.svg){kind=small}
Most owners I speak with think of their home in two modes: short-term or long-term. In Toronto, that thinking leaves money on the table. There is a third mode that fits the city's rules, smooths out the winter, and suits detached homes especially well. It's the mid-term rental: furnished stays of 28 nights or more.
Where Toronto's short-term rules stop
Toronto defines a short-term rental as a stay of less than 28 consecutive days. Short-term renting is only allowed in your principal residence, and an entire home can be rented that way for up to 180 nights a year. The City's Auditor General also confirms that secondary and investment properties can't be used as short-term rentals.
That leaves two kinds of owners with a gap. The first rents out their own home and hits the 180-night ceiling with half the year still to fill. The second owns an investment property in the city and can't use short stays at all. For both, a booking of 28 nights or more sits outside the short-term rental definition. It's the natural next step, not a workaround.
Winter is where the gap shows
Toronto travel demand is seasonal, and the numbers are clear. Third-party listing data from AirROI shows occupancy across the city averaging around 40% in January, against roughly 62% in August. Nightly rates follow the same curve, from about $235 at the summer peak to about $185 in January and February.
Most hosts respond to that dip with discounts. Discounting a slow week still leaves you with a slow week. A mid-term guest booked from January through March fills the whole stretch at once. The same data shows Toronto stays are already at their longest in March, and close to one in ten city listings now requires a minimum stay of 30 nights or more.
Who books a home for a month or more
Mid-term guests aren't tourists. They're people whose lives or work have moved them to Toronto for a while, and they tend to need space.
- Families displaced by home damage. Flooding in July 2024 alone caused more than $940 million in insured damage across Toronto and southern Ontario, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada. A family waiting on repairs needs bedrooms, a kitchen and a yard, not a hotel room.
- Healthcare professionals on contract. Ontario hospitals and long-term care homes spent more than $950 million on agency staff in 2022–23. Many of those contracts bring people into the city for weeks or months at a time.
- Film and television crews. Toronto's screen industry brought in a record $2.6 billion in production spending in 2022. Productions house cast and crew for the length of a shoot.
- Relocating professionals. People moving for work often need a furnished base while they look for something permanent.
This is why detached homes do so well with mid-term stays. The guests with the longest bookings usually need the most room.
What other cities have already shown us
Toronto isn't the first city to draw a line on short stays, and we can learn from the places that went further.
When New York City tightened its rules in 2023, listings for stays under 30 days fell from 22,246 to about 4,000, according to Lodgify. At the same time, listings with 30-day minimums grew by about half, to more than 32,000, based on Inside Airbnb data reported by Sherwood News. Supply didn't disappear. It moved to longer stays.
The same thing happened closer to home. After British Columbia limited short-term rentals to principal residences in May 2024, furnished rental listings in Metro Vancouver jumped 86% in two months, according to rennie.
The demand is there too. Across the US, nights from bookings of 28 days or more grew 136% between 2019 and 2025, compared with 52% for short stays, in a joint report from Furnished Finder and AirDNA. Monthly stays now make up about a third of nights booked in urban areas.
There's a lesson in the New York numbers as well. Hosts who simply switched to 30-night minimums without changing how they marketed or prepared their homes saw occupancy fall. Mid-term works when it's planned, not when it's a setting you flip.
Why owners like it
A month-long guest means fewer turnovers, fewer cleanings and less wear between stays. The same US report found longer stays can cut turnover costs by up to 70%. Income is steadier and easier to forecast. And a home that might sit half-empty in February earns through it.
Mid-term won't always beat a peak summer weekend night for night. It isn't meant to. It's meant to hold the floor up in the months when short stays can't.
What to check before you switch
A few things deserve a careful look before your first 28-night booking.
- Your condo rules. Some condominium declarations require minimum lease terms of six or twelve months, regardless of city bylaws.
- Your tenancy agreement. Ontario's Residential Tenancies Act doesn't apply to temporary accommodation, but the law doesn't set a length of stay that counts as temporary. How a stay is structured matters.
- Your insurance. Make sure your policy covers furnished stays of a month or longer.
We don't give legal advice, but we can connect you with licensing specialists, lawyers and accountants from our trusted-experts directory who handle exactly these questions.
How we approach it at Oakwood BnB
We manage both short-term and mid-term stays, and for many of our owners the best year is a mix of the two. Summer and peak weekends go to short stays. The slower months go to monthly and multi-month guests. We plan the calendar around your home, your rules and your goals, then handle the guests, the cleaning and the upkeep so you don't have to.
After eight years and more than 18,000 guests hosted across the GTA, our view is simple: your property should earn all year, not just in July. If you'd like to see what a combined short and mid-term plan could look like for your home, get in touch for a free consultation.
