The Permit St. Louis Can’t Enforce: Short-Term Apartment Rentals
Revised October 20, 2026
Where can I find temporary housing in St. Louis?
Temporary housing in St. Louis usually comes from furnished corporate apartments, extended-stay hotels, conventional communities that write short leases for a premium, sublets and lease takeovers, and mid-term furnished listings booked by the month. The right one depends on how many weeks you need and whether you want to move furniture.
Keep reading ↓“We can do a short lease. It’s just going to cost you.” That’s the line you tend to hear first from a St. Louis leasing office, usually over the phone, usually while standing in a room that is already half boxes. The tape gun is still in your hand. The dog is pacing because the couch is gone.
So you hang up and scroll furnished listings instead, and when one promises it is “fully licensed with the city,” that sounds like safety. Ordinance 71729 was supposed to put every short-term rental in the City of St. Louis under a permit, and a court order stopped the city from enforcing it.
Who ends up needing one? A travel nurse pulls into the Central West End with two suitcases and a coffee maker and a contract that ends in spring. A grease fire in a Tower Grove South kitchen leaves the whole first floor smelling like burnt oil, and the adjuster on the phone wants receipts for every night you sleep somewhere else.
St. Louis rental housing is priced, staffed and scheduled around the full-year lease, and every option for a shorter stay is some kind of workaround with a premium baked in.
You are not shopping for an apartment. You are shopping for a term, and the term decides the price, the protections and how fast you walk out the door with your deposit. Before you tour anything, do three things tonight. Write down your realistic end date, not the hopeful one, and add two weeks, because closings slip and contractors always say a little longer. Then call two leasing offices and say this, word for word: “What is the monthly rent at every lease length you offer, from the shortest up to twelve months, and is the short-term premium its own line on the lease?” Write each answer next to the length. Last, ask every furnished host the same blunt question: “Is this a lease or a booking, and what happens to my deposit if my dates move?” The ones who answer in one breath are worth your time. Often the longer term turns out to be the cheaper exit, and you would never have known if you had only asked about the length you wanted.
So what happened to the permit? The City of St. Louis passed a short-term rental law, Ordinance 71729, which became law in November 2023 with Mayor Jones’s signature and was set to go into effect on November 6, 2024. Then a court stepped in. The city’s own permit page now carries a notice that a court order has prohibited the City from enforcing Ordinance 71729, and that while the order is in effect, the City will not be enforcing the permit requirements.
Say it to the friend who is apartment hunting with you: in St. Louis right now, “permitted” is a word, not a guarantee. When a host tells you their place is “fully licensed with the city,” that phrase is doing less work than it sounds like. Read the notice yourself on the city’s short-term rental permit page, or call City Hall at 1200 Market Street on the main line, 314-622-4800, and ask. And when a host insists on a minimum stay of a month, ask why, and ask to see the lease. A month-long stay on a real lease brings the protections below with it. A nightly booking does not.
Then there is what Missouri law already gives you, no matter how short the stay. Under state law a landlord may not demand or receive a security deposit of more than two months’ rent. If a landlord on a short lease asks you for three months up front as a “security deposit,” that is more than Missouri allows, and you can say so politely on the spot. Within thirty days after the tenancy ends, the landlord has to return the deposit or send you an itemized list of what was kept and why. And a month-to-month tenancy can be ended by either side with one month’s written notice. Those rules ride along with a real lease. They do not ride along with a hotel folio, which is one more reason the paperwork matters as much as the rent.
Where can I find temporary housing in St. Louis?
Temporary housing in St. Louis usually comes from furnished corporate apartments, extended-stay hotels, conventional communities that will write a short lease for a premium, sublets and lease takeovers, and mid-term furnished listings booked by the month. Which one fits depends on how many weeks you need and whether you want to move furniture.
The labels overlap more than they look. A furnished corporate apartment is often an ordinary unit that a third party leased, furnished down to the dish towels and re-rented by the month. An extended-stay hotel is a hotel that added a two-burner stove and a weekly rate. What matters is not the category. It is the term, the furniture and what is bundled into the number you actually pay.
Let the clock sort it. For a stay of a few weeks, start with the hotel-style options and ask what gets added on top of the nightly rate. A month to a few months brings furnished and corporate options into play. Go longer and conventional communities start treating you as a tenant rather than a guest. Location narrows it fast, too. The nurse who wants to walk to a hospital shift has a much shorter list than the family that just needs four walls near a school, because furnished mid-term inventory clusters where the demand already is: near the hospitals, downtown and the university corridors. Out in Pagedale, Vinita Park or St. John, you are more likely to find a small landlord happy to go month-to-month than a furnished corporate unit.
