What the court actually wrote
Since the spring of 2026, one sentence has been circulating in owners' WhatsApp groups, in meeting notices and across much of the press: Brazil's Superior Court of Justice is said to have ruled that listing your apartment on a short-stay platform strips the building of its residential character.
Brazil's highest court in matters of private law wrote precisely the opposite.
And, in the same ruling, the sentence that genuinely settles the debate:
So it is not the channel that qualifies. It is the use. Renting is not operating.
The source of the misreading is, incidentally, identifiable — and ironic: the headline of the court's own press release announces that listing on platforms such as Airbnb requires the building's approval, while the body of the same text says the opposite. The press ran with the headline.
The dividing line: two situations with nothing in common
The phrase “short-term rental” now covers two realities that share nothing but their duration. Conflating them is the source of most disputes between owners — and of most badly drafted regulation.
On one side, a home let occasionally. An owner — living abroad, holding a second home, or simply away part of the year — lets the property during their absences. Stays are long, the periods few, the guests identified, and the home keeps a stable domestic staff, often employed by the owner directly. The property remains a residence: it is let, not operated.
On the other, a unit dedicated to operation. The property has no function beyond letting, it sits empty between bookings, it is let two or three nights at a time with no screening, run by rotating contractors on a nightly-rate logic. It is a continuous commercial activity installed inside a residential building.
The court itself listed the indicators of the second situation.
These indicators are not cumulative, and the court was explicit that they must be weighed “in each concrete case”. No numerical threshold was set: no minimum number of nights, no annual number of lettings beyond which exploitation becomes repeated. That is the main criticism levelled at the ruling by Brazilian legal scholars, and it is a genuine uncertainty for owners.
The two profiles, in practice
This grid is not an agency's invention. It is a direct reading of the criteria the court wrote down.
What the rulings actually decided
April 2021 — the founding ruling, and its forgotten facts
In Porto Alegre, two owners were letting separate rooms inside their own apartments to occupants with no connection to one another — as many as five at a time — with laundry and internet access, for very short periods, sometimes by the day. One of the apartments had been physically altered, from three bedrooms to five. The appeal court of Rio Grande do Sul records that the owner admitted using the property “como se um hostel fosse” — as though it were a hostel.
The Fourth Panel of the Superior Court of Justice held, by a majority, that this amounted to “hospedagem atípica” — atypical accommodation — incompatible with by-laws imposing residential use. This is the ruling that has been cited for five years to argue that a building can ban short-term rentals. Its facts, however, have nothing to do with letting a whole home.
Two qualifications the ruling itself sets out, and which vanish from the summaries. It does not condemn seasonal letting: it expressly distinguishes it, recalling that seasonal letting means “a locação plena e formalizada de imóvel adequado a servir de residência temporária para determinado locatário e, por óbvio, seus familiares ou amigos, por prazo não superior a noventa dias” — the full, formal letting of a home to a named tenant and their family or friends, for no more than ninety days. And it does not condemn the digital channel: a general meeting may authorise this use “through digital platforms or any other means of offer”.
7 May 2026 — the ruling that caused the noise
The Second Section — which brings together the court's two private-law panels and therefore unifies its position — held, on a report by Justice Nancy Andrighi, that using a property under atypical short-stay contracts “involving repeated commercial exploitation or professionalisation of the service” alters its residential character, and requires authorisation by a two-thirds majority of the owners.
The reasoning runs in three steps. These contracts are neither leases within the meaning of Law 8,245/1991 nor hotel accommodation within the meaning of Law 11,771/2008: the court creates a third category, atypical short-stay contracts. The channel of commercialisation is irrelevant to their classification. What alters the residential character is repeated commercial exploitation and the professionalisation of the service.
The real point of the ruling is not the one usually reported. The by-laws in question said nothing about short stays: they merely prohibited using units as “república, pensões ou hotéis, depósitos, ou qualquer utilização que não seja estritamente residencial”. That is where the novelty lies — silence in the by-laws does not amount to authorisation. A general residential-use clause is enough to exclude uses that undermine it, without any need for a specific prohibition.
