Short-Term Rental Rules Across El Paso County

A listing last spring advertised its active short-term rental permit as though it came with the house. It does not.

I'm Brandon Behr, a REALTOR® with the Behr & Behr Team in Colorado Springs, and here is the answer up front: every jurisdiction in El Paso County writes its own short-term rental rule, and inside the city the permit expires the day the property changes hands.

I am not an attorney, a lender, an insurance agent or a tax professional. Where I could not open a primary document, I say so.

Six rulebooks inside one county line

Regional Building covers nearly the whole county with one permit search. Short-term rental rules do the opposite. They break at every municipal boundary, and a mailing address reading Colorado Springs tells you nothing about which row applies.

Read the last column twice. It is the one that costs money.

The city's line between a spare room and a business

The city sorts every short-term rental into one of two boxes, and the box decides where the house can be. Per the city's program page, retrieved August 2026, "owner occupied short term rentals are those properties that are physically occupied by the owner for no less than 185 days per year." Those are allowed wherever a zone permits residential use.

Everything else is non-owner-occupied, and City Code section 7.3.301 puts two walls around it. "No non-owner occupied Short Term Rental shall be located within five hundred (500) feet of another non-owner occupied Short Term Rental." And applications after December 26, 2019 cannot sit in the R-E, R-1 9 or R-1 6 districts, or in single-family planned development zones, at all. One exception: an active duty military member may get a one-year waiver from the separation rule.

The city also states there is "not a cap on the number of short term rentals being approved." Colorado Springs did not copy the mountain towns. It restricted geography instead of counting units.

The permit dies at the closing table

City Code section 7.5.510 is not ambiguous. The permit "is issued to the specific owner of the property" and "expires upon sale or transfer." It "shall not be transferred or assigned to another individual, person, entity, or address."

There is no grandfathering for a buyer. Say a house in an R-1 6 zone has run as a whole-home rental since 2018 on a permit issued before December 26, 2019. That permit ends at closing, and you cannot get a new non-owner-occupied one at that address. The income history is real. Your right to repeat it is not.

Renewal bites current owners too. Missing the date "may result in a Code Enforcement notice and if non-owner occupied, the potential forfeiture of your established permit," with "no grace period."

Manitou Springs, and the chapter I could not open

Manitou is the tightest jurisdiction here and the one buyers misread most. Its rules sit in Chapter 18.89, Vacation Rentals, adopted through Ordinance No. 1416. Manitou's own site and its Municode chapter both refused automated retrieval in August 2026, so what follows is secondhand.

Writing in Colorado Lawyer in April 2022, attorneys Reagan Larkin and Amy Brimah described Manitou as capping short-term rentals at 2% of residential structures, roughly 58 permits, with a 500-foot separation. Two real estate sources published since put the figure near 56 and treat 185 days of owner occupancy as a condition of a new license.

I will not state a 2026 permit count, waitlist position or fee I could not confirm. Call the City Clerk and ask three things: how many licenses are issued today, whether the list is closed, and whether one survives a sale. A blog handing you a confident Manitou number without naming the ordinance section is guessing.

Outside the city, the house is fine and the casita is not

Unincorporated El Paso County is the loosest jurisdiction, and the county says so in writing. Its Planning and Community Development page states that "El Paso County does not have a codified short term rental ordinance/Code and there are no specific regulations or permit requirements for short term rental of the principal structure."

The exception is the building out back. The county adds that "if an accessory structure will be used as a short term rental, then zoning approval is needed," and its accessory living quarters standards make owners sign a recorded affidavit that the unit will not be leased, rented or used as a short-term rental. So in Black Forest or Peyton you may rent the house nightly with no county permit, and you may not rent the guest quarters at all without Development Services. Planner of the Day, 719-520-6944.

Green Mountain Falls, Palmer Lake, Monument and Fountain

Green Mountain Falls runs a real system. The town's posted amendment, dated September 1, 2022 and carrying staff notes, sets a ceiling: "the Town shall issue no more than 60 short-term rental licenses." A license "is not transferrable upon the sale of the property." Fines run $250, $500 and $1,000, with revocation after three violations in a license year. Ordinance 2022-02 passed November 1, 2022 and took effect that December. I read the annotated draft, not the signed ordinance, so verify the 60 with Town Hall.

Palmer Lake regulates under town code 5.08, from Ordinance 12 of 2021 as amended in 2022 and 2023. It defines a short-term rental as a dwelling unit rented for one to twenty-nine days and calls it "a commercial use of a residential property." One license per parcel, with more requiring conditional use approval.

Monument and Fountain are where I have to be blunt. I checked Monument's permits, licensing and planning pages and its code, and Fountain's zoning ordinance and code library, and found no dedicated short-term rental ordinance in either as of August 2026. Monument does require a business license for "all businesses operating within the Town." Absence in my search is not proof of absence. Call Monument planning at 719-884-8015.

Taxes now, and the reclassification bill that keeps returning

Per the Colorado Department of Revenue's DR 1002 publication dated January 2026, the state rate is 2.9%, El Paso County adds 1.23%, and the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority adds 1% countywide except in Fountain, Monument and Palmer Lake. Colorado Springs adds 3.07%, for a combined 8.20%. Manitou levies 3.90%. On top sits the Lodgers and Automobile Rental Tax, 2% on lodging and 1% on car rentals, which produced $10,157,177 in 2024. The city says the permit program exists partly to "ensure that short term rental owners are paying LART tax similar to other transient lodging." Airbnb and Vrbo collect most of it. Book direct and you "will need to obtain a City Sales Tax License."

