Starting an RV rental business in Salt Lake City
Reviewed by Ben Kiser, RV rental operator and fleet consultant.
This site is a finder. It owns no vehicles and takes no bookings, and it earns a referral when someone books on a marketplace. That means the measurement behind it is the same measurement anyone deciding whether to put a vehicle into this market would want, so it is published here in full rather than summarised into a pitch.
- 610
- listings within 50 miles of downtown
- $165
- median published day rate
- 4.6%
- accept a long-term booking
Mostly people with one vehicle
385 of the 610 listings measured on 2026-09-18, 63.1 percent, come from an owner who publishes exactly one vehicle. 123, or 20.2 percent, are dealer listings. The largest owner-published vehicle count attached to any listing in this market is 728. One vehicle means one calendar with nothing behind it, which is why the specific rig a renter wants is either free on their dates or the booking is lost.
The gap between the $186 mean and the $165 median is a small number of very expensive units pulling the average up. The published range runs $30 to $1,795. Price a vehicle against the median for its class, not against the market average, because the average describes units nobody in your class competes with.
The opening is two numbers wide
524
of 610 listings publish no exterior height. Zion measures height, and refuses on it.
530
publish no width. Zion's limit is 7 ft 10 in and the National Park Service states the measurement includes mirrors.
Every one of the 610 listings publishes a length, because the marketplace form asks for one. An operator who publishes a measured height and a mirror-to-mirror width on every unit, with the date it was measured, answers the question the other 530 listings leave open, and answers it for the one park most of this market is rented to visit. Among the 86 heights that do exist the field mixes decimal feet with values reading as feet and inches, so even those cannot be compared to a limit without re-measuring the vehicle.
Two tax rules decide more than your rate does
| Rule | What it says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| State motor vehicle rental tax | 2.5 percent on all short-term rentals of motor vehicles. | Utah Code 59-12-1201 |
| Salt Lake County rental tax | 7 percent, on top of the state rate and on top of 8.45 percent sales and use tax. | Utah Code 59-12-603 |
| The 30 day definition | A short-term rental is one of less than 30 consecutive days. At 30 the 9.5 points stop applying, as a definition rather than a discount. | Utah Code 59-12-102(135) |
| The weight exemption | A motor vehicle rated at 14,001 lbs GVWR or more is exempt at any length of rental. The Tax Commission website still publishes the superseded 12,001 lb figure, so cite the statute. | Utah Code 59-12-1201(5) |
| Towables | A trailer is not a motor vehicle. Utah's separate off-highway and recreational vehicle rental tax covers travel trailers and fifth-wheels, and Salt Lake County does not levy it. Grand County and Washington County both show 7 percent. | Tax Commission Q4 2026 rate chart |
Read together, those two rules say that a heavy motorhome let for a month in Salt Lake County carries none of the 9.5 point rental tax, twice over. Only 4.6 percent of the 610 listings measured here accept a long-term booking, so the segment where the tax disappears is also the segment with the least competition in it.
Host concentration is not published here
494 of the 610 listings return an empty owner slug. A count of distinct hosts taken from that field would measure the blank rather than the market, so no such figure appears on this site and none should be quoted from it. The per-listing owner-published vehicle count is populated and is used instead, which is why the figures above are counts of listings rather than counts of businesses.
Nothing on this page is a projection of income. Every figure is a count taken on 2026-09-18 and every count decays. Re-run the measurement before putting money behind any of it.