The policy, in the order it will affect your shopping
Airbnb’s policy took effect on 30 April 2024 and it is written in unusually plain language. Five parts of it change what you buy.
1. The definition is broad. Airbnb defines a security camera or recording device as “any device that records or transmits video, images, or audio such as a baby monitor, or doorbell camera”. That sweeps in things hosts do not think of as cameras.
2. No interior monitoring, at all. Hosts “are not allowed to have security cameras and recording devices that monitor any part of a home’s interior, such as the hallway, bedroom, bathroom, living room, or guest house, even if they’re turned off or disconnected”. The “even if they’re turned off or disconnected” clause is the one that catches people out: an unplugged indoor camera sitting on a shelf is still a violation.
3. Private rooms are not an exception. The prohibition “also appl[ies] to the common areas and shared spaces of private room listings (ex: a living room)”. If you rent a room in your own home, the living room camera has to go.
4. Some exteriors are off limits too. Cameras are not allowed over “exterior areas to the home where users have a greater expectation of privacy, such as the inside of an enclosed outdoor shower or in a sauna”.
5. Exterior cameras require disclosure in the listing. Airbnb’s own examples are worth copying almost verbatim: “I have a camera in my front yard,” “I have a camera over my patio,” “I have a camera over my pool”. Home hosts are required to disclose exterior cameras under their control, including ones covering an apartment building hallway or a back garden.
There is one narrow geographic exception in the policy: for certain homes in Japan with a Hotel Business License, hosts may be required by law to have a camera monitoring the interior entryway only — disclosed, restricted to the entryway, and prohibited from recording audio.
How to disclose it, in the words Airbnb uses
The disclosure is a specific switch, not just a line in your description. Airbnb’s instructions for desktop: open Listings, select the listing, go to Your space in the listing editor, then Guest safety, then Safety devices, and check “Exterior security camera present”. Then — and this is the part hosts skip — “describe each device, its location (ex: ‘I have a camera in my front yard’), and if it will be switched on or off”.
Two related device classes appear in the same policy and are worth knowing about, because they solve problems hosts often try to solve with a banned indoor camera. Noise decibel monitors — devices that “assess sound levels and their duration but do not record audio” — are allowed inside, as long as the host discloses their presence and they are not in bedrooms, bathrooms or sleeping areas; Airbnb does not require you to disclose where they are. Smart home devices are allowed, disclosure is “encouraged, but not required”, and Airbnb says it encourages hosts “to give guests the option of unplugging or disabling smart devices”.
We are not going to tell you how your state’s recording laws work — that is genuinely local and genuinely consequential. What we will say is that Airbnb’s own definition includes audio, and that audio capture can engage consent rules that vary by state. If your exterior camera has a microphone, read our guide to whether security cameras record audio and check whether the model lets you switch the microphone off.
Why no-fee storage matters more to a host than to anyone else
A homeowner weighing a camera subscription is weighing one bill. A host with three properties is weighing three, indefinitely, against cleaning fees and platform cuts. That is why every pick on this page records locally with no required plan, and why the brands that dominate the category on television adverts are not here.
The eufyCam S330 kit answers it most completely: eufy publishes 16GB of HomeBase storage expandable to 16TB, 4K video, a 135° lens, radar plus PIR detection, infrared and colour night vision with a motion-activated spotlight, IP67 and a solar panel. One base station in a locked cupboard covers the whole property, which also means the footage is not sitting on the camera a departing guest could walk off with. eufy is honest in its own documentation that a battery camera is designed for event capture rather than continuous recording — so do not expect an unbroken 24/7 archive from it.
The Reolink Argus PT Ultra is the pick when a kit is overkill. Reolink publishes 4K at 15fps, 355° pan and 140° tilt, two 6500K spotlights reaching 33ft plus two 850nm infrared LEDs, PIR detection, microSD up to 512GB, dual-band Wi-Fi and IP65, with a solar panel. The pan matters on a rental: one camera that sweeps a driveway, a path and a parking space replaces two fixed ones.
The eufy E340 doorbell is the front-door answer because of where the video goes. eufy publishes 8GB of on-device storage that it rates at around 90 days of video on average use, no monthly fee with local storage, a front-facing camera on people plus a downward-facing camera on “the floor in front of your door”, 2K, a 160° field of view, 16ft colour night vision and compatibility with HomeBase 2 and HomeBase 3 — so it can also write to the same base station as the cameras. It is 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only, and the battery is removable and rechargeable in about five hours, or you can hardwire it.
The three picks, scored for a short-term rental
Policy rows are read from Airbnb's own community policy on the date in the sources below; hardware rows come from each maker's published specs via our registry. 'Not published' means we found no first-party figure. This page describes a platform policy and is not legal advice — recording laws, especially around audio, vary by state and country. | eufyCam S330 kit | Reolink Argus PT Ultra | eufy Doorbell E340 |
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| Allowed under Airbnb's policy | Yes — exterior, with disclosure | Yes — exterior, with disclosure | Yes — Airbnb names doorbell cameras in its own disclosure examples |
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| Monthly fee required | No | No | No |
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| Where the footage lives | HomeBase, 16GB expandable to 16TB | microSD up to 512GB in the camera | 8GB on-device, or HomeBase 2 / 3 |
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| Footage survives the camera being removed | Yes — base station is indoors | No — the card is in the camera | Only if paired to a HomeBase |
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| Published weather rating | IP67 | IP65 | Not published |
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| Power | Battery, solar-assisted | Battery with solar panel | Removable rechargeable battery or hardwired |
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| Resolution | 4K | 4K at 15fps | 2K, dual camera |
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| Coverage per unit | 135° fixed, multi-camera kit | 355° pan / 140° tilt | 160°, plus a downward package view |
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| Wi-Fi band | Not published | 2.4 / 5GHz dual-band | 2.4GHz only |
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| Continuous 24/7 recording | No — eufy states battery cameras capture events | Event-based on battery | Event-based on battery |
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Two rows deserve a second look. “Footage survives the camera being removed” is the row that separates a base-station system from a card-in-the-camera system, and it is the one short-term-rental hosts underrate — a camera is a visible object on an unsupervised property. And “continuous 24/7 recording” is a row where every honest answer here is no: battery cameras capture events, which eufy states plainly. If you need an unbroken archive, you are looking at a wired camera and a recorder, which is a different build and a different page.
The setup a host should actually run
Exterior cameras covering approaches and parking, a doorbell at the entrance, a noise monitor inside if parties are your worry, and nothing — not one thing — that points at an interior space. Then the disclosure, written in the listing and ticked in the safety-devices panel, naming each camera and its location and whether it is on.
Two more things worth doing, neither of them a camera. Put the entry codes on a lock that can expire them: Yale and August both publish Airbnb integrations that issue a unique code per reservation and expire it at checkout, which is covered in our smart locks for Airbnb and rentals ranking. And secure the accounts themselves — the FTC’s consumer guidance on home cameras is about exactly the weak-password-and-shared-login problem that turns a host’s camera into somebody else’s feed, and our guide to securing smart home devices walks through it.
If you are furnishing the place from scratch, the rest of the no-subscription logic on this site applies to a rental even more strongly than to a home: see our no-subscription camera ranking and the alarm systems you can self-monitor for free.