Property tax is the bigger question, and Colorado has twice tried to move it. SB24-033, Lodging Property Tax Treatment, from Senator Chris Hansen and Representative Mike Weissman, would have reclassified a unit leased short-term more than 90 days in the prior tax year as lodging property starting January 1, 2026. Senate Finance killed it 6 to 1 on April 16, 2024. HB24-1299 drew a 10 to 0 postponement six days later. The interim version proposed moving these properties from 7.15% to 29%, per The Sum and Substance, October 31, 2023. Senator Larry Liston, a Colorado Springs Republican, told that committee "the heavy hand of government is trying to tell you how to run your business." Hansen called it "tax fairness and equity."

As of August 2026, no Colorado statute reclassifies short-term rentals. They are assessed at the residential rate like any other house, and how that rate reaches a bill is in what your property tax bill really says. Do not underwrite assuming it stays settled, and do not let anyone tell you it already changed.

Three documents no city permit covers

First, the covenants. In newer El Paso County neighborhoods the recorded declaration is frequently stricter than the zoning, and I have watched a buyer clear the 500-foot buffer and lose the plan to a paragraph in Schedule B-2 of the title commitment. In Houston v. Wilson Mesa Ranch Homeowners Ass'n, 360 P.3d 255 (Colo. App. 2015), the court held that an association could not ban short-term rentals by board rule, because "the covenants themselves must be amended." Under C.R.S. 38-33.3-217(4.5), changing the uses to which a unit is restricted takes at least 67% of owners, per Larkin and Brimah in Colorado Lawyer, April 2022. That cuts both ways. A quiet declaration today can acquire a ban after you close.

Second, your policy. The city requires "proof of at least $500,000 in liability insurance," a requirement that exists because a standard homeowners policy is not written around paying guests. I am not an insurance agent. Send the declarations page to your carrier with the sentence "I intend to rent this nightly" and get the answer in writing. Premium context is in why hail drives insurance here.

Third, your note. Fannie Mae's Selling Guide section B2-1.1-01, last updated October 5, 2022, says a second home "must not be rental property" and "cannot be subject to any agreements that give a management firm control over the occupancy of the property." A principal residence is one "that the borrower occupies as their primary residence." I am not a lender. That is a conversation to have before you sign.

Confirming one specific address before you write

Twenty minutes, before the offer rather than inside the inspection window, whose mechanics are in what contingent actually means.

1. Confirm the jurisdiction. Pull the parcel on the El Paso County Assessor search at property.spatialest.com/co/elpaso. Plenty of parcels with a Colorado Springs mailing address are unincorporated. Limit: it shows taxing districts, not municipal rules.
2. Run SpringsView for city addresses. The city's instruction: "click 'show layer list' and ensure that 'Short Term Rentals' is checked under 'Planning-Administration,'" then search the address. The same map carries zoning, so you learn whether the parcel is R-1 6, R-1 9, R-E or a single-family PDZ. Limit: a pin proves the current owner holds a permit, not that you can.
3. Email the buffer question to [email protected]. Limit: it is measured against other active non-owner-occupied permits, which lapse and appear, so an answer in March is not an answer in July.
4. Read the recorded declaration, not the welcome packet. Check the use clause and the amendment threshold.
5. Check permit history at pprbd.org if you plan to rent a basement, casita or converted garage. An unpermitted second unit fails on the building side regardless of zoning.
6. Call the town clerk in Manitou Springs, Green Mountain Falls, Palmer Lake, Monument or Fountain. The published page lags the ordinance.

Four gaps I could not close

Manitou's current cap, waitlist and fee could not be retrieved from a primary source in August 2026. Green Mountain Falls' 60-license ceiling comes from an annotated draft. Whether El Paso County levies a county lodging tax is unresolved, because the state moved lodging rates into a separate DR 1003 dashboard on August 1, 2025 that my tools could not read. And I found no published count of city permits issued or revoked, so nobody, including me, can tell you how hard Colorado Springs enforces. What the city does publish is that enforcement runs through the Neighborhood Services Division on complaints.

What I tell a buyer chasing nightly rates here

Decide which of the two city boxes you are in before you tour anything. Live there 185 days a year and your options stay wide. Do not, and the search collapses to multi-family and mixed-use zones subject to the 500-foot buffer, which drops much of the westside inventory on the first filter.

Then stop treating a seller's rental history as an asset you are buying. Underwrite the house as a long-term rental or as a home, and let nightly income be upside you have confirmed in writing from the jurisdiction, the covenants, the carrier and the lender. In Manitou, assume you cannot get a license until the clerk says otherwise. Outside the city limits, confirm whether the unit you want to rent is the principal structure or an accessory one. That distinction is the whole rule out there.

I'm Brandon Behr with the Behr & Behr Team at The Platinum Group, Realtors. Send me an address and I will pull the Assessor record, the zoning, the SpringsView permit layer and the covenants, then tell you what I see, including the version where the numbers do not work.

Equal Housing Opportunity. I am a REALTOR®, not an attorney, lender, insurance agent or tax professional, and none of this is legal, lending, insurance or tax advice. Ordinances, caps, fees, tax rates and bill status change, sometimes at a single council meeting. Verify with the City of Colorado Springs Planning Department, the Manitou Springs City Clerk, El Paso County Planning and Community Development, the Colorado Department of Revenue and your own attorney and accountant before relying on anything here.