The ruling was handed down by five votes to four, and the fault line was not the digital channel — on that point, majority and minority agreed. The disagreement was about silence: for the minority, any restriction on property rights must appear expressly in the by-laws.
It is not binding. It was not handed down under the repetitive-appeals procedure and does not constitute a súmula. It unifies the court's position; it does not bind the lower courts.
And the threshold applied in the case was low — this has to be said. To find the residential character altered, the court relied on only two of the four indicators: the frequency and habitual nature of the letting, and the small number of nights per stay. No subdivision into rooms, no hotel services, no formally established professionalisation. The criterion is indeed use rather than channel — but the court found that use established on relatively little. An owner who lets frequently, in very short stays, cannot shelter behind the neutrality of the channel.
The two-thirds quorum, finally, does not come from the ruling: it follows from Article 1,351 of the Civil Code as amended by Law 14,405/2022. Before that reform, changing a building's designated use required unanimity.
26 May 2026 — the court reopens the question and freezes everything
Three weeks later, the Second Section referred two appeals — REsp 2,272,537/SC and REsp 2,272,536/SP — to the repetitive-appeals procedure, on a report by Justice Raul Araújo. The referral was decided on 26 May 2026 and published in the national judicial gazette on 1 June. This is Tema 1.443.
This is precisely the question on which the Second Section had split by a single vote. And the court ordered, in the meantime, the suspension of every pending case, individual or collective, raising the same point of law, throughout the country.
As of late August 2026, Tema 1.443 has not been decided. No hearing date has been listed, no amicus curiae has been admitted, no public hearing has been announced. That ruling — and that ruling alone — will produce a binding rule.
The three shortcuts, corrected
“The court has banned short-term rentals.” No ruling pronounces a ban. The May 2026 position makes a particular use conditional on a two-thirds vote of the owners, which presupposes a vote — and the absence of one is not a prohibition. Whether a general clause suffices is exactly what Tema 1.443 must decide.
“Listing on a platform alters residential use.” The court wrote the literal opposite, in two separate rulings. The channel is legally irrelevant. It is not even treated as an indicator: it is expressly excluded from the classification exercise.
“Short-term rental equals commercial use.” This is the most consequential conflation. The locação por temporada of Article 48 of Law 8,245/1991 is a lease: the full, formal letting of a whole home to a named tenant and their family, for no more than ninety days. The meio de hospedagem of Article 23 of Law 11,771/2008 is a professional tourism activity. Between the two, the court created a third category, only one variant of which — repeated, professionalised exploitation — is problematic.
The stakes are not theoretical: reclassification as non-residential use would, in Rio, move the property tax rate from the residential 1.0 % to the non-residential 2.5 %.
A regulatory framework that does not yet exist
In Rio de Janeiro, no municipal law currently governs short-term letting. Three bills have come and gone: PL 107/2025, PL 372/2025 — whose committee report was approved in December 2025 but never reached the floor — and PL 2265/2026, published in the official gazette on 28 May 2026, which replaces them. The latter provides for a simplified municipal register, withholding of service tax at source by the platforms, fines of R$1,000 for the host and R$10,000 for the platforms, and two-thirds approval by the building. It has been referred to twelve standing committees; no vote is scheduled.
At federal level, nothing has been enacted. Several bills coexist, pulling in opposite directions: PL 2030/2025 and PL 1153/2026 expressly attach short-term letting to the Tenancy Act and remove it from the scope of the Tourism Act; PL 6018/2025, conversely, strengthens the powers of condominium associations.
Elsewhere, a few cities have legislated, largely on tax: Salvador and Ponta Grossa have made platforms responsible for collecting service tax; São Paulo has prohibited short-term use of subsidised housing by decree.
The practical consequence deserves to be stated plainly: the answer will not come from the legislature in the short term, it will come from the court. And in the meantime, the decisive variable for an owner is the wording of their building's by-laws and the record of its general meetings.
