If you host on Airbnb in Greater Sydney or anywhere in Victoria, you've probably felt the regulatory floor moving under your feet over the last two years. NSW has tightened its 180-day cap enforcement. Victoria introduced a 7.5% short-stay levy that took effect on 1 January 2025. Owners corporations in both states now have new powers to restrict or ban short-stay letting in strata buildings. Councils are layering their own caps on top. If you're reading this, you've probably already done the mental maths on what another round of restrictions would mean for your property's returns.
What many hosts haven't fully absorbed is that both states' legislation contains a specific duration threshold that carves out medium-term rentals from the worst of the new regulatory load. In NSW, bookings of 21 consecutive days or more don't count toward the 180-day cap. In Victoria, stays of 28 consecutive days or more fall entirely outside the definition of "short stay accommodation" and therefore outside the levy. These aren't loopholes — they're deliberate carve-outs written into the primary legislation, and they materially change the economics of any property within range of a hospital, university, corporate hub, defence base, or relocation corridor.
This article walks through exactly how the rules work, what the legal sources actually say, and where the practical limits of each carve-out lie. It's written for landlords, hosts, property managers, and anyone weighing up whether medium-term letting deserves a slot in their property's mix. For a deeper NSW-only walkthrough of the 21-day exemption, including the three technical conditions that trigger it and where hosts commonly get it wrong, see our companion piece on how the NSW 21-day exemption works in practice.
The short-stay regulatory landscape in April 2026
Before getting into the duration carve-outs, it's worth establishing a clear picture of what's actually in force across the two largest Airbnb markets in Australia.
In New South Wales, the governing instrument is the State Environmental Planning Policy (Housing) 2021 — commonly called the Housing SEPP — which came into effect on 1 November 2021. Part 6 of the SEPP regulates short-term rental accommodation (STRA). Under section 112, non-hosted STRA (where the host doesn't live on the property) is treated as exempt development in most of NSW, meaning no formal planning approval is required, but subject to a 180-day annual cap in specified areas. Those areas are the Greater Sydney region (comprising the Eastern Harbour City, Central River City, and Western Parkland City districts), the Ballina area, and certain mapped land in the Clarence Valley and Muswellbrook local government areas. Byron Shire operates under a separate 60-day cap that commenced on 23 September 2024. All other NSW LGAs have no day cap — 365 days is permitted. In addition, all STRA dwellings must be registered on the NSW Government's STRA Register, must comply with the STRA Fire Safety Standard, and must observe the mandatory Code of Conduct administered by NSW Fair Trading. The NSW Government announced a formal review of the STRA framework in 2024, with submissions closed and policy changes under active consideration.
In Victoria, the Short Stay Levy Act 2024 received Royal Assent on 29 October 2024 and commenced on 1 January 2025. It imposes a 7.5% levy on the total booking fee for short-stay accommodation, with "short stay accommodation" defined in Part 1 of the Act as accommodation occupied for a continuous period of less than 28 days. The levy is collected by booking platforms for bookings made through them, and by hosts directly for bookings outside a platform. Registration with the Victorian State Revenue Office is required, with quarterly returns for properties generating $75,000 or more per year in booking fees and annual returns below that threshold. Alongside the levy, the same Act amended the Owners Corporations Act 2006 to let owners corporations pass rules prohibiting short-stay accommodation in strata buildings by special resolution (a 75% vote of lot entitlements under section 96 of that Act). Individual Victorian councils also retain the power to introduce their own night caps and registration schemes.
The common thread across both states is the policy rationale: governments want short-stay accommodation properties redirected toward long-term housing supply. What distinguishes the two jurisdictions is the mechanism. NSW uses a day cap on non-hosted short-term letting. Victoria uses a price signal (the levy) combined with strata-level prohibition tools. In both cases, the legislation draws a bright line at the point where a booking is long enough that it starts to look more like housing than like tourism — and on the right side of that line, the restrictions fall away.
The NSW 21-day rule: how section 112 actually works
The 21-day rule is set out in Part 6 of the Housing SEPP 2021, specifically within section 112, which governs non-hosted short-term rental accommodation. The operative provision treats non-hosted STRA as exempt development — meaning no planning approval is required — provided the dwelling is not used for STRA for more than 180 days in any 365-day period within the prescribed areas. Critically, in calculating that 180-day total, any period of 21 consecutive days or more of non-hosted STRA provided to the same person or persons is not counted.
