San Diego Tier 3 STRO Licenses: 829 Left as of July 2026

As of 31 July 2026, the City of San Diego had issued 4,832 Tier 3 licences and 829 remained available under the cap. That is the whole answer to the question most owners are asking, and it is a very different answer from the one Mission Beach gets, where the separate Tier 4 cap is fully subscribed with none left at all.

For a whole home outside the Mission Beach community planning area, Tier 3 is the licence that applies. The count moves as licences are issued and as others lapse, so treat 829 as a reading taken on a date rather than a live figure, and confirm the current number with the City before making a decision that depends on it. What follows is which tier your property actually falls into, what the licence does and does not carry, and what to check before you buy or apply.

How Many Tier 3 Licenses Are Left, and What the Cap Means

San Diego caps whole-home short-term rentals rather than leaving the number open. The Tier 3 cap is set at 1 percent of the city's housing units outside the Mission Beach community planning area. Against that ceiling, 4,832 licences had been issued as of 31 July 2026, with 829 still available. Tier 3 is the licence a whole home in La Jolla, Pacific Beach, North Park or anywhere else outside Mission Beach would need.

For scale, the other tiers sit very differently. Tier 1 had 135 licences issued and Tier 2 had 2,372, both as of the same date, and neither is capped. Tier 4, which covers Mission Beach only, had 1,099 issued and zero remaining. So the cap is a live constraint in exactly one place today, Mission Beach, and a ceiling with room under it everywhere else.

The city operates a waitlist for when a capped tier is full, which is the position Mission Beach is in now. How that list is worked through, and how long anyone waits on it, is not something to guess at; ask the City directly if your property sits in a tier with no headroom. For Tier 3 today the more useful question is not whether a licence exists but whether your property and your intended use actually qualify, which is where most applications come unstuck.

San Diego's Four STRO Tiers: Where Tier 3 Fits

The Short-Term Residential Occupancy ordinance splits the market into four tiers. Tier 1 covers an aggregate of 20 days or less a year and does not require the host to be onsite at all. Tier 2 applies where the unit is the host's permanent residence and the host lives there at least 275 days a year, with whole-home rental allowed for up to 90 days a year. Neither is capped. Tier 3 is the whole-home licence outside Mission Beach.

One detail catches people out. Tier 3 and Tier 4 both require 90 or more days of short-term use a year, a two-consecutive-night minimum per guest, and quarterly reports. That leaves a real gap: if you intend to rent somewhere between 21 and 89 days a year, that pattern does not fit any permitted tier, and it is worth resolving before you apply rather than after.

Tier 4 covers Mission Beach only, and it has its own cap set at 30 percent of the housing units in that community planning area, not a zip code. The Mission Beach Tier 4 licence pool is full: 1,099 issued and none remaining as of 31 July 2026. If your property sits inside that boundary, Tier 3 is not an alternative you can apply for instead.

The practical difference between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is whether you live in the property. Tier 2 requires it for most of the year. Tier 3 does not, which is why it is the tier that suits an owner who is not local or who has moved out. Atlia manages Tier 3 properties on a flat 10 percent of booking revenue with no markups on cleaning, supplies or maintenance, covering guest communication, pricing, turnovers, maintenance coordination and owner reporting.

Who Qualifies for a Tier 3 License

Qualification for a Tier 3 license is governed by strict ownership and property type rules. The most significant restriction is the one license per individual rule. A single person cannot hold multiple STRO licenses in San Diego, regardless of how many properties they own. This policy is designed to prevent corporate consolidation of the rental market. If you own three houses, you can only personally license one as a Tier 3 rental. To license the others, you would need separate legal entities or partners as owners, though the city continues to audit these structures closely.

Location decides the tier before anything else. A property inside the Mission Beach boundary applies for Tier 4, not Tier 3, and that boundary is a community planning area rather than a postcode, so check it rather than assuming. If your property is a condo, confirm separately what your HOA bylaws say. A city licence is permission from the city and nothing more; it does not override a building's own rules, and the two are enforced by different people. Ask the City directly about anything specific to your property type before you pay a fee.

