of Holland, Holland Charter Township, and Park Township all border Lake Macatawa and share the same mailing conventions, school pull, and marketing shorthand. They are not the same government. Each writes and enforces its own zoning ordinance, and none of them defers to the others. A property with a Holland address can sit under any of the three, and the difference determines whether short-term rental income is a real possibility or a closed door before you even make an offer.
This is the detail that does not show up on a listing photo or a walkthrough. It shows up on a parcel lookup and a phone call to the right planning office, and it is worth doing before you fall in love with a house.
What the City of Holland Actually Allows
Inside the city limits, the ordinance splits short-term rental activity into three lanes, and only one of them has a hard ceiling.
| Path | Where it applies | Limit | Certificate required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner-occupied | Any zoning district | Rent one room year-round, or the whole home up to 60 days a year while you're away | Yes |
| Investor-owned, commercial or mixed-use | NMU, CMU, RMU, GMU, I, PUD, and F zones where residential use is permitted | No citywide cap | Yes |
| Investor-owned, residential | LDR, CNR, MDR, and TNR zones | Capped at 25 properties citywide with a 500-foot separation between them | Yes |
| Tulip Time only | Any owner-occupied home | Up to 10 days during the May festival | No inspection or certificate needed |
The residential cap is the one tripping people up. Twenty-five slots for the entire city, spaced 500 feet apart so they cannot cluster on one block, and the city's own registration page currently shows zero openings. That is not a ban. It is a waitlist with no published timeline, and the city has said the page will update if and when a slot frees up.
The Cap Is Full, and the Certificate Dies at the Closing Table
Here is the part that matters most if you are underwriting a purchase around rental income. A Holland short-term rental certificate does not transfer with the deed. When a certified property sells, the certificate suspends, and the new owner has to reapply from scratch, providing the same registration information the previous owner did. In a commercial or mixed-use zone, that reapplication is mostly paperwork. In one of the capped residential zones, it means getting in line behind whoever else is waiting for one of the 25 slots to come open, with no guarantee it happens on your timeline or at all.
A seller advertising strong short-term rental income on a residentially zoned Holland property is describing their own operation, not a fixture that comes with the house. Price the deal on the assumption that you'll need a new certificate, not on the assumption that the old one carries over, and confirm the zone district and cap status with the city's Community and Neighborhood Services office before you write an offer that leans on that income.
Cross the Township Line and the Answer Flips
Step outside city limits and the rules are not stricter versions of the same policy. They are different policies entirely.
Holland Charter Township does not permit short-term rentals like Airbnb, VRBO, homestays, or individual room rentals within a dwelling, full stop. The only path to short stays is applying for a Bed and Breakfast Special Land Use Permit, and that comes with a condition the city's investor-owned path does not have: the owner or operator has to live on the premises. Properties renting for 15 days or more move into the township's standard rental inspection program instead.
Park Township, just west along the lakeshore, went further. Its Board of Trustees voted 6-0 on November 10, 2022 to enforce a residential zoning ordinance that does not permit short-term rentals at all, giving existing operators until October 1, 2023 to wind down. At the time of that vote, the township had roughly 248 active short-term rental units, a number that had grown 16 percent in a single year. That growth is part of why the board acted. The lesson for a buyer is that a property one township away from a capped-but-open city program can be sitting in a jurisdiction where the door closed permanently three years ago.
Why No State Law Is Coming to the Rescue
Buyers sometimes assume this patchwork is temporary and that Michigan will eventually pass a statewide rule that overrides local zoning. Nothing on the horizon suggests that is close.
The Michigan Supreme Court settled the underlying legal question in Reaume v. Township of Spring Lake, ruling that a township can classify a short-term rental as a non-permitted use, like a motel, under its own zoning code and exclude it from residential districts entirely, even without ever using the words "short-term rental." That ruling is what gives Park Township and Holland Charter Township their legal footing.
A bill that would have stripped that local authority, House Bill 4722, passed the Michigan House 55-48 back in October 2021 but never got a Senate floor vote before the session ended, and it died. A successor package built around House Bill 5438 was introduced in February 2024 to create a statewide Short-Term Rental Regulation Act, and a separate tie-barred package, House Bills 5138 through 5140, was introduced in October 2025 to let counties put an accommodation tax on the ballot. As of this writing in 2026, all of it is still sitting in committee. Michigan has no statewide short-term rental law, and the local patchwork that created three different rulebooks within a few miles of each other is not going away on its own.
What to Confirm Before You Write an Offer
A few checks take less time than a single showing and can save a deal from falling apart on rental math that never had a legal basis.
- Pull the parcel and confirm whether it sits in the City of Holland, Holland Charter Township, or Park Township. The address alone will not tell you.
- If it's in the city, confirm the zone district on the interactive zoning map and ask Community and Neighborhood Services directly whether the residential cap has any current openings, rather than relying on a listing description.
- Treat any advertised short-term rental income as the seller's track record, not an asset that conveys. Your own certificate approval is a separate step that happens after closing, not before.
- If rental income is central to your numbers, look at properties in the commercial or mixed-use zones where the city's 25-unit cap doesn't apply at all.
- If the Tulip Time-only path fits your goals, remember it is a 10-day window in May with no certificate or inspection required, which makes it a real option but a narrow one.
A Few Straight Answers
If I buy a house with an active short-term rental certificate in Holland, do I inherit it? No. The certificate suspends at sale and the new owner has to reapply with the required registration information. In a capped residential zone, that means waiting for one of the 25 citywide slots, which the city currently lists as full.
Is Tulip Time a workaround if the residential cap is closed? It's a real, narrower option. Owner-occupied homes can rent for up to 10 days during the festival in May without a certificate or inspection. It will not replace a full season of bookings, but it is legal and available regardless of the cap.
Will the 25-property cap open up soon? There's no published schedule. The city has said it will update its registration page when a slot opens, but nothing in current ordinance or pending state legislation points to a change on a set timeline.
Rental income potential is real on this stretch of West Michigan lakeshore, but it depends on which government drew the line around your parcel long before you knew what to look for. If you're weighing a Holland-area purchase against its actual short-term rental potential, David Isljamovski can help you confirm the jurisdiction, the zone, and the cap status before you write an offer that depends on getting it right. Let's Connect.
