Anchorage Short-Term Rental Registration Starts in May

Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s stated goal to build 10,000 new dwellings in ten years underscores the need for more information about the city’s housing market. Baldwin Day says that need includes data like where short-term rentals operate, their density in different neighborhoods, and what types of spaces people rent out.

“You can’t really make an informed decision in the absence of information,” says Bill Falsey, the city’s chief administrative officer. “There’s been a lot of [discussion] about the penetration and the volume of short-term rentals in Anchorage, but not a lot of good data.”

To remedy that, the new registration process will gather basic information on short-term rentals, defined as a unit “offered for overnight occupancy in exchange for a fee and that is available for rent for fewer than thirty consecutive days.”

When the free registration portal opens May 1, short-term rental owners must enter information including the type of unit, physical address, owner’s name, the local contact “responsible for the short-term rental,” whether the owner lives onsite, when the unit is rented on a short-term basis, and whether any short-term renters have also rented the property on a long-term basis.

Once owners complete the registration and attest to its truthfulness, they’ll receive a registration number. Mandy Honest in the municipal clerk’s office says properties should start displaying their registration number in any advertising upon receipt. Starting August 1, any non-compliant short-term rentals or listings without a registration number will face a $75 fine.

The ordinance prohibits hosting platforms from collecting fees for rental listings that either lack the required registration or fail to display the registration number. While Baldwin Day says the city will have to flag any non-compliant listings for platforms like Airbnb, she says she and her colleagues had productive conversations with them during the ordinance drafting process.

“We’ve had really good contact with industry and good feedback from short-term rental operators.” Those conversations also gave them insight on how other cities have handled similar requirements.

Track Record

The City and Borough of Juneau has required short-term rental registration since July 2023, with annual renewal. Like Anchorage, registration is free, and Juneau defines “short-term” as less than thirty days. Juneau doesn’t ask whether the owner lives on the property, as the Anchorage registration will. However, owner address data gives some sense of this.

Juneau’s 2025 data showed 65 out of 510 registered operators, or about 13 percent, lived out of state, and listings were densest near the airport and the Mendenhall Valley neighborhood.

“Actual operators don’t seem to find it too burdensome or challenging,” says Juneau municipal treasurer Ruth Kostik. Now and then they get calls from a resident who suspects a neighbor might have an unregistered short-term rental (e.g., in a condo building that prohibits them), but Kostik recalls only once finding an unregistered rental at the address.

In Anchorage, short- and long-term rental operator Bekki Weaver says she’s “not too concerned” about the new requirement. Weaver runs two long-term rentals in South Anchorage and recently converted a third near her home into a short-term rental.

She agrees the city has a housing shortage and hopes the city’s data-collection efforts will include long-term rentals too. When Weaver and her husband still owned a Spenard six-plex, their tenants sometimes called about noise issues with nearby buildings. Weaver sometimes had a hard time finding out how to contact the owners about this.

Falsey says Anchorage does not currently have a listing of long-term rentals, but he says the city hasn’t gotten too much pushback on the new requirement from operators he knows of.