The mechanism is a counting rule rather than a definitional one. A 21-day booking doesn't cease to be STRA — it's still short-term rental accommodation for the purposes of the SEPP, still subject to the Code of Conduct, still requires STRA registration, still needs fire safety compliance. What changes is that those 21 days don't deplete the 180-day allowance. The commercial effect is significant: a landlord who runs a mix of 2-7 night short stays alongside occasional 3-6 week medium-term stays can preserve their short-stay capacity for the weekends and school holidays when it's most valuable, while using the medium-term stays to fill longer weekday gaps that would otherwise count against the cap.
Several technical features of the rule are worth understanding before you rely on it.
The 21 days must be consecutive. Stitching together two 10-day bookings from the same guest with a one-night gap doesn't work — the rule requires a single continuous stay of at least 21 days.
The stay must be provided to the same person or persons. If one guest stays for 10 days and a different guest moves in for the next 15 days, those are two separate short stays and both count against the cap, even though the property was occupied continuously. For the rule to apply, it must be the same booking party throughout.
The 180-day count runs on a registration annual period (12 months from the date of the initial registration on the STRA Register), not the calendar year. If you registered your STRA on 15 March, your counting year runs from 15 March to 14 March the following year. This is worth tracking because it affects when the clock resets — particularly if you're managing multiple properties registered at different times.
There is an upper limit on how long a booking can be before it ceases to be STRA at all. Under NSW tenancy legislation, a STRA booking cannot last more than 3 months; beyond that point, the arrangement is no longer short-term rental accommodation and instead becomes a residential tenancy governed by the Residential Tenancies Act 2010. This matters for landlords contemplating longer bookings to escape the cap entirely. At 21 days to 3 months, you're within the sweet spot of the STRA exemption. Beyond 3 months, you're in residential tenancy territory with a different set of legal obligations: prescribed tenancy agreements, bond lodgement with NSW Fair Trading's Rental Bond Online, statutory grounds for termination, rent increase limits, and so on. Neither end of that spectrum is necessarily worse than the other, but they are legally distinct regimes, and a landlord who treats a 4-month booking as STRA is non-compliant even if the commercial feel of the arrangement looks similar.
The rule only applies to non-hosted STRA. If you live on the property while guests stay — whether in the main dwelling with a rented room, or in the main house with the granny flat let out — that's hosted STRA, which has no day cap in the first place and can be carried out 365 days a year.
For a more granular walkthrough of the NSW 21-day exemption — including the three conditions that have to be satisfied for it to apply, how the 180-day clock runs on a registration annual period, and the patterns where hosts commonly get it wrong — see our companion article: The NSW 21-Day Exemption Explained.
The Victorian 28-day rule: how the Short Stay Levy Act creates a definitional carve-out
The Victorian rule operates on a different structural logic. Rather than a counting exemption, it's a definitional threshold. The Short Stay Levy Act 2024 defines "short stay accommodation" by reference to a continuous period of less than 28 days. A booking of 28 days or more is therefore not short-stay accommodation at all for the purposes of the Act, which means the 7.5% levy doesn't apply.
This is a cleaner rule than the NSW equivalent. There's no counting, no tracking, no annual allowance to manage. Either the booking falls below 28 days (levy applies to the whole booking) or it doesn't (no levy at all). A 27-night booking attracts the full 7.5% on the total booking fee, including cleaning and GST. A 28-night booking attracts nothing.
The 28 days is measured continuously, with the check-out day excluded from the count. A stay from 1 January to 29 January is 28 nights and therefore not a short stay. Chaining shorter bookings from the same guest to reach 28 days won't work — each booking is assessed on its own terms, and a 20-night booking followed by another 10-night booking (even from the same guest with no gap) gives you two separate short stays, both subject to the levy.
The levy applies to a broad range of accommodation types. It captures entire houses and apartments, private rooms in houses (where the house isn't the owner's principal place of residence), granny flats, tiny homes, and caravans used as residences outside of caravan parks. It doesn't apply to principal places of residence, hotels and motels (commercial residential premises within the meaning of the GST Act), student accommodation provided by recognised higher education providers, rooming houses, retirement villages, residential care facilities, supported residential services, temporary crisis accommodation, or accommodation provided to contractors or employees in connection with a broader facility.
