Can you Airbnb
your ADU?

The direct answer

Generally, no — not the common scenario of living in the main house and renting the backyard ADU out short-term. LA's Home-Sharing Ordinance restricts short-term rental listings to a host's actual primary residence. If you live in the main house, the ADU isn't your primary residence, so it doesn't qualify to be listed.

What "primary residence" actually means here

The city defines it concretely: you have to live in the home for at least 6 months (183 days) per calendar year for it to count as your primary residence for home-sharing purposes. It's not a paperwork technicality — it's where you actually live most of the year.

The narrow exception

There's a specific edge case: if you genuinely live in the ADU itself as your primary residence, that ADU can potentially register for home-sharing — but only if it received its certificate of occupancy before January 1, 2017. A newly built ADU doesn't qualify under this path, even if you move into it full-time.

If you do qualify: the caps

A registered primary residence is capped at 120 nights of home-sharing per calendar year, unless you apply for Extended Home-Sharing approval, which requires a clean registration history (no more than one citation in the prior three years) to qualify for.

The actual path to ADU income

Long-term rental — 30 days or more — isn't subject to any of these home-sharing restrictions. For most homeowners building an ADU specifically for rental income, that's the realistic model: a standard lease, not a short-term listing. If Airbnb-style income was the whole premise of your ADU, it's worth knowing that before the design phase, not after the certificate of occupancy is issued.

What this means for your project

We ask what the ADU is actually for before we design it — family, long-term rental income, or something else — because "short-term rental income" specifically changes the honest answer about what's realistic here. Better to know that going in than to build toward a use case the city's ordinance doesn't actually allow for your situation.