The World Cup is coming to the U.S., and with it a renewed lobbying push from the short-term rental industry to loosen regulations. The industry argues that hotels will be overwhelmed by the influx of visitors and that vital economic windfalls are at stake.
Leading home-sharing platform Airbnb, an official “supporter” of the World Cup, has announced $5 million in infrastructure investments for certain host cities, including Kansas City, LA, and San Francisco. Airbnb is offering a $750 bonus to attract new hosts ahead of the World Cup.
All of the American host cities have citywide regulations in place for short-term rentals. Airbnb, one of the largest lobbyists in the short-term rental market, is pushing to weaken those regulations in LA and New York City.
While some reports indicate that short-term rentals are seeing increased demand, some hosts and hotel operators say demand is lower than expected. Multiple studies show that the proliferation of short-term rentals can raise rents and housing costs. Organizers are concerned that lifting short-term rental regulations for the World Cup or other major events would set a precedent and allow the companies to permanently loosen regulations.
Here is a rundown of how some major cities are addressing short-term rentals ahead of the World Cup.
Los Angeles
According to AirDNA, demand for Airbnbs in the LA area on June 12—when the first game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, will occur—is up 13 percent year over year. The LA Times interviewed one host charging $7,000 for one night.
In 2018, the city passed an ordinance regulating home rentals that bars affordable and rent-stabilized housing from being operated as short-term rentals and creates an application process for property owners (or renters with a property owner’s permission) to rent their homes for short periods. Permits must be renewed annually. Hosts are responsible for any nuisance complaints and must pay an $89 registration fee and a nightly fee to the city’s enforcement fund. The ordinance allows hosts to list only primary residences as rentals. Los Angeles County also has its own short-term rental ordinance.
In a 2024 report, the LA Housing Department estimated that 7,500 units were actively in violation of the city’s short-term rental regulations but 300 citations had been issued. The housing department wrote that it “[had] not received the necessary staffing and resources to effectively enforce the Home-Sharing Ordinance.”
FIFA has required all host cities to develop a plan to mitigate the games’ human rights impacts, but LA’s plan only lists existing federal, state, and local government laws and does not propose new measures to address homelessness or short-term rentals.
The region has seen particularly intense lobbying on behalf of short-term rental interests. In 2025, Airbnb spent $19 million at the state level and $360,000 on lobbying in LA, according to Capital & Main.
During a $1 billion city budget deficit last year, Airbnb launched its Save Our Services campaign, asking legislators to weaken short-term rental protections ahead of the World Cup, the Super Bowl, and the Olympics to bring extra revenue to the city’s coffers and to prevent service cuts.
“The city is already facing difficult choices, including potential cuts to public services like trash pickup, public safety and emergency response,” the campaign website reads. “By allowing a limited number of people to rent their second home, Los Angeles can unlock millions in new, annual tourism revenue—paid for by tourists, not taxpayers!”
While some labor unions, including International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, backed the campaign, another coalition, Better Neighbors LA, put forward a competing plan asking the city to step up enforcement and bring in increased revenue by collecting fines. The group’s report said it had identified more than 200,000 Airbnb listings since 2019 that were noncompliant with the short-term rental law. “If the City were to start collecting all potential fines from noncompliant STR listings and transactions, in two months L.A. would generate roughly $95 million,” Better Neighbors LA wrote.
In April, a line in Mayor Bass’s proposed 2026–2027 budget tasked the Office of Finance and city administrative officer with developing recommendations to allow companies to prepay into the city’s tax for hotels and short-term rentals ahead of the 2028 Olympics, as first reported by LA Material. The proposal would have set aside these prepaid taxes for street cleanliness, sidewalk repairs, park programming and urban forestry. Separately, the budget proposed a temporary relaxation of short-term rental restrictions in the lead-up to the 2028 Summer Olympics, with a sunset in December of that year. Both proposals were suggested by Airbnb, the company told LAist.
