The Sundance Institute announced in 2025 that the festival would move from Park City to Boulder starting in 2027, on a deal meant to keep it here for a decade. The festival is planned around downtown Boulder, the Pearl Street area, and the CU campus. Predictably, a lot of people who live in Boulder have started thinking about what a week of festival visitors might be worth if they rented out their place.
Before anyone builds a spreadsheet around that, it’s worth understanding how Boulder actually regulates short-term rentals, because the city is meaningfully stricter than most Colorado towns and considerably stricter than Park City ever was.
The Rule That Stops Most People
Boulder ties short-term rental licenses to your principal residence, meaning the home you actually live in for more than half the year. Investment properties, second homes, and units you own but don’t live in generally don’t qualify. On top of that, the city limits an applicant to a single license, so nobody is assembling a portfolio of festival rentals.
So can a student renting an apartment list it during Sundance? In almost every case, no. The license structure is built around owners of a principal residence, not tenants subletting a place they rent. A student leasing an apartment or a room in a house is not the party who can hold that license, and most Boulder leases separately prohibit subletting on their own terms regardless of what the city allows. Anyone in a rental who’s picturing a lucrative festival week should read their lease first and then check the city’s licensing requirements second, because there are usually two separate obstacles rather than one.
Homeowners who genuinely live in their Boulder house are a different story. That’s who the license is designed for, and it’s a legitimate path if the paperwork is done properly ahead of time.
Individual Stays Are Capped, Total Nights Aren’t
One quirk worth knowing: Boulder doesn’t put a ceiling on how many nights a year a licensed property can be rented, but it does cap the length of any single stay at under thirty consecutive days. For a festival week that’s irrelevant. For anyone thinking about a longer arrangement, it’s the line between a short-term rental and a regular lease, with different rules attached to each.
Lodging Taxes Are Not Optional
Short-term stays in Boulder carry a stack of lodging taxes, city accommodations tax plus state, county, and district sales taxes, which combine into a rate well into double digits. Platforms sometimes collect portions of this automatically and sometimes don’t, depending on the tax and the platform. The obligation sits with the host either way, so confirming exactly which taxes are being remitted on your behalf and which you’re responsible for filing is worth doing before the first booking rather than at tax time.
What Sundance Actually Changes
A festival concentrated downtown means demand clustered near Pearl Street and campus, in a town that already runs tight on lodging. Expect enforcement attention to rise alongside demand, since a surge of unlicensed listings during a high-profile event is exactly the pattern cities notice. Getting licensed well before 2027, if you’re eligible, is a very different position than scrambling in January of the festival year.
It’s also worth thinking about the guest side. Visitors flying in have to get here from Denver, and the airport connection is a real consideration for anyone deciding whether a listing needs parking to be attractive.
The Coverage Question Nobody Asks Until Later
A standard homeowners policy is written around a home you live in, not one you rent to paying guests, and many exclude or limit coverage during commercial rental use. Platform-provided host protection is real but narrower than most hosts assume, particularly around property damage and liability limits. If a Boulder home is going to host paying guests, whether for a festival week or year-round, insuring it as a rental is worth working through before the first guest arrives rather than after a claim gets denied.
The Short Version
If you own and live in your Boulder home, a short-term rental license is achievable and worth starting early ahead of 2027. If you rent your place, the answer is almost certainly no, on two counts. And either way, the tax and insurance pieces are the parts that quietly cost people money long after the festival crowd goes home.