Short answer: no. A Queensland body corporate governed by the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997 (the BCCM Act) cannot ban you from short-term letting your unit, or impose rules on you that aren’t applied equally to long-term tenants. The only exception is a tiny handful of extremely niche developments, well under 1% of Queensland’s body corporates, that sit outside the normal rules. For everyone else, the law has been on your side since 2018, and nothing in 2026 has changed that.

Here’s why. Queensland has roughly 51,000 community titles schemes, and section 180(3) of the BCCM Act says a by-law cannot restrict the type of residential use a lot is put to. QCAT confirmed in 2018 that short-term letting counts as residential use, not a separate commercial activity a committee can single out.

The niche exception, covered further down, is a small named list of older developments, including Sanctuary Cove and a Hope Island scheme called Fairway Island, that were never brought under the BCCM Act. If that’s not your building, you’re not getting shut down or meaningfully restricted.

None of this means a committee has no power over your listing. It means the power sits in a different place, conduct, noise, parking and common property rules that apply to every occupier the same way, not an outright ban, and not a rule that treats your guests differently from everyone else in the building. At Bedspoke, we’ve got no issue with rules like that, provided they’re applied uniformly, and we make sure our local team stays available to neighbours and building managers alike so those rules actually get followed.

What section 180 of the BCCM Act actually says
The whole fight over short-term letting in Queensland strata law comes down to a handful of subsections in one part of the Act, as Redchip Strata Law and others have set out in detail.

• Section 180(3): if a lot may lawfully be used for residential purposes, the by-laws cannot restrict the type of residential use. Short-term and long-term letting are both residential uses. A by-law cannot say one is allowed and the other isn’t.
• Section 180(4): a by-law cannot prevent or restrict a dealing with a lot, and granting a lease (whether for one night or twelve months) counts as a dealing.
• Section 180(5): a by-law must not discriminate between types of occupiers, which rules out treating short-term guests as a lesser class of resident for the purposes of access and use.
• Section 180(6): a by-law (outside an exclusive use by-law) cannot impose a monetary liability on an owner or occupier, which is why a committee cannot invent a special “Airbnb levy” through the by-laws to claw back extra common property costs.
• Section 180(7): a by-law cannot be oppressive or unreasonable, weighed against the interests of all owners and occupiers.

Put together, these subsections are why a blanket ban, a minimum-stay by-law designed to kill off short-term letting, or a punitive short-term letting fee all fail the same test. They’re not regulating how a lot is used. They’re trying to prohibit a category of lawful residential use altogether, which section 180 doesn’t give a body corporate the power to do.

The case that settled it: Hilton Park
This isn’t a theoretical reading of the Act. It’s been tested. In Body Corporate for Hilton Park CTS 27490 v Colin Robertson [2018] QCATA, a body corporate argued that letting a lot, whether short or long term, was a commercial activity rather than a residential one, and tried to use that argument to justify a by-law setting a six-month minimum tenancy, which would have killed off short-term letting in the scheme entirely.

QCAT rejected it. The tribunal held that short-term letting is a type of residential use, that the Body Corporate and Community Management (Standard Module) Regulation 2008 was explicitly written to cover schemes mixing permanent residential and holiday letting, and that granting any lease, long or short, is a “dealing” with a lot that a by-law cannot restrict under section 180(4). The decision was consistent with earlier adjudicator rulings, and QCAT’s authority as the appeal body is what gives it weight beyond a single scheme’s dispute. LookUpStrata’s write-up of the decision, sourced from Hynes Legal at the time, is a good plain-English breakdown if you want to go further than this summary. HopgoodGanim’s analysis of the by-law limits covers the same section 180 restrictions from the flip side, what a by-law is allowed to touch, which is useful background for the next section.

Why nothing has changed since 2018, including in 2026
Queensland has run two packages of body corporate reform since Hilton Park. The changes have covered scheme termination thresholds, smoking in common areas, and new seller disclosure certificates that commenced on 1 August 2025. None of it touched section 180 or the residential-use question. If you’re being told a recent law change has quietly handed committees the power to ban short-term letting, ask for the section number, because for a BCCM Act scheme it doesn’t exist.

What a body corporate can actually enforce
None of this means a committee is powerless, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise. A body corporate retains real authority over the things that actually cause disputes in mixed-use schemes: noise after hours, parking allocation, pool and gym access, lift and stairwell conduct, and security of common property, provided the rule applies to every occupier the same way, whether they’re an owner-occupier, a twelve-month tenant, or a weekend guest.

That last part matters more than most articles on this topic let on. In Admiralty Towers II [2019] QBCCMCmr 567, a body corporate tried a lighter-touch approach than an outright ban: a by-law requiring its consent before any lease under three months could proceed. The owner who challenged it argued, reasonably enough, that this wasn’t a ban, just a regulation. The adjudicator disagreed and found it still breached sections 180(3) and (4), noting that a by-law which only interferes with short leases, while longer leases “proceed without interference,” is still a restriction on the type of use, whatever it’s called. The lesson: a rule doesn’t need the word “ban” in it to fail. If it singles out short-term letting for an obligation that longer lettings don’t carry, it’s vulnerable to the same challenge that struck down Hilton Park’s six-month minimum.