Iris Craige, assistant director of policy and research at the economic justice nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), says the group interpreted the term “street cleanliness” in this portion of the budget as allowing Airbnb payments to go toward encampment removal. The organization brought members to protest the proposal at city council meetings.
The city council instead voted to produce recommendations to create a time-limited short-term rental program that would end at the close of 2028, after the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the World Cup.
The program would set a citywide cap on short-term rentals equal to 1 percent of the existing housing supply: The city of Los Angeles had about 1.6 million units in 2024, 1 percent of which would be about 16,000. To prevent property speculation, the policy would limit short-term rentals to properties owned by hosts before Dec. 31, 2025. The program would also strengthen enforcement by requiring hosts to sign documents “under penalty of perjury.”
SAJE representatives say they will continue to oppose weakening regulations as they await the city’s report.“While they’re doing research, there’s space for advocacy,” Craige says.
[Related Article: Running Rampant: How Short-Term Rentals Affect Communities with Loose Restrictions]
Atlanta
Since 2022, Atlanta has had a short-term rental ordinance that requires hosts to obtain a license from the city. But the city suspended enforcement after the law went into effect and after a lobbying group composed of short-term rental hosts complained, according to an investigation by 11Alive News.
In 2025, lawmakers proposed stronger restrictions that would have required short-term rentals to be 1,000 feet apart and placed a cap on new rentals in multifamily buildings, but none have passed.
Since then, lawmakers have proposed a range of neighborhood-level bans on short-term rentals. An August 2025 ban on new short-term rental permits in the Home Park neighborhood near Georgia Tech passed. A November 2025 attempt to ban short-term rentals in northeast Atlanta failed.
The city of Atlanta has also put forward a human rights strategy, as required by FIFA. Atlanta’s plan pledged to create 500 permanent supportive housing units with wraparound services by the end of 2025, part of a strategy announced in 2025 called AtlantaRising. It will also remove “traditional barriers such as income, employment, or sobriety requirements, in order to provide immediate stability for those in crisis.” In an email to Shelterforce/Next City, Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for Home, which is administering the plan, writes that the city has “created 500 units of permanent supportive housing through the Rapid Housing Initiative,” and that the final 112 units came online in April. But the city has not made any plans to address short-term rentals during the World Cup. When Shelterforce/Next City asked about short-term rentals and homeless policy, Michael Smith, deputy chief communications officer for Mayor Andre Dickens, declined to answer specific questions. “There are a number of independently verified sources, both local and national, that have covered the Administration’s work to provide supportive housing, case management, wraparound services and more for our unsheltered residents,” Smith wrote to Shelterforce/Next City instead.
Michael Collins, the director of Play Fair ATL, says that he has heard of people at rental assistance clinics whose leases were not renewed in the past few months.
“The landlord is suddenly not renewing the lease, and they believe it’s to make money during the World Cup,” Collins says.
Collins argues that the city’s entire World Cup planning process was conducted with an eye toward investment rather than toward protecting vulnerable people. He believes that the government’s role in preparing for the games has been minimal.
“The original sin [with] the World Cup in Atlanta is that the planning … is not done by [the] city government, it’s not done by the mayor’s office, it’s not done by the governor. The planning for the World Cup has been outsourced to the Chamber of Commerce,” Collins says.
The Metro Atlanta Chamber is one of eight partner groups on the city’s host committee, which includes the Atlanta Sports Council and the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Metro Atlanta Chamber Chair, Rich McKay, is the former CEO of the Atlanta Falcons and has spoken with CNBC about his role in preparing the city for the games.
The result, Collins says, is that the host committee has not focused on regulating short-term rentals.
“They’re not accountable to residents,” he says.
New York/New Jersey
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city council are fending off a push to weaken an existing short-term rental law, Local Law 18.
Enacted in 2022, the law requires short-term rental hosts to register before listing their rental on an online platform, limits rentals to primary residences, and creates a list of prohibited buildings that cannot be listed on short-term rental sites. According to a report by the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement, the law successfully “eradicated” most of the city’s illegal short-term rental activity, leaving just 3,000 active registrations by September 2025.
