Airbnb 90-day rule in London

What the rule actually is

For Londoners, the 90-day rule is a planning law, rather than simply an Airbnb policy. Under Section 44 of the Deregulation Act 2015, Entire-home, short-term, lets in Greater London are capped at 90 booked nights in a calendar year without planning permission. The legal cap applies to entire-home lets, and Airbnb automatically blocks listings when they reach the 90-night limit, although the cap applies across platforms combined. The automatic platform enforcement began in January 2017, while a host can need a full change-of-use application to the council for additional letting. In practical terms, booked nights count, not advertised nights; renting a room while living in the property is different, while 90 or more consecutive nights are categorised as long-term lets. This distinction matters when managing flats, a spare room, an entire flat, or a wider portfolio of properties.

The regulatory landscape is broader than one platform. Hosts who exceed the limit can face enforcement action, fines of up to £20,000 per offence, and possible mortgage or lease consequences. In my experience, good short-let management starts with understanding the rules, checking the threshold, and choosing a legitimate workaround or strategy rather than relying on assumptions. The rental income estimate tool can help assess returns, while Pass Keys offers management services for hosts seeking to operate profitably. The UK market has grown enormously over the past decade, but 2026 brings a patchwork of regulations across each nation, city, and borough: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have different restrictions, while London has additional requirements. Landlords may also need to consider tax obligations, furnished holiday lettings, the national registration scheme, reporting duties, and DAC7. For general information, seek professional advice on specific tax questions from a qualified solicitor or accountant; residents groups and central London communities have also highlighted concerns about whole stairwells, self-check-in, and lockbox corridors, making compliance an essential part of running holiday lets.

Airbnb blocks the calendar automatically

Since January 2017, Airbnb has been counting booked nights on every entire-home London listing. When the total hits 90, the calendar locks for the rest of the year. The listing stays visible, but no new bookings can be confirmed until 1 January, when the counter resets.

It’s a hard stop. The block isn’t a polite reminder. You can’t argue with it. The only way through is to show Airbnb proof of planning permission for a change of use, at which point they’ll lift the cap on your specific listing.

The legal cap is platform-agnostic, and that catches people out

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding of the rule. The 90-night limit is a legal limit on the property. It is not a limit on Airbnb specifically. If you take 90 nights on Airbnb and then another 30 on Booking.com, you’ve broken the rule, even though Booking.com didn’t stop you.

In 2026, most professional managers run a single unified calendar and stop accepting bookings at night 90 regardless of platform. Self-managing hosts who think of the cap as “an Airbnb thing” tend to discover the truth via a letter from their planning department.

Planning permission is available in theory

You can apply to your council for permission to short-let beyond 90 nights, and a fraction of those applications succeed. The approval rate depends almost entirely on the borough and the building. Westminster, Camden, and Kensington & Chelsea have approved very few such applications in recent years. Outer boroughs are more pragmatic. A flat in a building that already operates as serviced apartments is a much stronger case than a flat above a family home on a quiet residential street.

Budget 8 to 13 weeks for a decision, professional fees in the low thousands, and the real possibility of refusal.

Councils have noticeably sharpened their teeth since 2023

For the first few years of the Airbnb 90-day rule, enforcement was patchy and largely complaint-driven. That’s changed. Westminster, Camden, and Tower Hamlets in particular have built up dedicated short-let enforcement work. Recent headlines include a landlord ordered to pay around £75,000 in fines for running multiple unauthorised lets in central London. The £20,000 statutory maximum is per offence; portfolio operators can rack that up several times very quickly.

Most enforcement actions start with neighbour complaints. Noise, bins, constant rolling suitcases at all hours. Be a good neighbour, and you cut your enforcement risk substantially, regardless of paperwork.

3. What happens when you hit 90 nights

The calendar locks. Until 1 January.

That’s true whether your 90 nights ran from January to March or were scattered across the whole year. The system doesn’t distinguish. Once you cross the threshold, you’re out of the short-term market on Airbnb for the rest of the calendar year.

What that means in practice:

Plan your 90 nights deliberately. Peak summer and Christmas usually beat off-peak weeks in central London by a wide margin.
Watch the counter if you list on multiple platforms. Once you’re past 60, that’s the moment to slow down and lock in the highest-value remaining bookings.
Decide what to do with the rest of the year before it sneaks up on you.

The most common move at this point is to switch to mid-term lets. More on that in a moment.

4. The penalties

The famous figure is £20,000. That’s the statutory maximum fine per offence under planning law for breaching the cap. In practice, council action tends to unfold along these lines:

Investigation. Triggered most often by a neighbour complaint or council platform monitoring. You’ll be asked to produce booking records.
A planning enforcement notice. A formal order to cease the unauthorised use. Ignoring one is a criminal offence.
A fine. Often less than the £20,000 ceiling on a first offence, but capable of stacking quickly for repeat or portfolio operators. The £75,000 Westminster case wasn’t an outlier.
A listing takedown request. Councils can ask Airbnb to remove non-compliant listings. Airbnb generally complies.

Then there are the second-order consequences that quietly surprise hosts:

Mortgage. Most residential mortgages prohibit short-letting outright. A breach can entitle your lender to demand repayment or move you onto a punitive rate.
Lease. Most London long-leasehold flats prohibit short-letting in their lease covenants. A breach is grounds for forfeiture proceedings from the freeholder, which is as dramatic as it sounds.
HMRC. Since January 2024, Airbnb has reported all UK host earnings directly to HMRC under DAC7. Undeclared short-let income is now very hard to hide. Council investigations tend to surface this part too.