Corporate and furnished apartments
You walk in, drop the suitcase and the sheets are already on the bed. That is the whole pitch. Utilities, internet and sometimes housekeeping fold into one monthly number, which is exactly what a relocation department or an insurance adjuster wants to see on an invoice. The catch is that you pay for all of it whether you use it or not. If your own couch is sitting in a storage unit across town, you are renting a second one. Ask about the minimum stay before you get attached, because many furnished operators will not go below a month and some hold out for longer.
Extended-stay hotels
Fastest option, least paperwork. No lease, no screening, and often a room the same afternoon, which matters a great deal to a family standing in a kitchen that still smells like smoke. What you give up is space. Four people and a dog in one room for weeks is a long, loud stretch of tripping over each other’s shoes. Pet fees vary, and the lodging tax is a real part of the bill even though it never shows in the headline rate.
A short lease at a conventional community
Ask a large community for a lease shorter than a year, then ask what it costs per month. Shorter terms carry a premium over the full-year rate, the unit comes empty, the utilities are yours and the screening is the normal screening. For the separated dad who owns furniture and wants maintenance that answers the phone, this is often the best value on the board. Our guide to renting an apartment in St. Louis walks through the application and deposit side in more detail.
Sublets and lease takeovers
A sublet is someone else’s apartment for part of their lease. A takeover, or assignment, puts your name on the paperwork for whatever time is left. Both can be real bargains because the person leaving is motivated. Both carry more risk than anything else here. A sublet the property manager never approved can be voided, and then you are the one hauling boxes down the stairs twice. Ask the office, in writing, whether they allow it, and get the answer on paper before any deposit changes hands.
Mid-term furnished listings
These are houses and condos, furnished and rented by the month, usually by an individual owner. Quality runs from lovely to bleak with very little in the photos to tell you which. They are worth a look for a household that needs bedrooms rather than a suite. Just remember you are dealing with a person, not a company, so the lease, the deposit and how fast someone shows up when the water heater quits all depend on that one person.
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The phone call where the leasing office says no to one month
It is not personal. A one-month tenant costs a community nearly what a year-long tenant costs and pays a fraction toward it. Every move-out means paint, carpet cleaning, new locks, an inspection, then marketing and staff hours to fill the unit again. Spread over a year, that is manageable. Spread over four weeks, it eats the rent.
So they price the flexibility instead of refusing it. Ask for a short term and you will usually hear the full-year rent plus a premium, sometimes shown as its own line on the lease. The useful move is to ask for the premium at every length they offer, out loud, on the same call. The curve is often steep at the short end and flat near a year, and if a longer term costs only a little more than a shorter one, the longer one can be the cheaper exit even after you count a lease-break.
People are asking
Where can I find a homeless shelter in St. Louis?
Three doors lead to a shelter referral in the city, according to the city’s Homeless Services Division: the Housing Helpline at (314) 802-5444, United Way at 2-1-1, or a visit to the Welcome Center at 800 North Tucker St., Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. If you need a bed tonight, the city’s Housing Help page says United Way can help get you into a local shelter for the night at 211 or 800-427-4626. Write those numbers on paper now, before the battery icon on your phone turns red.
What month-to-month really buys you
An exit, and you pay for it every month. The rent can rise with proper notice, and the freedom cuts both ways. Under Missouri law either side can end a month-to-month tenancy with one month’s written notice, so the landlord has the same door you do. Read your own lease, too, because it can set its own notice terms.
Month-to-month makes sense when you truly do not know your end date, or when you are converting at the end of a lease you already served, which is by far the easiest way to get it. Plenty of communities that will not write a new month-to-month lease will happily convert a sitting tenant at renewal. It is the wrong answer when you know your end date. A fixed term that covers a nurse’s contract usually beats paying the month-to-month premium every month of it.
Is a furnished apartment worth the premium?
Furnished wins when the alternative is buying or hauling furniture you will not keep. For a short stay, it almost always wins. In the middle range it is a coin flip that turns on whether your things are already in storage. For a long stay, unfurnished plus a storage unit usually costs less, even after you pay a mover twice.
Do it on paper, not by gut. Furnished bundles furniture, usually utilities and internet, often linens. Unfurnished means separate utility accounts, a mover on both ends and furniture you own or rent. The moving cost is the line people underbudget: two moves are two moves, and a storage bill hums underneath the whole stay. Our guide to St. Louis moving truck rental costs and sizes shows how truck pricing works if you plan to do it yourself.
