Hastings, Nebraska Ties Rental Rules to House Size, Not Stay Length

Hastings, Nebraska is drafting a zoning ordinance that would decide whether a property counts as a regulated short-term rental based on the size of the building, not how many nights a guest stays. The proposal, headed to the city's planning commission, breaks from the 30-day rental-length test that Nebraska cities have generally used to separate short-term stays from long-term leases.

How the size test would replace the stay-length test

Under current practice, a rental in Hastings is treated as short-term if bookings run under 30 days, the same durational line used across much of the state for lodging tax and licensing purposes. The draft ordinance would instead sort properties by structure size, meaning a house or accessory building would be classified for zoning purposes according to its footprint or unit type rather than the length of any given booking.

City planning staff have not published an exact square-footage line as part of the draft, and the commission has yet to vote on specifics. What is clear from the proposal is the shift in mechanism: zoning status would attach to the building itself, not to a landlord's rental calendar.

What changes for hosts operating in Hastings

A duration test and a size test can sort the same city into very different winners and losers. Under the old rule, an owner renting a large single-family home for three-night stays and one renting it for three-month leases would fall into different regulatory buckets. Under a size-based rule, that same large home could be treated the same way regardless of how it's booked, while a smaller accessory dwelling or converted garage apartment might be pulled into a separate, possibly more permissive or more restrictive, category.

That matters most for operators who lean on accessory units, converted basements or small secondary structures as part of a portfolio. If the city sets the size threshold low, those units could face tighter zoning conditions than the main house on the same lot, even though both currently operate under identical short-term rental registration rules today.

Why the timing matters

Nothing in Hastings changes until the planning commission acts on the draft and, typically, the city council follows with a final ordinance. Hosts currently registered or licensed under the existing 30-day framework are not yet subject to a new size-based test, and the exact thresholds the city lands on will determine who actually feels the difference. Operators with mixed-use lots or accessory rental units are the ones with the most reason to watch the vote closely, since they're the group most likely to be reclassified regardless of which side of the change is more favorable.