General Information Only. This article is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Laws may have changed since publication. Your situation may differ; consult a licensed Virginia attorney about your specific matter.
The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Laws change and individual circumstances vary. Consult a licensed Virginia attorney about your specific situation. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship nor does merely contacting our office through this website or any other means.
A guest books your cabin for a hundred nights. Nothing about that feels legally interesting at the time. It starts to feel interesting somewhere around week ten, when you find yourself wondering whether the person in your house is still a guest.
Virginia has something to say about that, and the answer surprises people in both directions. The line does not run through the calendar the way most owners assume. It runs through where the person actually lives. And the statute that draws it leaves a threshold question genuinely open, which is worth knowing before you rely on any of it.
The Provision Everyone Skips Past
The Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act sits at Va. Code § 55.1-1200 and following, and it governs residential tenancies. The part that matters to a rental owner is the carve-out at § 55.1-1201(D), which pulls transient lodging out of the Act in four steps.
| Situation | Does the VRLTA apply? |
|---|---|
| The guest does not use the lodging as a primary residence | No, however long the stay runs |
| Primary residence, 90 consecutive days or less | No, but a five-day written notice of nonpayment is required before self-help |
| Primary residence, more than 90 consecutive days | Yes |
| Subject to a written lease for more than 90 days | Yes |
Now the part worth being honest about. The exemption reaches “a hotel, motel, extended stay facility, vacation residential facility, including those governed by the Virginia Real Estate Time-Share Act, boardinghouse, or similar transient lodging.” A whole-home short-term rental is not named anywhere in that list.
So the whole framework above depends on your property qualifying as “similar transient lodging,” and that phrase is doing a lot of work with very little help. “Vacation residential facility” appears in the exemption and is not defined anywhere in the Code. Section 35.1-1 defines “hotel” broadly, as “[a]ny place offering to the public for compensation transitory lodging or sleeping accommodations, overnight or otherwise,” which points one way. But that definition lives in a different title, written for a different purpose.
Whether a particular rental sits inside that phrase is a question of fact, and it is the first question a court would reach. That is a real gap, not a lawyerly hedge, and the cautious move is to treat the exemption as something you may need to establish rather than something you can assume.
Why the 90-Day Number Misleads People
Owners hear “90 days” and start treating it as a countdown running against every booking. Read the subsection in order and the sequence works differently.
The first gate is primary residence. Under § 55.1-1201(D)(1), a guest who does not reside in the lodging as a primary residence “shall not be construed to be a tenant living in a dwelling unit,” and is exempt from the Act. No day count appears in that provision at all. A guest who keeps a home elsewhere and books your property for four months is, on the face of the statute, still outside the VRLTA.
The 90-day count in subsections (D)(3) and (D)(4) becomes relevant only once the lodging is the person’s primary residence. Someone who gave up their prior housing and is living at your property crosses into the Act after 90 consecutive days.
There is one wrinkle in the text worth flagging before you lean on any of this. Subsection (D)(4) applies the Act where a person resides as a primary residence for more than 90 consecutive days “or is subject to a written lease for more than 90 days.” Whether that second clause carries the primary-residence condition with it is not obvious from the words, and no controlling decision resolving it turned up. Read the clause as standing on its own and more occupancies fall inside the Act, which is the reading that asks more of you. Until someone settles it, a written agreement running past 90 days is a term to avoid unless you intend the Act to apply.
The Power That Makes Classification Expensive
Most Virginia landlords cannot lock anyone out. For transient lodging, § 55.1-1201(D)(1) says close to the opposite: the innkeeper or property owner “shall have the right to use self-help eviction under Virginia law, without the necessity of the filing of an unlawful detainer action in a court of competent jurisdiction and the execution of a writ of eviction.”
That is an unusual grant of power, and it is exactly what makes getting the classification wrong costly. The statute hands you a shortcut that only exists if the person is outside the Act. Use it against someone who turns out to be a VRLTA tenant and you have skipped a process the law required of you, which is its own subject and not a pleasant one.
Subsection (D)(3) adds a step inside the 90-day window for an occupant who does treat the property as a primary residence. The owner has to give a five-day written notice of nonpayment, and may act only after those five days pass without payment in full. Subsection (D)(5) preserves everything else, so using self-help under this section does not give up other civil or criminal remedies otherwise available.
Where Drafting Actually Helps
Two terms carry most of the weight, and neither requires anything exotic.
A stay-length trigger caps bookings below 90 nights and says plainly that any extension past the cap needs a separate written agreement signed before the extension begins. The risk in practice is almost never the guest who books 120 nights at once. It is the guest who extends three times through the platform while nobody counts.
A primary-residence representation asks the guest to state that they maintain a primary residence elsewhere, and captures that address. A representation does not decide the classification, because the underlying facts control. What it does is record what the guest told you at the time, which is worth having if the question ever gets contested. Both terms belong in the guest agreement itself rather than in a separate note.
For a stay you actually intend to run long, a separate residential lease drafted to the VRLTA does the job better than a nightly booking form stretched to cover five months. That approach tends to produce the worst features of both documents.
The Questions Worth Sitting With
If you take long bookings, these tend to be the ones that open things up:
- Pull your longest booking from the past year. Did that guest have a home to go back to? That is the question the statute asks, and you can answer it from your own records.
- Does anything in your booking settings stop a stay from quietly crossing 90 consecutive nights? A hard cap is a five-minute change.
- When a guest extends, does a new document get signed, or does the same reservation just roll forward?
- If someone had to establish that your property is “similar transient lodging,” what would that argument rest on?
- If you needed to remove someone next week, do you know which path applies before you had to choose one?
Classification turns on facts that develop during the stay rather than on the label at the top of your agreement, and the interesting cases are the ones where the facts are mixed. If you take long bookings anywhere in the New River Valley and have never mapped them against § 55.1-1201(D), a Virginia attorney can work through the actual bookings and documents with you. That is usually a shorter conversation than owners expect, and a much better one to have with nobody currently in the house.
This article is general information only and is not legal advice. Laws change and individual circumstances vary, and outcomes depend on the specific facts of each situation. Do not rely on this article to make decisions about your specific situation; contact Valley Legal or a licensed Virginia attorney to discuss your case. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship, nor does contacting our office through this website or any other means. Attorney advertising.
Valley Legal, PLLC is located at 107 Pepper St SE, Christiansburg, Virginia 24073, and serves the communities of the New River Valley of Virginia, including Montgomery County, Blacksburg, Radford, Pulaski County, Floyd County, and Giles County.