The numbers, for scale
Brazil welcomed 9.3 million international visitors in 2025, against 6.65 million in 2024 — one of the strongest increases in the world that year. The city of Rio received 12.5 million visitors in 2025, of whom 2.1 million were foreign, up 44.8 %, generating R$27.2 billion for the local economy. From January to May 2026, Rio recorded 1.2 million international visitors, up 17.4 % on the same period in 2025.
The short-term stock is following the same curve. Inside Airbnb counted, in July 2026, 48,193 active listings in the city of Rio, of which 13,174 in Copacabana — close to a third of the total, and the highest density of such listings anywhere in the world. Secovi Rio estimated the dedicated stock at around 25,000 properties in early 2025, growing 18 to 20 % a year.
Long-term residential rents are rising well ahead of inflation: up 11.65 % over twelve months in Rio as of June 2026, against consumer price inflation of 3.36 % for the year to date.
One caveat, which we would rather state ourselves: these correlations are documented, the causation is not. We found no econometric study establishing that short-term letting is the cause of rising rents in Rio. The most recent academic work on the subject says cautiously that the reduction in long-term supply “may contribute” to price pressure, without quantifying it. Symmetrically, the most widely cited economic impact figures come from a study commissioned by Airbnb. No independent, arbitral measurement exists to date.
Our reading
We have practised this trade in Rio since 2007, and we argue neither for prohibition nor for laissez-faire.
Short-term letting is necessary in Brazil. It accompanies real growth in tourism, it funds the upkeep of an ageing housing stock that nothing else funds, and it is often the condition that makes it viable for a non-resident owner to hold a property they occupy part of the year. Service charges, property tax, the maintenance of large apartments in old buildings: without a few weeks of letting a year, many of these homes would be sold — and, more often than not, carved up.
But it has to be organised. What we have observed for a decade is not a problem of principle, it is a problem of practice: units converted into continuous operation, two-night stays, no screening of occupants, rotating crews, and operators who let at any cost without imposing a single rule on their clients. It is those practices — not short-term letting as such — that make life difficult in certain buildings, feed the push for prohibition, and will eventually sweep away the owners who never did any of it.
That is why we work on the side of the line the court has drawn. The properties we manage are homes: large apartments, occupied by their owners part of the year, with household staff employed by them and present on site, let for long periods and for a limited number of them. We do not do two or three-night stays, and we screen our guests. This is not a moral posture, it is an economic model: this segment does not work any other way. But it happens that this model answers, point for point, the material criteria the court set out — length of stay, frequency, no subdivision, no hotel services, a permanent identified contact. And each property has a single point of contact: us. That is not a convenience, it is a matter of proof — an owner whose property circulates among several operators no longer controls its turnover, and can no longer account for it at a general meeting.
We do not claim that such a configuration is immune to litigation. The assessment remains case by case, the court set no numerical threshold, and Tema 1.443 may move the line. What we maintain is more modest and more solid: there is a difference in kind, not in degree, between these two uses — and Brazilian law already recognises it.
We therefore argue for regulation that distinguishes instead of conflating: a minimum stay, an annual turnover cap, identification and registration of occupants, a responsible contact reachable at all times, compliance with the house rules. Rules of that kind genuinely govern the model that causes the problem, and let the one that does not cause any carry on.
It is also what we advise the buildings that consult us: write criteria rather than vote prohibitions. A general ban will be challenged, and may well be overturned depending on the rule Tema 1.443 lays down. A set of house rules built on material criteria — duration, turnover, services, identification, integrity of the home — rests on the very dividing line the court is examining.
This article sets out the position as at the end of August 2026 and does not constitute legal advice. The applicable law is evolving, and the forthcoming ruling in Tema 1.443 may substantially alter the points set out here. Any decision to acquire or to let should be preceded by a review of the relevant building's by-laws and by advice from a Brazilian lawyer.