The other significant feature of the Victorian regime is the owners corporation dimension. The Short Stay Levy Act 2024 amended the Owners Corporations Act 2006 (Schedule 1) to grant owners corporations the power to pass rules prohibiting the use of lots for short-stay accommodation. The primary mechanism is a special resolution under section 96 of the Owners Corporations Act, which requires 75% of the total lot entitlements (where a ballot or poll is taken). There is also a lower "interim special resolution" pathway under section 97 which can become binding after a 29-day window if at least 50% of votes support it and no more than 25% oppose — meaning in practice, a rule can become enforceable without full 75% support if the objection is below the 25% threshold. An exception applies where the lot is the principal place of residence of the owner, lessee, or sub-lessee. This is a material development for apartment owners in Victoria: an owners corporation that decides to prohibit short-stays can do so, and any lot owner running an Airbnb on a 1-7 night basis is caught.
The key technical point — and the one that most apartment-owning Victorian hosts haven't fully registered — is that the owners corporation's ban power is tied to the same 28-day definition. The Act only authorises owners corporations to prohibit short-stay accommodation, which by definition is stays of less than 28 days. An owners corporation cannot use this specific rule-making power to prohibit longer stays. If an owners corporation in your building passes a short-stay ban, your Airbnb business is over, but a medium-term letting business (28+ day bookings) continues undisturbed under that rule. For Victorian apartment owners, that's not a minor footnote — it's potentially the difference between having a property business at all and not.
Separately, individual Victorian councils retain the power to introduce their own short-stay night caps and registration schemes. Where any such caps reference the 28-day state definition for consistency, they generally don't bite on 28+ day stays — but this is council-by-council, and landlords should check their local rules directly rather than assume.
Comparing the two regimes
The NSW and Victorian approaches are structurally different, and understanding the distinction helps when planning a property strategy across both markets.
NSW operates a counting exemption. A 21+ day stay is still legally short-term rental accommodation. It's just that the days don't count against the cap. The STRA Code of Conduct still applies. Fire safety standards still apply. Registration is still required. The practical upside is flexibility: a landlord can freely mix short and medium-term stays without the medium-term bookings triggering any different regulatory status, and the 21-day threshold is relatively easy to hit (three weeks is a common length for corporate placements, insurance temporary housing, and interstate relocations).
Victoria operates a definitional threshold. A 28+ day stay is not short-stay accommodation at all for the purposes of the Act. The levy doesn't apply. Owners corporation short-stay bans enacted under the Act's amendments don't reach it. Council short-stay night caps that adopt the same 28-day state definition generally don't reach it. The trade-off is that the threshold is higher (28 days versus 21) and the booking loses access to short-stay-specific infrastructure — but in practice most medium-term letting already sits outside the short-stay ecosystem (different platforms, different lease structures, different tenant expectations), so this is rarely a practical cost.
For a landlord with properties in both states, the implication is straightforward: in NSW you can afford to accept 3-week bookings as part of your strategy; in Victoria you want to target 4 weeks or longer to benefit from the full carve-out. Most serious medium-term operators target 1-6 month bookings as their core product, which satisfies both thresholds comfortably — and keeps them clear of the 3-month STRA ceiling in NSW where relevant.
Where the carve-outs actually matter commercially
Duration-based carve-outs only help if there's demand for medium-term stays in your specific market. The good news for most Australian landlords is that there is — more than is generally appreciated — and it comes from surprisingly consistent sources across every state.
Medical and hospital tenants are one of the largest sources. Registrars and specialist doctors on rotation typically need 3-6 month placements near teaching hospitals. Visiting surgeons, locums, and nurses on short-term contracts need 1-3 months. Patients undergoing extended treatment and their families often need 4-12 week stays near major medical facilities. If your property is within a reasonable commute of any major teaching hospital or specialist medical centre, you have a medium-term market almost by default.
Corporate relocations are the second pillar. Companies moving senior staff between cities, bringing international hires to Australia, or running multi-month project teams all need furnished accommodation for 1-6 months. Serviced apartments capture some of this demand, but at price points that increasingly push corporate HR teams toward alternatives. Furnished medium-term rentals that sit meaningfully below serviced apartment rates tend to win this segment.
Insurance placements are the third. When a family's home is damaged by fire, flood, or storm and is being rebuilt, their insurer typically places them in alternative accommodation for 3-9 months. Insurance is a high-volume, price-insensitive buyer that pays reliably and is actively seeking medium-term furnished rentals in most Australian metros.
Defence, diplomatic, and government postings round out the picture. Defence families posted to new bases, diplomats on rotation, and federal and state government staff on secondment all generate predictable medium-term demand in specific corridors — Canberra, Townsville, Darwin, and the defence precincts around the major Air Force, Army, and Navy bases across the country are representative examples.
If your property sits within any of these demand corridors, the duration carve-outs in NSW and Victoria aren't abstract regulatory curiosities — they're the legal foundation that lets you serve demand you're probably already leaving on the table.