But business lobbying groups such as the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and Partnership for New York City, both of which count Airbnb as a member, have urged the city council to roll back its restrictions.
A bill that would have allowed hosts in one- and two-family homes to rent out properties without being physically present at the residence during a reservation died in the New York City Council in December. Council members voiced their opposition to weakening short-term rental regulations in March.
Meanwhile, hotel demand during the World Cup is lower than predicted, according to The City Reporter. The outlet reports that hotel bookings are down year over year for June 13, when the first match at MetLife Stadium takes place.
In nearby New Jersey, the state is governed by a hodgepodge of short-term rental regulations; many municipalities have banned rentals of fewer than 30 days. According to Gothamist, 10 towns in New Jersey are in ZIP codes where hosts are eligible for a $750 World Cup bonus, despite local bans on short-term rentals.
Boston
Boston’s short-term rental ordinance, which took effect in 2019, requires hosts to register with the city and pay a $200 annual fee, mandates that the rental be the host’s primary residence, and limits the number of guests.
Towns outside Boston, including Plainville and Foxborough, where Gillette Stadium will host the games, already have their own short-term rental bans in place.
Boston’s games are affecting the short-term rental market across New England. In Smithfield, where Ghana’s men’s team will be staying, the town council is debating a ban on short-term rentals, although it will likely not be in place in time for the World Cup games.
“Short-term rentals in general, not just specifically related to FIFA, have had a big impact … particularly in areas [such as] Newport and South County,” Brenda Clement, executive director of HousingWorks RI, tells Shelterforce/Next City.
“It’s not a bad thing to encourage all of this economic activity and excitement and interest, but when we do it in the context of a very tight housing market, it further exacerbates the problem,” Clement says.
Houston and Dallas
Texas is hosting 16 World Cup matches at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington and NRG Stadium in Houston.
Houston adopted a short-term rental ordinance in 2025 that took effect at the beginning of this year. It establishes a $275 annual fee for hosts to register with the city and operate legally.
A city database shows that just over 5,000 locations had been registered as of late May. The city also set up a website for neighbors to file complaints about short-term rentals, including complaints about noise or illegal rentals.
Airbnb donated $1.3 million to Houston ahead of the World Cup to support green space revitalization, repair the Columbia Tap Trail, and fund youth soccer initiatives. It’s the largest tranche of the company’s $5 million payments to host cities.
In June 2023, Dallas passed two separate ordinances governing short-term rental regulations and zoning. The laws establish a process for registering a short-term rental with a $404 annual registration fee and legalizes rentals within the city’s zoning code while limiting their presence in some types of buildings. Enforcement was temporarily blocked by an injunction later that year after a lobbying group of short-term rental hosts sued. In October, the city appealed to the Texas Supreme Court for clarification of the rules before the World Cup.
Even with the injunction in place, the city can crack down on short-term rentals under existing property laws. During a May city council meeting, the city said it had recovered $5.5 million from short-term rental hosts who had failed to pay occupancy taxes dating back to 2020.
“We need to get it right instead of leaving it in litigation,” one legislator said at the council meeting, though nothing new has been introduced.
Kansas City
Kansas City, Missouri, passed a short-term rental ordinance in 2023. The law restricts short-term rentals by hosts who are not primary residents to commercially zoned neighborhoods and limits the number of short-term rentals in single-family homes and duplexes to one every 1,000 feet. Hosts must register with the city and pay a $200 fee.
In December 2025, the city passed an ordinance to encourage residents to open listings during the World Cup. The ordinance allows hosts to register their units in 90-day increments for a lower fee of $50 if it is determined that the city does not have enough lodging for a major event.
According to KCUR, about 400 hosts participated in the program.
This story was published through a collaboration between Shelterforce and Next City. Next City is a nonprofit news outlet that publishes solutions to the problems that oppress people in cities, inspiring social, economic, and environmental change through journalism and events around the world.
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