New York City's Local Law 18 All But Eliminated Short-Term Rentals to Protect the Housing Stock. Manhattan Hotel Rooms Now Average $444 a Night, and the Hotel Industry That Lobbied for the Law Calls Itself Fully Supportive.

New York City's Local Law 18 took effect on September 5, 2023, requiring anyone renting out a room or apartment for under 30 days to register with the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement, pay a non-refundable $145 fee, and be physically present for the entire stay. Whole-apartment rentals were banned outright, guest counts were capped at two, and booking platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com had to verify a listing's registration before they could even process payment. The city framed it as a fix for a 1.4% housing vacancy rate — pull short-term rentals off the market and apartments would return to long-term tenants.

Active listings collapsed almost immediately, from roughly 38,000 in early 2023 to about 3,000 registered two years later, a drop of around 92%. What the law did not do, according to the city's own housing numbers, was move the vacancy rate. What it did do was hand New York's hotel industry — the same industry that spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing for the law — a market with a lot less competition and a lot more room to raise prices.

The numbers

• ~38,000 active short-term listings in early 2023 fell to ~3,000 registered listings by mid-2025 — OSE's own figures.
• AirDNA data cited separately shows ~22,000 active Airbnb listings in August 2023 down to ~2,300 by early 2024.
• OSE approved only about 40% of registration applications, denying more than 4,300 — including 550 for units in rent-regulated buildings, which are barred from the program entirely.
• Roughly 14,000 NYC buildings opted onto the city's "prohibited buildings" list, closing themselves to registration outright.
• A later review found about 27% of the ~3,000 registered listings were still operating illegally anyway.

Who paid for it

During the lobbying push, the hotel industry contributed more than $600,000 to city politicians. Airbnb contributed about $18,000 — roughly a 33-to-1 gap. In 2015, the Hotel Association of New York City had published a study claiming Airbnb cost hotels $2 billion in lost revenue. The Hotel Trades Council, the hotel workers' union and a significant force in city politics, publicly celebrated Local Law 18's passage as a win.

• Airbnb and three hosts sued the city; NY Supreme Court Judge Arlene Bluth dismissed the suit on August 8, 2023, calling the rules "inherently rational" and "not so burdensome."
• Violations carry penalties up to $5,000 a day; the city filed its first Local Law 18 lawsuit against a landlord in May 2025.
• The Hotel Association of New York City describes itself today as "fully supportive" of the law.

The bill

New York City's average nightly hotel rate hit $283 in July 2025, up between 7% and 12.6% since the law took effect. In Manhattan specifically, hotel stays averaged $444.66 a night in December 2024 — nearly triple the national average of $150 to $160. Airbnb's own retrospective on the law's first year acknowledges higher prices for travelers and states there was "no impact on housing."

The law that eliminated 92% of the city's short-term rental listings was financed 33-to-1 by an industry with no unit of housing to its name. Two years later, the vacancy rate the law was written to fix sits where it sat before, and a room at a Manhattan hotel costs $444 a night.

Filed from public reporting:

• Wikipedia — "Local Law 18 of 2022"
• NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice — "LL18 Report Sheds Light on Eliminated Illegal Rentals in NYC"
• NYC Office of Special Enforcement — "NYC Files First Lawsuit Using Local Law 18"
• Bloomberg — "Airbnb's Lawsuit to Block NYC Short-Term Rental Law Is Dismissed"
• Matador Network — "NYC Hotel Prices Surge After Airbnb Crackdown"
• Skift — "Banned in NYC: Airbnb One Year Later"
• Gallet Dreyer & Berkey — "The Impact of New York City's Short-Term Rental Law, Two Years In"
• American Enterprise Institute — "How NYC Hotels Use Regulations to Block Airbnb Competition"
• Hotel Association of NYC — Statement on Local Law 18
• Lodgify — "1 Year Later: The Impact of New York City's Short-Term Rental Restrictions"