Nearly every buyer who asks me about rental income asks the question the same way: can I rent it out?And the honest answer starts by rejecting the premise, because “here” is not one place with one rule. This market spans at least three separate permitting jurisdictions, and the boundaries between them do not follow the names people use in conversation.
Then, on top of whichever town rules apply, sits the document that can overrule all of them: the covenants recorded against the property itself.
So there are four things to check, in a specific order. Getting them in the wrong order is how someone ends up owning a property they cannot legally use the way they bought it for.
1. Which jurisdiction is the address actually in?
Not which town do people say it is near. Which jurisdiction is the parcel in. There are three answers in this market:
- Town of Hilton Head Island. Its own short-term rental programme, in Title 10, Chapter 7 of the Town Code.
- Town of Bluffton. A separate programme entirely, under Chapter 6, Article V of the Town of Bluffton Code of Ordinances.
- Unincorporated Beaufort County.Neither of the above. A great deal of what people call “Bluffton” in conversation — including plenty of addresses with a Bluffton postal address — sits outside the Town of Bluffton’s limits.
That last one catches people constantly. A postal address is not a jurisdiction. Confirm the parcel, then read that jurisdiction’s rules and no one else’s.
2. On Hilton Head, the line is thirty days
The Town of Hilton Head Island’s ordinance applies to privately owned residential property rented to transient occupants for a rental period of less than thirty consecutive days. That is the trigger. At thirty days and beyond you are outside the short-term rental programme; below it, you are in it, and a permit is required.
The Town’s published requirements include:
- A short-term rental permit for the property, plus a current-year Town business license — two separate things, both required.
- The permit must be issued to a person, not a business entity. If you were planning to hold the property in an LLC and permit it in the LLC’s name, read this one twice.
- An HOA approval letter where applicable — see the next section, because this requirement is the whole argument.
- The valid permit number must appear in your advertisements. Not filed somewhere. In the listing.
- A site plan showing the trash location and the designated parking spaces, at nine feet by eighteen, with a maximum of six.
- Safety equipment: at least one fully charged fire extinguisher, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, a sixty-minute shut-off valve on propane barbecues, and — for properties of 3,600 square feet or more — an approved fire suppression or monitoring system.
- A responsible party who takes responsive action within one hour of a complaint. One hour. If you are planning to own this from another state and self- manage, that clause deserves a hard look before you commit.
Town Council amended this ordinance in October 2025, including moving the permit due date to 30 April so it lines up with business licence renewal. Because it has been amended once recently it will be amended again, so treat the list above as a map of what the Town cares about rather than as the current text. The current text is at the link in the sources below, and that is the one that governs.
I have not put the permit fee in this post. The figures circulating on third-party lodging-tax sites are not the Town’s own publication, and a fee is exactly the kind of number that changes in a budget cycle. Get it from the Town.
3. Bluffton runs its own programme
The Town of Bluffton requires a Short-term Rental Unit Permit under Chapter 6, Article V of its Code of Ordinances, and it must be obtained before advertising, leasing or operating the unit — not once a booking arrives. A town business licence comes first, then the permit. A separate application is required for each unit, including accessory dwelling units, and the permit renews annually.
Bluffton also limits density in a way Hilton Head does not: a maximum of one short-term rental unit per lot across a defined list of zoning districts. Which district a lot sits in therefore matters as much as which town it is in.
4. And then your POA gets a vote — this is the one that decides it
A town permit is permission from the town. It says nothing whatsoever about whether the covenants recorded against your property allow you to do it.
Communities in this market sit all along the range. Some permit short-term rentals as a matter of course, and an entire management industry exists around them. Some restrict them by minimum stay. Some prohibit them outright. Two gates fifteen minutes apart can land in completely different places, and neither of them will tell you at the gatehouse.
The clearest evidence of how much this matters is in the Town’s own application: it asks for an HOA approval letter where applicable. The Town is not going to hand you a permit for something your community forbids. It checks.
The permit is the last question, not the first. If the master deed says no, nothing the town issues will help you.
This is the single most expensive version of a mistake I see coming, and it is why the master deed is one of the three documents I want every buyer to read before they sign. Short-term rental permission is a line item in it, alongside the pet rules and whether you may put a fence in your own back garden.
What I am not going to tell you
You may have noticed there is no rental rate in this post, no occupancy assumption and nothing resembling a projected return. That is not modesty. I do not have a sourced figure for what a given unit rents for, and the number a buyer most wants at this stage is the one most likely to be quoted from a memory of somebody else’s good year.
When someone is seriously evaluating a specific unit, the numbers worth having come from that unit’s own history and from managers who operate in that complex — not from an agent’s estimate. I will help you get those. I am not going to make them up.
One thing I will say plainly, because it comes up constantly and the answer is not a grey area: how you represent the property to your lender is a separate matter from what the town permits, and getting it wrong is fraud rather than paperwork. I wrote that one out in full in can I tell the bank an investment property is my home?
The order to do this in
- Confirm which jurisdiction the parcel is in.
- Read that jurisdiction’s current ordinance.
- Read the community’s master deed and covenants for rental restrictions.
- Only then work out whether the numbers make sense.
Most people do these in reverse, and the ones who get hurt are the ones who did step four first. If you are weighing a specific property and want the first three checked properly before you commit to anything, send me the address. And if the segment you are looking at is island condos, I have a page on that specifically.