Practical compliance notes
A few operational points worth flagging for landlords who decide to incorporate medium-term stays into their property strategy.
Keep documentation of stay durations. For NSW properties within the 180-day cap zones, you should be able to demonstrate to council, if asked, that any 21+ day bookings you're excluding from your count were genuine continuous stays to the same guests. Contemporary records — booking confirmations, check-in/check-out dates, guest identification — should be retained.
Understand the 3-month ceiling in NSW — and consider structuring around it from day one. A booking that starts as STRA under the 21-day exemption but runs beyond 3 months has legally transitioned into a residential tenancy governed by the Residential Tenancies Act 2010. If a guest extends repeatedly from short-stay into long-stay territory, at some point you've crossed that line, and operating as if you're still under the STRA framework creates real legal exposure. At EzyFlats, we sidestep this issue entirely: every booking we manage — whether it's 4 weeks, 3 months, or 12 months — is structured as a residential tenancy from the start, with a proper tenancy agreement, bond lodged through NSW Fair Trading's Rental Bond Online, and compliance with the Residential Tenancies Act built in. We don't use the STRA framework for medium-term stays at all, which means landlords don't have to worry about the transition point, and tenants get the protections they're entitled to. For more on how the 21 days-to-3 months boundary works in practice, see our dedicated guide to the NSW 21-day exemption.
For Victorian properties, check your owners corporation rules before scaling up. Even though medium-term stays are immune to short-stay-specific owners corporation bans, some owners corporations have broader rules about commercial use of lots that can reach any letting activity. Always review the current rules and any pending amendments before committing to a medium-term strategy in a strata building.
Don't rely on platform-level levy exemption claims. In Victoria, Airbnb and similar platforms will generally collect the 7.5% levy on bookings under 28 days and not collect it on bookings of 28+ days. But if you take direct bookings — through your own website, a property manager, or another channel — the levy liability is yours, not the platform's, and you're responsible for registering with the State Revenue Office and lodging returns.
Regulatory change is ongoing in both states. The NSW STRA framework has been subject to a government review following the 2024 consultation, with submissions closed and policy changes being considered. Victoria's levy has been in place for over a year, but councils are layering their own rules on top. The 21-day and 28-day thresholds are current law as at April 2026, but any landlord building a long-term strategy around them should expect to re-check the position annually.
Where EzyFlats fits
I've built EzyFlats specifically to serve the medium-term rental market across Australia. It's a licensed South Australian real estate agency (RLA 346573) operating nationally for furnished rentals from 1 to 24 months. The platform handles digital lease generation, condition reports, bond lodgement, direct debit rent collection, and full property management for landlords who want a hands-off operation.
If you're a landlord weighing up whether medium-term stays make sense for your property, you can list with us directly through ezyflats.com.au. We handle the end-to-end process, and you're welcome to reach out with questions along the way.
I also run a dedicated Facebook group — From Airbnb to Medium-Term — Australian Landlords — for hosts exploring this shift. It's a smaller community focused on the regulatory, tax, and operational side of medium-term letting, rather than general Airbnb discussion. If you'd like the link, drop a comment or message me directly.
Further reading
For primary sources and official guidance:
NSW Planning Portal — Short-term rental accommodation (the NSW Government's central STRA page, including current framework details, Byron Shire provisions, and the 2024 review):
https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/policy-and-legislation/housing/short-term-rental-accommodationHousing SEPP 2021 (the primary NSW legislation, Part 6 covers STRA): available via the NSW legislation website at
https://legislation.nsw.gov.auVictorian State Revenue Office — Short stay levy (the official SRO page with levy details, calculation guidance, registration, and exemption forms):
https://www.sro.vic.gov.au/owning-property/short-stay-levyShort Stay Levy Act 2024 (Vic) (the primary Victorian legislation): available via the Victorian legislation website at
https://www.legislation.vic.gov.auNSW Fair Trading — STRA Code of Conduct (mandatory behavioural code for hosts, guests, and platforms):
https://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/housing-and-property/short-term-rental-accommodation
This article is general information for Australian property owners and is not legal or tax advice. The NSW STRA framework has been subject to an ongoing government review following a 2024 consultation, and further reforms remain possible. Individual council rules also vary widely. Always verify the specific position for your property with your local council, a qualified lawyer, and where relevant the State Revenue Office. Current as at April 2026.
Josh Braendler is the principal agent of EzyFlats (RLA 346573), an Australian licensed real estate agency specialising in medium-term furnished rentals from 1 to 24 months, operating nationally.