For anyone buying, this is the expensive assumption to avoid: the licence does not come with the house. San Diego STRO licences are non-transferable. A home currently running as a short-term rental is not a home that arrives with permission to keep doing so, and the seller cannot pass theirs to you or sell it separately. You apply in your own name, from scratch. The fact that 829 Tier 3 licences remained as of 31 July 2026 is the number to re-check with the City before you assume that will be straightforward.

What a Tier 3 License Costs (Fees and Term)

Tier 3 costs more than the lower tiers, and the published schedule is specific. Effective 1 March 2025, Tier 3 and Tier 4 are a $41 application fee plus $1,129, against $33 plus $193 for Tier 1 and $33 plus $284 for Tier 2. Licences run two years, so that is a biennial cost rather than an annual one. Confirm the current schedule with the City before you budget, because fee schedules get revised.

The permit fee is not the whole compliance picture. A licensed operator also holds a Transient Occupancy Tax certificate and files returns against it, and those filings fall due whether or not the property booked that period. The rate depends on where the property sits, so take it from the City Treasurer for your specific address rather than from any general figure you find online.

Management is the other recurring cost, and it is the one you actually control. Atlia charges a flat 10 percent of booking revenue with no markups added to cleaning, supply or maintenance invoices. Whoever you use, ask for the full written fee schedule rather than the headline rate, because a margin quietly added to every vendor invoice never shows up in the percentage you were quoted. Our comparison of self-managing versus full-service management in San Diego walks through how those costs stack up.

How to Apply: Prerequisites and the City Portal

The Transient Occupancy Tax certificate comes first. You apply for it through the City Treasurer, and it is the piece that has to exist before the STRO licence application makes sense. Licensing itself has been mandatory since 1 May 2023, and the trigger is renting for less than one month measured by calendar month, so 31 January to 28 February counts as a month and 1 February to 28 February does not.

You will also need to name a local contact, and this is the obligation that catches owners out after the licence is granted rather than during the application. That contact must respond to a complaint in person or by phone within one hour and take action to resolve it. Responding inside the hour without actually stopping the problem counts as a separate violation. The enforcement path is cumulative: a third alleged violation at the same unit, or by the same host, within twelve months can go to a hearing officer who has the power to revoke the licence.

Atlia fills that role for its clients with local operators near the property, which is the practical answer to a rule requiring somebody to be physically reachable inside the hour. If you are managing the property yourself, or from out of state, work out who that named person is going to be before you apply rather than after the first complaint. The City is the right source for current processing times and for the full document list.

What Happens When the Cap Closes, and What to Do Now

What happens when a capped tier fills is not hypothetical, because Mission Beach is already there. Tier 4 has 1,099 licences issued and none remaining, and the city maintains a waitlist for that situation. Beyond the existence of that list, the mechanics are not something to take from a blog. If your property sits in a tier with no headroom, the City is the only reliable source for where you would stand and how long it might take.

One thing worth being clear about, because it cuts against how people talk about permits: a licence is not an asset. It is non-transferable, it is tied to one host and one dwelling unit at a time, and it ends when you sell. Whatever value it has is value to you while you hold it. It does not carry to a buyer and it cannot command a price of its own, so anyone telling you a licence adds resale value to the house is describing something the ordinance does not allow.

That makes keeping the licence the thing actually worth protecting, and the mechanism is the one already described: complaints accumulate, and a third alleged violation at the same unit inside twelve months can put the licence in front of a hearing officer. Most of that risk is operational rather than legal. Somebody answering the phone inside the hour and genuinely resolving the problem is what stops a first complaint becoming a second and a third.

Conclusion

So, the short version: 829 Tier 3 licences remained as of 31 July 2026, Mission Beach has none, and the licence you get is non-transferable and tied to a single dwelling unit. Check the current count with the City, confirm which tier your property is actually in, and settle who your local contact will be before you apply rather than after.

Atlia manages San Diego short-term rentals for a flat 10 percent of booking revenue, with no markups on cleaning, supplies or maintenance, and with local operators who can cover the one-hour contact obligation. Every figure here is as of 31 July 2026 and the counts move, so confirm anything you intend to rely on with the City of San Diego before you commit to it.