Barcelona's Tourist Licences All Expire in November 2028
Most articles on this site end with something Airflow can help you do. This one mostly does not, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
If you own a tourist apartment in Barcelona, the useful thing we can offer is a clear statement of the position and an honest view of the options.
Checked 27 September 2026. These rules change often and they change locally. Verify against the authority before acting. General information, not legal advice.
The position
Catalonia’s Decree Law 3/2023, of 7 November 2023 and in force from 9 November 2023, set a five-year transitional period for existing tourist-use dwelling licences (HUT). Barcelona’s council confirmed that none of the roughly 10,101 existing HUT licences would be renewed.
They expire by November 2028. After that, the city has no legal whole-apartment short-term letting in residential buildings.
Two things people hope for, which are not coming:
It is not under appeal. The Spanish Constitutional Court upheld the plan in a ruling in March 2025, dismissing owners’ challenges.
There is no new licence to apply for. Barcelona has allowed zero growth in tourist accommodation since 2017. You cannot obtain a new HUT in 2026, and the phase-out is not a queue you can join.
Separately, every legal short-stay listing in Spain must display a national NRU registration number — which from 20 May 2026 platforms must verify.
Why no software helps
The gauge this site talks about a lot manages a limit: it counts nights and closes the least valuable ones to keep you under a ceiling. That is useful in London, Paris and Amsterdam, where you have an allowance and the question is how to spend it well.
Barcelona is not a limit. It is a date. A licence you hold or do not, and after November 2028 nobody holds one. There is no allowance to manage and no nights to reallocate, so anything sold to you as “Barcelona compliance software” is selling you a countdown with extra steps. A countdown is worth having (we include one, below), but it is not compliance.
What the options actually are
Roughly two years of trading remain. Four directions, in rough order of how often they turn out to be right:
Long-term letting. The obvious destination and the one the policy intends. Lower gross, dramatically lower operating cost, and no licence question. The arithmetic is usually less bad than owners assume once cleaning, linen, platform commission and voids come out of the short-term figure — which is exactly the calculation most hosts have never actually done.
Mid-term letting — students, relocations, medical stays. Month-plus lets typically sit outside the tourist-licence regime. Take advice on where the line falls in your case before assuming it.
Sell. Worth modelling early rather than in 2028, when a large number of similar apartments may reach the market at once for the same reason.
Trade the remaining time deliberately. Two seasons is real money. It is also the window in which to build the records that make the next step easier.
The one genuinely useful thing
Whichever route you take, you will need to demonstrate what the property actually earned — to a buyer, a lender, a tax authority, or yourself when comparing a long-let offer against what you are giving up.
Most short-term owners cannot produce that quickly. Income sits across two or three platforms, cleaning and linen are paid personally, and the annual figure is an estimate assembled once a year under duress.
So if you do one thing: get the last two years of letting into one set of books, and keep the next two there as they happen. Not for compliance — there is nothing left to comply with — but because every option above is a decision you cannot make well without knowing the real number.
That much we can help with. Import your booking history, connect your accounting, and you will have a defensible per-property picture by the time you need it.
We can also keep the date in front of you. In property Settings → Block Dates → Letting limit, enter your HUT number, set Licence to “Ends on the expiry date”, and put your licence’s own date in Expires. The note under it counts down (“Ends in N days (M months)”), and Airflow sends reminders at 12, 6, 3 and 1 months before the date and on the day. That won’t change the date, but it does mean the long-let, mid-term or sale decision reaches you with a year to spare, not a month.
Sources: Barcelona to terminate tourist accommodation licences in 2028, Barcelona short-term rental laws: HUT licences and PEUAT rules. Related: Portugal’s Alojamento Local, Short-Term Rental Rules by City, 2026.