Amsterdam's 30 Nights — and 15, If You're in the Wrong Street
Amsterdam runs the tightest night cap of any major European city, and as of April 2026 it runs two of them. Which one applies to you depends on your address.
Checked 27 September 2026. Short-term letting rules move fast — Paris cut its cap in January 2025 and Amsterdam cut parts of the city in April 2026. Verify against the authority before you act on anything here. This is general information, not legal advice.
The two caps
30 nights per year across the city — down from 60 in 2019 and 30 since 2021.
15 nights per year in eleven neighbourhoods in Centrum and De Pijp, since 1 April 2026.
Same city, same platform, half the allowance, decided by which side of a boundary your front door is on. If you let in or near the centre, confirm which list your neighbourhood is on before you take a single booking — this is not a detail you can average.
Three other obligations that catch people
A permit and a registration number. You register the property with the municipality and get a number, and that number must be visible in every advertisement on every platform.
Every booking must be reported in advance. This is the one that surprises hosts arriving from other cities. It is not enough to stay under 30 nights — each rental period has to be notified to the municipality through the national Registratiesysteem Toeristische Verhuur before it happens. A stay you never reported is a problem even if your annual total is fine.
Four guests maximum at any one time.
So Amsterdam asks for three different things: a cap on the total, a declaration of each individual let, and a limit on party size. They are independent, and complying with one says nothing about the others.
Why 30 nights changes the whole strategy
At 90 or 120 nights you are running a small letting business and managing a ceiling. At 30 you are doing something else: you have roughly four weeks of the year to place, and each night you spend is a meaningful fraction of the whole.
The arithmetic flips. With 120 nights the question is how do I fill them. With 30 the question is which 30 are worth the most — and the answer is almost never “the first thirty that get asked for”, which is what an open calendar gives you.
Concretely: a night in a quiet February week and a night during a major conference both cost you 1/30th of your allowance. One might earn three times the other. If you let the calendar allocate, you will spend your allowance on whichever arrived first.
This is the case for deciding in advance rather than reacting. Rank the year by what each night is actually worth, open the top 30, keep the rest closed, and revisit as the year moves.
Counting it
- What you count: nights let (occupancy) — Amsterdam caps what you sell
- Per night
- Calendar year
- Limit 30 — or 15 in the Centrum and De Pijp neighbourhoods
Both are in the rule list: “Amsterdam (30 nights)” and “Amsterdam — Centrum / De Pijp (15 nights)”. Pick the one that matches your address, not the one that matches your city.
Import every channel, because 30 nights is small enough that a single forgotten direct booking is 3% of your year. And with an allowance this tight, the forecast date matters more than anywhere else: at 30 nights you can go from comfortable to over inside one busy fortnight.
What to do this week
Knowing the number is not the same as being able to prove it, and the proof is the part that takes months to accumulate. It is worth starting before you need it.
- Create an account — start free; a card is needed at sign-up.
- Import your booking history. Paste your Airbnb or Booking.com iCal link, or upload a CSV. Past bookings come in too, so the counter is right from the first day rather than from today.
- Turn on the letting limit for the property and pick your city’s rule from the list. It is four settings — what you count, per night or per room-night, over which window, up to what limit — and the presets fill them in.
- Add your registration number once. It renders on your listing wherever Airflow publishes it.
Then leave it alone. It counts every night, tells you the date you are forecast to cross, and can close the least valuable nights automatically to keep you under.
Sources: Gemeente Amsterdam — vakantieverhuur melden, NOS — Amsterdam scherpt regels voor vakantieverhuur in deel van de stad verder aan. Related: Short-Term Rental Rules by City, 2026.