Own a Short-Term Rental in Ashland City? Nashville's Rules Do Not Apply to You.
If you own a home in Ashland City and you have been reading Metro Nashville's short-term rental rules, stop. Ashland City is the county seat of Cheatham County. Metro's permit is Davidson County law and it ends at the county line. You do not need a Metro STRP permit, and you could not get one.
That sounds obvious written down. It is not obvious in practice, because Ashland City is half an hour from downtown, people call the whole area Nashville, and every guide you will find online is about Davidson County. I have watched owners plan around rules that never applied to their property.
So here is what does. I read the adopted Ashland City municipal code end to end rather than a summary of it, and I have marked plainly where the code runs out and the honest answer is "nobody can tell you from this document".
There is no short-term rental ordinance in the town code
I searched the full adopted code — all 17,900 lines of it, from the version published by MTAS, the University of Tennessee service that codifies municipal law in this state.
"Short-term" appears three times. Two are about temporary structures and one is short-term seeding for erosion control. None is about renting a house.
"Transient" appears fourteen times, and every one of them is Title 9's transient vendor — peddlers and door-to-door sellers who bring merchandise to temporary premises. Nothing to do with lodging.
"Vacation rental", "tourist home", "bed and breakfast" and "Airbnb" appear zero times.
As of the current adopted code, Ashland City has no short-term-rental-specific permit, registration or licence. That is a finding, not a gap in my reading.
It is also not the same thing as "there are no rules".
What the code does impose: a 2.5% hotel/motel tax
Section 5-501 reads, in its entirety:
A two and one half percent (2.5%) hotel-motel tax shall be imposed.
That is the whole chapter. Title 5, Chapter 5 has one section, and it does not define "hotel".
So the question that actually matters is unresolved on the face of the ordinance. Tennessee's occupancy-tax statutes generally define a hotel by function — anywhere sleeping accommodation is furnished to transients for payment — and that description normally captures a whole-home short-term rental. But this ordinance does not say so.
I am not going to tell you that you owe this tax, and I am not going to tell you that you do not. Call the Ashland City recorder's office and get the answer in writing. This is exactly the kind of gap where guides start guessing, and a confident wrong answer about a tax is worse than no answer.
Separately: state and local sales tax are their own question, Cheatham County may levy its own occupancy tax, and Airbnb collects and remits some Tennessee taxes as a marketplace facilitator but not necessarily every local one. Do not assume the platform has it covered.
Zoning lives in a document that is not in the code
Section 14-201 says:
Land use within the Town of Ashland City shall be governed by the Ashland City, Tennessee Zoning Ordinance, adopted December 21, 1971, and any amendments thereto.
That zoning ordinance is not reproduced in the municipal code. Which means whether a short-term rental is a permitted use in your particular district cannot be answered from the code at all, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It needs the ordinance itself, plus fifty years of amendments, obtained from the town.
Anyone who tells you what Ashland City zoning permits without having pulled that document is guessing.
Tennessee state law applies whether or not the town has an ordinance
The Short-Term Rental Unit Act, at Tennessee Code sections 13-7-601 to 13-7-606, is statewide. Two parts of it matter to an owner here.
Paying occupancy tax buys you more than compliance. The Act protects a rental that was already operating from new local rules. One of the two ways to qualify is having remitted the relevant taxes for at least six of the previous twelve months. So if Ashland City ever does adopt an ordinance, the owners who were already paying are the ones with standing to keep operating. The ones who were not are simply subject to whatever passes.
That protection dies when the property sells. Legacy status ends on sale or transfer, after thirty continuous months of non-use, or after three or more violations. This is the same trap as a Nashville permit, and it catches people the same way: if you are buying a rental here partly because it has been operating for years, that history does not transfer with the deed.
Before any of this applies to you: are you in the town or the county?
An "Ashland City, TN" postal address does not mean the property sits inside the town limits.
Plenty of Cheatham County addresses outside any municipality carry the same postal city name. It changes who regulates you — the town for properties inside the limits, the county for those outside — and therefore changes which of the sections above are even relevant. Settle it from the parcel record first. It takes a few minutes and it determines everything else.
What I have not resolved
Stated plainly, because a page that hides its own limits is worth less than one that admits them:
Whether the 2.5% hotel/motel tax reaches short-term rentals. The code does not define "hotel".
What the 1971 zoning ordinance, as amended, permits. Not in the code.
Whether Cheatham County levies its own occupancy tax, and what county zoning does for unincorporated properties.
Whether any town short-term rental ordinance is currently pending. The adopted code shows none, but a proposal working through the commission would not appear in it.
I will update this when I have those from the source, and not before.
One warning if you go looking yourself. Searching for "Ashland short-term rental ordinance" turns up a detailed proposal — one rental per owner, within 200 feet of a major street, property at least 20 years old, ten guests maximum, a manager who responds within 30 minutes. That is Ashland, Oregon. It has nothing to do with Tennessee. I nearly used it, caught it, and it is the single easiest way to end up planning around five requirements that do not exist here.
Checked 7 September 2026 against the adopted Ashland City municipal code and MTAS's summary of the Tennessee Short-Term Rental Unit Act. If you own in Davidson County instead, the Metro permit rules and a free eligibility check are over here — put in your address and it will tell you which permit type your parcel can actually hold.