That’s why guest registration, an emergency contact requirement, or a code of conduct only survive scrutiny if they apply to every letting arrangement in the scheme, not just the short ones. A by-law requiring all occupiers, however long they’re staying, to provide contact details to the committee is defensible. A by-law that imposes that requirement only on short-stay guests, while a twelve-month tenant faces no equivalent obligation, starts to look like the Admiralty Towers II by-law with extra paperwork.

The practical test a committee should be applying, and that you should hold them to, is whether a proposed by-law addresses a specific, evidenced problem and applies to everyone in the scheme equally, rather than functioning as a backdoor restriction aimed only at short-term letting. A pool curfew that applies to every resident is reasonable. A 24-hour contact-person rule that only short-term hosts have to meet looks a lot like the consent requirement Admiralty Towers II struck down. A by-law setting an effective minimum stay of 90 days is not regulation, it’s prohibition with extra steps, and it fails the same test Hilton Park already ran.

The exception: schemes still on BUGTA, and the Fairway Island case
Everything above assumes your scheme is on the BCCM Act, which covers the great majority of Queensland strata. There’s a separate, older category the BCCM Act doesn’t reach: schemes still governed by the Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980 (BUGTA), or one of the handful of “specified Acts” layered on top of it, principally the Integrated Resort Development Act 1987, the Mixed Use Development Act 1993, and the Sanctuary Cove Resort Act 1985. These are pre-1997 developments that never transitioned across when the BCCM Act commenced, and in practice they’re confined to a small, named list of large integrated resort and mixed-use communities. Sanctuary Cove and the Hope Island precinct, including a scheme called Fairway Island, are the two most commonly cited examples, not an ordinary suburban unit block.

This isn’t theoretical. In Redman v The Proprietors – Fairway Island GTP 107328 [2020] QDC 68, the Queensland District Court upheld a Fairway Island by-law banning rentals of less than one month. The reasoning turned on a gap in BUGTA itself, not the same test Hilton Park applied. Unlike section 180(3) of the BCCM Act, BUGTA only stops a by-law from restricting a “lease,” and the court held that a short-term letting arrangement isn’t a lease in that legal sense. So the by-law stood, and Fairway Island still enforces its one-month minimum today.

Several law firms have independently estimated how small this exception is. ABKJ Lawyers put BUGTA and specified-Act schemes at approximately 200 out of Queensland’s more than 50,000 body corporates. Other commentary since, including from HWL Ebsworth, rounds it to “about 1%.” No government body publishes an official count, but several independent estimates land in the same range: well under 1%, likely closer to 0.5%.

One thing worth flagging for fairness: since Fairway Island, some body corporate managers have argued its reasoning could extend to BCCM Act schemes too, and claim to have helped ordinary schemes adopt similar restrictive by-laws unchallenged. That claim rests on a by-law going unchallenged, not on any tribunal or court actually upholding it under the BCCM Act, and it’s a different legal argument to the one that succeeded at Fairway Island, since section 180(3) (the provision QCAT applied in Hilton Park) doesn’t exist in BUGTA and wasn’t at issue in the Fairway Island case at all. As at 2026, no reported BCCM Act decision has followed Fairway Island’s reasoning over Hilton Park, and current commentary from Queensland strata law firms still treats outright bans and disguised minimum-stay by-laws as unenforceable for BCCM Act schemes. An untested by-law isn’t the same as a valid one, and a committee waving Fairway Island at a BCCM Act scheme is citing a case about a different Act.

The way to check which category you’re in is to see whether your scheme has a community management statement (CMS) registered with Titles Queensland. If it does, you’re on the BCCM Act and everything above stands. If it doesn’t, or if your development is one of the named integrated resort communities, get specific advice on your by-laws before assuming section 180 protects you.

If a special resolution to ban short-term letting lands in your inbox
Don’t assume it’s valid just because it’s been put to a vote. Get the actual proposed wording, not a summary of it, and check two things: whether it’s framed as a genuine use restriction, and whether it applies only to short-term letting or to every letting arrangement in the scheme. A rule that singles out short-stay guests for extra consent, paperwork or response-time obligations that a twelve-month tenant never faces is the same problem Admiralty Towers II already tested and lost. If it passes anyway, you can challenge it through body corporate dispute resolution and, if needed, QCAT, using the same reasoning that succeeded in Hilton Park and Admiralty Towers II.

This is also where being a boring, professional operator pays off. A committee that’s genuinely worried about noise, turnover and unsupervised guests has a much weaker case against an owner whose property is professionally managed, with a dedicated local contact and no history of complaints, than against a self-managed listing with a track record of noise reports. At Bedspoke, our local area managers and team members in each location exist partly for this reason: they’re the point of contact a committee can actually reach, and the paper trail that shows a scheme it’s dealing with a managed asset rather than an unsupervised one.

