Short-term rentals
555 short-term rentals hold a licence across the county’s four townships. A short-term rental is a home let for 28 days or less, and since 1 October 2024 each township has required a licence to operate one, under by-laws drafted with the County, which runs the program.
This page counts them and lists none. Every licence is somebody’s house or cottage, so there is no address, no directory and no map here, unlike every other kind of business in this atlas.
By township
| Township | Licensed | Per 100 dwellings (2021) | Issued 2024 | Issued 2025 | Issued 2026 | List updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dysart et al | 282 | 3.9 | 42 | 181 | 59 | 2026-07-16 |
| Minden Hills | 86 | 1.4 | 18 | 66 | 2 | 2026-04-22 |
| Highlands East | 64 | 1.4 | 6 | 58 | 0 | 2026-10-06 |
| Algonquin Highlands | 123 | 3.7 | 6 | 96 | 21 | 2026-09-25 |
| County | 555 | 2.6 | 72 | 401 | 82 |
Dwellings are the 2021 census count of all private dwellings, cottages included, which is the stock a rental is let from. It is the latest count there is, five years older than the licences, so the rate is against the housing stock of 2021, not today’s. The issue year is read from the licence number: STR25-00056 was issued in 2025. A licence renewed in a later year keeps the number it was first given, so the columns show when each licence started, not the year it is now in.
Each township keeps its own list, and they are not updated together. Minden Hills’s was last changed on April 22, 2026, so licences issued there since then are not yet counted.
What this does not count
A rental operating without a licence. The count is the townships’ approved licences, not every listing on Airbnb or Vrbo. Neither platform publishes its listings, and this atlas does not scrape them.
Fines and penalty notices. Algonquin Highlands enforces its by-law through an administrative monetary penalty system, and the others set fines in their by-laws, but none of the four publishes how many penalties it has issued.
Where this comes from
The County of Haliburton publishes each township’s approved licences as a layer on its ArcGIS Online site, the same layers behind the map Highlands East links to from its short-term rentals page. Read on October 14, 2026.
Each licence is placed in a township by testing its point against the province’s legal boundaries, and where the layer carries roll numbers, their assessment code has to agree. The layers publish no licence, the same as the County’s other GIS services, which is a second reason only the counts are kept. 3 licence numbers appear twice in their township's list and are counted once.