Short-Term Rentals at Raystown Lake, Huntingdon County, PA

Huntingdon County's Raystown Lake supports a real, active short-term-rental market built around lakeside cabins and, uniquely in Pennsylvania, houseboats -- and Juniata Township, home to the lake's main marina and visitor hub, regulates that market under its own named ordinance rather than leaving it unaddressed.

This page covers what's specific to Huntingdon County. For the general explanation, see the national guide.

A rental market built around a lake with almost no lakefront houses

Raystown Lake -- at roughly 8,300 surface acres, the largest lake located entirely within Pennsylvania -- has a distinctive geography that shapes its whole rental market: because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state own most of the land ringing the reservoir, there is reportedly not a single private house directly on its roughly 118 miles of shoreline. That public-land buffer is also why nearly a quarter of Huntingdon County's total land area is publicly owned, as this county's hub page covers. The practical result for a short-term-rental investor is that lakefront vacation cabins and rental homes cluster in the private land just outside that public buffer -- particularly around Hesston, in Juniata Township, where the Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau and Seven Points Marina are both based -- rather than directly on the water the way a typical PA lake community would develop.

Seven Points Marina, based in Hesston, is described by the Philadelphia Inquirer, VisitPA, and multiple other outlets as the only place in Pennsylvania where you can rent a houseboat -- a fleet reported at around 19 vessels, ranging from small units for a handful of people up to boats sleeping 8 to 10, renting in-season for roughly $1,500 to $3,900 per week or weekend depending on size. That's a genuinely unique short-term-rental product for this state, not just a larger version of what other Pennsylvania lake towns offer, and it makes Raystown's rental economy meaningfully different from a typical rural PA short-term-rental market built solely around cabins and cottages.

Juniata Township regulates short-term rentals directly -- not every PA township does

Unlike many rural Pennsylvania townships, which have no short-term-rental ordinance at all and leave the question to state innkeeper/hotel-tax law and general nuisance ordinances, Juniata Township -- the township that includes Hesston and the Seven Points Marina area -- has adopted its own dedicated Short-Term Rental Ordinance (No. 2023-2). As of a 2022 township meeting, roughly 34 short-term rentals in the township were already registered with the Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau, giving a rough sense of how established this market already was before the ordinance was formally adopted in 2023.

The ordinance requires septic system inspection as part of short-term-rental compliance -- a genuinely practical detail for a lake-area rental property where a septic system, rather than public sewer, is the norm -- and the township has designated named STR Enforcement Officers as points of contact for compliance questions, rather than routing enforcement through general code-enforcement staff. This research pass could not independently confirm the ordinance's specific permit fee amount or full list of requirements (occupancy limits, parking, noise provisions) from search-indexed sources alone; a buyer should request the full ordinance text and current fee schedule directly from the township before assuming any figure found elsewhere online is current.

What to check before buying land near Raystown Lake for rental income

First, confirm which specific municipality a prospective parcel sits in -- Raystown Lake touches several Huntingdon County townships, and this research pass confirmed a dedicated short-term-rental ordinance specifically in Juniata Township but did not find equivalent, independently confirmed ordinances for every other lake-adjacent township (Wood, Henderson, Cass, and others), so don't assume Juniata Township's rules, or lack of rules elsewhere, apply uniformly around the entire lake. Second, if the township does regulate short-term rentals, request the ordinance's current permit application, fee schedule, septic-inspection requirement, and the name of the current STR Enforcement Officer directly -- these change over time and are worth confirming rather than relying on a prior owner's or online listing's account of what's required.

Third, if the appeal of the parcel is specifically its proximity to the lake, remember that direct lakefront land is largely unavailable for private purchase given the public-land buffer -- so "near Raystown Lake" for a private rental property almost always means a short drive to the water rather than true lake frontage, and confirming the actual distance, road access, and view from a specific parcel matters more here than it might at a lake with conventional private shoreline development.

Short-Term Rentals Near Raystown Lake, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania

A rental market built around a lake with almost no lakefront houses

Juniata Township regulates short-term rentals directly -- not every PA township does

What to check before buying land near Raystown Lake for rental income

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