The trade-off worth being honest about
None of this is a licence to ignore your body corporate. The BCCM Act protects your right to let short-term. It doesn’t protect you from a legitimate noise complaint, a genuine breach of a reasonable conduct by-law, or the reputational cost of being the unit everyone in the scheme complains about. Owners who treat section 180 as a free pass to ignore house rules altogether tend to be the ones who eventually generate the evidence a committee needs to make a narrower, more defensible by-law stick around guest conduct, even if a total ban still wouldn’t hold up.

The stronger long-term position is the one the law already assumes you’ll take: uphold your end of it with responsible guests, clear house rules, and a fast response when something goes wrong, so the only argument left for the committee is one they’re not entitled to win.

FAQ
Can a body corporate ban Airbnb in Queensland? No, not through an outright ban. If your property is governed by the BCCM Act, Section 180(3) of the Act prevents by-laws from restricting the type of residential use a lawfully residential lot is put to, and QCAT confirmed in the 2018 Hilton Park decision that short-term letting is a residential use.

What by-laws can a body corporate actually enforce against Airbnb hosts? Reasonable, evenly applied rules around noise, parking, common property access, guest registration and conduct standards. These regulate behaviour rather than prohibit the use itself, which is the distinction that determines whether a by-law survives a section 180(7) reasonableness challenge.

Can a body corporate require short-term letting hosts to be available 24/7 and reachable within a set time, like 30 minutes? Probably not, if the requirement only applies to short-term letting and not to other lettings in the scheme. Admiralty Towers II struck down a by-law that only interfered with leases under three months, even though it was framed as a consent requirement rather than a ban, because singling out short lettings for an extra burden is still a restriction on the type of use under sections 180(3) and (4). A 24/7, 30-minute response requirement is exactly that kind of rule in practice, since nobody imposes it on a twelve-month tenancy. If a committee tries to put one in your by-laws, ask them to point to the equivalent obligation on longer lettings. If there isn’t one, you have a strong argument the by-law is invalid, not just harsh. We couldn’t find a reported Queensland decision testing this precise wording, so treat this as the reasoning that would likely apply rather than a guaranteed outcome.

Can a body corporate enforce a minimum stay of 30 days, 90 days, or 6 months? Not for a BCCM Act scheme. Hilton Park was itself about a six-month minimum-stay by-law, and QCAT struck it down for exactly this reason: a minimum stay long enough to functionally kill off short-term letting is a disguised restriction on the type of residential use, which section 180(3) doesn’t allow. Admiralty Towers II confirms the same result for a lighter-touch version too, a three-month consent requirement rather than a fixed minimum, and that was struck down as well. A 30-day or 90-day minimum fails the same test. The one exception is a genuine BUGTA or specified-Act scheme, where the Queensland District Court has upheld a one-month minimum at Fairway Island on Hope Island.

Can a body corporate charge a higher levy for owners who short-term let? No. Section 180(6) prevents a by-law (outside an exclusive use by-law) from imposing a monetary liability on an owner or occupier, which rules out a specific short-term letting fee or levy through the by-laws.

Are there any Queensland schemes where a body corporate can actually ban short-term letting? Yes, but it’s a niche exception. Independent law firm estimates put schemes still governed by the Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980 or a specified Act, such as Sanctuary Cove and Fairway Island on Hope Island, at somewhere around 200 to 300 out of Queensland’s more than 50,000 body corporates, well under 1%. These schemes don’t have an equivalent to section 180(3), so a valid by-law can restrict short-term letting there in a way it can’t elsewhere. Check whether your scheme has a registered community management statement to find out which category you’re in.

Has anything changed in 2026 that affects this? Not for BCCM Act schemes. Two rounds of BCCM Act reform since 2018 haven’t touched section 180, and the BUGTA gap identified by a 2018 government-commissioned review still hasn’t been legislated.

The bottom line
Confirm which Act your scheme sits under, then get the by-law wording itself, not the rumour. On the BCCM Act, if it’s an outright ban or a minimum-stay rule designed to achieve the same thing, the law is on your side and has been since 2018. If it’s a conduct, noise or access rule that applies to every letting in the scheme regardless of length, it’s probably enforceable. If it singles out short-term letting for an obligation longer lettings don’t carry, it’s the same problem Admiralty Towers II already lost, whatever the committee calls it. On BUGTA or a specified Act, the analysis is genuinely different, so don’t assume the same protection applies. Either way, the strongest position is running a property that never gives the committee a genuine complaint to point to.

If you’d rather hand the committee correspondence, the guest screening and the compliance paperwork to someone who does this daily across 450+ properties on the Gold Coast, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, get in touch with us for a no-pressure chat about what managing your unit properly actually looks like.