The fine is the public number. The lease and mortgage exposure is the part that quietly ends letting careers.

5. Approaching your 90-day limit?

If your London property is heading for the cap before the year is out, GuestReady can pivot you onto mid-term rental management (stays of 90 or more consecutive nights) with no compliance risk. These bookings sit outside the cap entirely, and our pipeline of corporate relocators, insurance placements, and visiting professionals fills the rest of your calendar at strong rates.

6. What hosts actually do (the workarounds)

You cannot bypass the cap itself. You can, legally, build a year-round letting strategy around it. These are the four routes we see London owners take, roughly in order of how often they work.

Switch to mid-term lets after day 90

The most popular option by some distance. Once Airbnb blocks your calendar, you list the property for stays of 90+ consecutive nights through corporate housing channels, relocation agents, and dedicated mid-term platforms. The legal logic: a 90+ night stay is not “temporary sleeping accommodation” under the Deregulation Act. It’s a tenancy (typically a licence or short AST, depending on the contract).

Nightly rates drop. Occupancy and net yield often go up, because turnover costs, cleaning frequency, and guest churn fall sharply. This is the strategy that lets London short-let income work as a serious year-round business rather than a long summer.

Apply for planning permission

Worth doing if the property is genuinely well-suited. A flat in a serviced apartment building, a former HMO already used as visitor accommodation, or a property in an outer borough with a more accommodating planning department all have a fighting chance. Not worth doing for a flat in a Westminster mansion block.

Diversify platforms within your 90 nights

The cap is on total nights, not Airbnb nights. Within your 90, you can list across Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and direct booking channels in parallel, which gives you better rate flexibility and protects you from a single-platform downturn. The discipline is keeping one accurate, centralised count of booked nights.

Convert to standard long lets

The fallback. A 12-month assured shorthold tenancy through a high-street agent gets you out of the short-let market entirely. Income is more predictable, the regulation is more familiar, and you don’t have to think about platform compliance ever again. It’s the right call for owners who’ve decided the short-let path is more friction than it’s worth, which is a reasonable conclusion for plenty of people.

7. The 2026 national registration scheme

The biggest UK short-let story of 2026 is the long-awaited national registration scheme, brought in under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.

A note on timing. Across the sources we’ve reviewed in late 2026, the scheme is described variously as “targeted for April 2026,” “launching Spring 2026,” and “in implementation phase as of mid-2026.” The statutory instrument is moving, but slowly. Treat any specific date as provisional and check GOV.UK before making decisions on it.

When it goes fully live, every English short-term let will need to:

Register on a new national portal run by DCMS.
Receive a unique registration number.
Display that number on every listing across every platform.
Confirm basic safety compliance: gas safety certificate, EICR, smoke and CO alarms, fire risk assessment.

Platforms will be obliged to verify the registration number and delist unregistered properties. Civil penalties of up to £5,000 have been proposed for operating without registering.

The parallel change is the proposed C5 use class, a new planning category specifically for dedicated short-term lets. Existing short-lets would be reclassified into C5 automatically, with new permitted development rights to move between residential (C3) and short-let (C5) without a fresh planning application. Local authorities will be able to remove those rights via Article 4 Directions in high-pressure areas.

The point London hosts need to hold onto: registration sits on top of the 90-day rule, not in place of it. Even with a shiny new registration number, you still cannot legally exceed 90 nights without planning permission.

8. The Airbnb 90-day rule outside London (short answer: it doesn’t apply)

This is the single most common misconception about UK short-let regulation. The 90-night statutory cap applies only to Greater London (32 boroughs plus the City of London). Anyone telling you it applies in Bristol or Manchester is wrong, and you can quote us on that.

What actually applies elsewhere:

Location	90 night cap?	What really applies
Greater London	Yes, 90 nights/year	Deregulation Act 2015. Airbnb auto-blocks at 90 nights.
England outside London	No statutory cap	Planning rules case-by-case. Article 4 Directions in some areas. National registration scheme due 2026.
Bristol	No	Planning permission is likely required where short-letting amounts to a “material change of use.” No London-style cap.
Bath & North East Somerset	No statutory cap	Article 4 Directions in central areas. Planning permission often required for whole-home lets.
Manchester, Brighton, Liverpool	No	Planning rules case-by-case. Watch local Article 4 activity.
Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland	No statutory cap	Mandatory short-term let licensing since October 2022. Operating without a licence is a criminal offence.
Wales	No statutory cap currently	Visitor Accommodation Register is being introduced. Visitor levy to follow.
Northern Ireland	No	Certification and registration via Tourism NI are required for tourist accommodation.

The general rule of thumb in 2026: outside London, there may be no night cap, but there is almost certainly a registration, licensing, or planning conversation to have with the local authority before you list.

How GuestReady can help

We manage hundreds of London properties and have built our compliance workflow around the 90-day rule rather than against it. For owners, that usually means:

A pricing and calendar plan that gets the most out of your 90 nights.
An automatic handover to mid-term lets once the cap is hit, with no compliance risk.
Registration scheme readiness as the national portal goes live.
Safety certification, planning advice, and platform compliance, all handled.

As a STAA-accredited short-term let management company, our London team runs all of this as part of a single servic