The four buckets your money falls into
What you pay to get in, what you pay every month, what you pay to leave and what runs quietly in the background. Short stays load the first and third buckets, because the same fees, connection charges and moving costs get crammed into weeks instead of a year.
Getting in can mean an application fee per adult, a deposit, a pet deposit and pet rent, an admin fee and utility hookups. Every month carries rent, any short-term premium, utilities that are not bundled, internet, parking, renters insurance and storage. Write all of them in one column. A furnished rate that looks high next to an unfurnished one often is not, once the other lines sit underneath it. Leaving costs money too: cleaning, any early-termination charge, the second move and the wait for your deposit. If someone is reimbursing you, ask them today exactly what they need on the invoice. Clean paperwork the first time gets paid faster than paperwork they have to ask about twice.
Make the shortlist before you make the call. Browse short-term apartment rentals on St Louis Near Me Directory, pick two or three, then tell each one your real dates, your budget and whether someone is reimbursing you, and see who gives you a straight answer.
If you’re the property manager, the furnished-rental host or the one-person leasing office behind a place like this, the people reading this page are your next customers. A listing puts your units in front of movers who need a few months, not a year - see how to get more customers.
Do the short-term rental rules apply to a stay under a month?
On paper, the City of St. Louis built a permit system for short-term rentals under Ordinance 71729. In practice, the city says a court order has stopped it from enforcing that ordinance, and it will not enforce the permit requirements while the order stands.
For a renter, the takeaway is practical. A short booking in someone’s house is a booking, not a lease, so ask for the house rules and the cancellation terms in writing and check the city’s permit page before you lean on anyone’s “licensed” claim. Our guide to short-term rental rules in St. Louis covers the host side, and it is worth skimming as a guest because it tells you what a careful operator should be able to show you.
How do you vet a listing before you send anyone money?
Short-term renters are the easiest mark in housing: rushed, often out of town and used to booking sight unseen. One rule holds anyway. Never send money for a place nobody you trust has physically stood inside. The patterns repeat: a price well below everything nearby, an owner who is overseas and cannot show it, a request to wire money or buy gift cards, another applicant who is “ready to send today,” photos that turn up on other sites, no written lease.
Check who owns the property. The City Assessor’s site lets you search addresses for ownership and property information for any property in the City of St. Louis, and the owner there should match the name on your lease. Pay in a way that leaves a trail, never a wire into a stranger’s personal account. And on key day, walk every room with your phone out and photograph the scuffs, the stained grout and the drawer that sticks. The version of you moving out in a hurry will be grateful.
Frequently asked questions
Does St. Louis allow short-term rentals?
Yes. The City of St. Louis regulates short-term rentals under Ordinance 71729, which set up a permit requirement, but the city says a court order currently prohibits it from enforcing that ordinance, so it is not enforcing the permit requirements while the order is in effect. Rules in St. Louis County towns are set locally and differ, so check with the specific town before booking.
Is it possible to do a 1 month lease on an apartment?
Sometimes, but rarely at a large apartment community, where shorter terms come with a premium and a minimum length. A true one-month stay usually comes from furnished and corporate housing operators, extended-stay hotels or an individual owner renting a house or condo directly. Start there, and expect the monthly rate to sit well above a year-lease equivalent.
Do any apartments rent month-to-month?
Yes, though it is more common as a conversion at the end of a lease than as a brand new one. Smaller landlords with a handful of units are often willing to start you month-to-month from day one. Ask about the monthly premium and the notice period in the same conversation.
Why don’t apartments do month-to-month leases?
Turnover costs the same no matter how long you stayed. Every move-out means cleaning, repairs, marketing and staff time, and a community recovers that over the life of a lease. Month-to-month also scrambles their planning around when units come open, so where it exists it carries a premium.
What are the downsides of a month-to-month lease?
You pay a recurring premium, the rent can go up with proper notice and the landlord can end the tenancy as easily as you can. Missouri law lets either side end a month-to-month tenancy with one month’s written notice. You also have less leverage at renewal, and fewer communities offer it at all.
Is renting a furnished apartment a good idea?
It is when your stay is short and your own furniture is not available. For a short stay, furnished usually wins once you count moving, storage and buying what you lack. For a long stay, unfurnished plus storage generally costs less. Furnished also buys time, which matters more than money for a household displaced overnight.
What are the drawbacks of furnished apartments?
You pay every month for furniture you may already own, and you sleep on somebody else’s mattress. Inventory clusters near hospitals, downtown and the universities, so your location choices narrow. You can also be charged for damage to items you did not pick, so photograph everything at move-in and get the condition confirmed in writing.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.