Will My Garden Cottage Be Affected by Cape Town's 50% Availability Rule?
This is a draft by-law, not law. Quotations are from the City of Cape Town’s draft Short-Term Letting By-Law, 2026, published for comment in August 2026; comment closes 5 October 2026. Where this article reasons beyond what the draft says, it says so. General information, not legal, tax or rates advice — and this article in particular turns on a point the draft leaves open, so take advice on your own erf.
Read the proposal: the full draft by-law (PDF) · the City’s executive summary (PDF) · how to comment before 5 October
Here is the question, in the form people actually ask it:
I have a five-bedroom house in Cape Town with a two-bedroom cottage that we rent out. How is the cottage calculated, and how many nights a year can we list it on Airbnb?
It is the most common shape of short-term letting in the southern suburbs and the Atlantic seaboard, and it is the shape the 50% threshold handles least clearly.
The short answer: on the most natural reading of the draft, you can list the cottage every night of the year and never approach the threshold. The longer answer is why that is true, and the one assumption that would reverse it.
First, the cottage is not a separate property
This is the part that decides everything, and it is settled by a definition rather than by the threshold itself. Section 1:
“property” means “any piece of land registered as a separate entity of land in a deeds registry as an erf, lot, plot, farm, stand or agricultural holding and includes any unit and land contemplated in the Sectional Title Act, 1986… and includes any building on that piece of land”
The unit is the erf, and the erf includes every building on it. One title deed, one property. Your five-bedroom house and your two-bedroom cottage are not two properties that happen to be neighbours; they are one property with two buildings.
Unless the cottage is sectionalised — a separate sectional title unit with its own deed — in which case it is its own property and everything below changes. Check your title before you rely on any of this.
So the maths uses seven bedrooms, not two
Section 8 sets the threshold at “50% of total annual room nights,” and section 1 defines that term as “the maximum annual capacity of a property for short-term letting.” Capacity of the property — the whole erf.
On the common reading of capacity as bedrooms × 365:
| Bedrooms | Total annual room nights | 50% threshold | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main house | 5 | 1,825 | — |
| Cottage | 2 | 730 | — |
| The erf (one property) | 7 | 2,555 | 1,277.5 |
Now put the cottage on Airbnb and leave it open all year:
- 2 bedrooms × 365 nights = 730 room nights
- 730 of 2,555 = 28.6%
You are not near the line. In fact you cannot reach it: to spend 1,277.5 room nights two at a time you would need 639 nights of cottage availability, and a year only has 365. A two-bedroom cottage on a seven-bedroom erf cannot cross the 50% threshold on its own, however you let it.
That is the answer to “how many nights a year can we list the cottage.” All of them — on this reading.
The assumption that reverses it
Everything above depends on the denominator being the whole erf’s capacity. The draft supports that: the threshold is about “a property,” and “property” is the erf.
But suppose the City, in applying its Rates Policy, assesses capacity as the part actually offered for short-term letting — the cottage, two bedrooms:
- total annual room nights = 2 × 365 = 730
- cottage listed all year = 730 of 730 = 100%
Same cottage. Same calendar. Same by-law. Reclassified immediately.
That is not a quibble. It is the difference between “list it every night forever” and “you crossed on day one,” and the draft does not close it, because “maximum annual capacity” is never reduced to a formula. We think the erf reading is right — it follows the definition of “property,” and section 8 categorises properties, not rooms — but we would not bet a rates bill on an inference, and neither should you. This is worth a comment submission before 5 October.
What you are actually risking
Worth being clear about the stake, because it is bigger than the cottage.
If the erf is reclassified, the whole erf is reclassified. Rates are levied on the property, and the property is the land plus every building on it. The five-bedroom house you live in gets commercial rates too. You do not get a residential rate on the house and a commercial rate on the cottage.
That asymmetry is the real argument for staying well clear of the line rather than optimising up to it.
When the numbers do get tight
Two situations change the picture.
You let the whole place while you travel. Seven bedrooms spend seven room-nights per calendar night, so the erf reaches 1,277.5 after about 182 nights of whole-property availability. Mix the two — cottage all year plus the main house for the December holidays — and they add up:
- cottage, 365 nights × 2 = 730
- main house, 30 nights × 5 = 150
- total 880 of 2,555 = 34.4% — still comfortable
but a main house open for 110 nights alongside a year-round cottage is 730 + 550 = 1,280, and you are over.
Your cottage is large relative to the house. A four-bedroom main house with a three-bedroom cottage is 7 beds again, but the cottage now spends 3 per night: 3 × 365 = 1,095 of 2,555 = 42.9%. Still under, but the headroom for letting the main house at Christmas has mostly gone.
The general rule: divide the bedrooms you let by the bedrooms on the erf. If the fraction is under half, a full year of availability keeps you under. If it is over half, you have a nights budget, and you should know what it is.
Registration applies to the cottage regardless
None of this exempts you from Part B. Section 4(2):
“No owner or operator may use, advertise, or list a property for short-term letting unless the property has been registered with the City and the City-issued registration number is displayed on all listings associated with the property.”
Being comfortably under the rates threshold has nothing to do with it. The cottage must be registered, and the number must appear on the listing — on Airbnb and on any direct-booking page you run. Section 11 makes failing to display a valid number an offence in its own right, with a fine or up to six months’ imprisonment. The overview article walks through the registration mechanics and what the platforms have to do.
What to do with this
- Check the title. Sectionalised cottage: separate property, and the favourable maths above disappears. One erf: read on.
- Count bedrooms on the erf, not on the listing. That is your denominator.
- Work out your fraction. Let bedrooms ÷ erf bedrooms. Under half and a full year is fine; over half and you need to count nights.
- Watch the main house. It is the whole-property lets — the festive season, the odd big booking — that spend the budget fast.
- Register the cottage anyway, and put the number on every listing.
- Comment before 5 October, particularly on how “maximum annual capacity” should be measured. This is precisely the ambiguity that will otherwise be resolved by whoever sends you the rates bill.
If you want the full picture of the by-law, start with Short-term Letting in the City of Cape Town. For the threshold arithmetic in the general case, see Staying Under Cape Town’s 50% Letting Threshold. And if the cottage is genuinely a business rather than a sideline, running it properly is a better conversation than shaving nights.
Airflow measures availability across every channel as a single rolling figure per property, so the cottage’s number is the union of Airbnb, your own site and anything else — not one platform’s view of it. The mechanics are in the threshold article.
To model the erf reading, open the cottage’s letting limit and fill in “Rooms on the whole erf (optional)” with every bedroom on the erf, house included: 5 + 2 = 7 in the example above. The limit is then taken of the erf’s room-nights while the count stays the cottage’s own, and the readout says so: “Limit taken of the whole erf: 7 rooms. Counting this listing’s 2.”
To model the per-unit reading, leave the field blank. The limit is then taken of the cottage’s own two bedrooms, and a cottage open all year reads 100%.
Because the answer flips between the two, a cautious host can check both: enter the erf’s rooms and look at the gauge, then clear the field and look again. If you are comfortable under both readings, the open question in the draft doesn’t matter for you. If you are only comfortable under one, you know how much rides on it.