Short-Term Rentals on Unincorporated Land in Eagle County, Colorado

The county considered a licensing ordinance, then chose not to adopt one

Eagle County spent time developing a draft short-term rental ordinance for unincorporated areas, including places like El Jebel that fall outside the licensing programs run by nearby Basalt or Pitkin County. But the Eagle County Board of County Commissioners ultimately decided, in a May 2025 meeting, not to create a county-level STR ordinance at all. Instead, the commissioners directed staff to simply collect short-term rental data going forward, concluding that the large majority of short-term rentals in unincorporated Eagle County are already governed by individual metro districts or homeowners associations rather than needing a separate county licensing layer on top.

The practical result: as of this writing, there is no county-level short-term rental license requirement for unincorporated Eagle County. That's a meaningfully different regulatory environment than Vail, Avon, or other incorporated towns in the county, each of which sets and enforces its own short-term rental rules within town limits -- and it's different from some neighboring mountain counties like Summit County, which has capped the number of STR licenses it issues specifically to limit the impact on workforce housing.

Metro districts and HOAs are where the real restrictions live

Because the county has explicitly stepped back from countywide STR regulation, the operative restrictions on a specific unincorporated parcel come from whatever metro district or homeowners association governs that property -- not from a single county rulebook you can look up once. Communities like Beaver Creek, Cordillera, and EagleVail each carry their own covenants and, in some cases, metro-district rules that can restrict or prohibit short-term rentals independent of anything the county does or doesn't require. Before counting on short-term rental income from a parcel in unincorporated Eagle County, pull the specific subdivision's covenants and any applicable metro-district rules -- the county's lack of a licensing requirement is not the same thing as the property itself being unrestricted.

Roughly 2,000 unincorporated units, and counting is the county's current approach

Reporting on the county's STR discussions put the total number of short-term rentals countywide at roughly 5,200, with about 3,200 inside incorporated towns and around 2,000 in unincorporated areas -- the segment a county ordinance would have covered had one been adopted. With the county now focused on data collection rather than licensing, treat that 2,000 figure as a snapshot rather than a capped or actively monitored number the way it would be in a county with a license-based cap. If short-term rental policy at the county level matters to your purchase decision, this is an area to watch -- county commissioners have revisited STR policy more than once already, and a future board could reach a different conclusion.