From 20 May 2026, Your Platform Reports Your Nights For You
There is a version of this story that reads as a crackdown, and it is not quite right. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 does not cap anybody’s nights. It sets no EU-wide limit, bans nothing, and creates no new licence.
What it does is quieter and, for most hosts, more consequential: it makes your activity visible to the authority that already has the power to act on it.
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.
What it actually requires
The regulation was adopted on 11 April 2024, entered into force on 20 May 2024, and applies from 20 May 2026 across all 27 member states. Three obligations matter to a host.
A registration number on every listing. Where a member state or region operates a registration procedure, your unit needs a number and that number must appear on the listing.
Platforms must check it. Airbnb, Booking.com and the rest have to make random checks against the national database — the Single Digital Entry Point — and make sure the number is visible. A listing that fails can be removed.
Platforms must report your activity. This is the part that changes the arithmetic: platforms hand the authorities data on the units they intermediate, monthly, without anyone asking you.
One honest caveat that most coverage skips: these obligations bite where a member state has actually established a registration procedure and its single digital entry point. The timetable is uniform; the local machinery is not. Check your own country.
Why this is bigger than any single cap
Here is the shift, in one sentence.
Before, a night cap was enforced by complaint. A neighbour reported you, an officer opened a file, and somebody had to reconstruct your year from listings and screenshots. Plenty of hosts went over and nothing happened, not because the rule was soft but because finding out was expensive.
After, the count arrives monthly, from the platform, in a structured form, and it lands next to a registration number that identifies the unit.
Nothing about the limit changed. Everything about the cost of noticing did.
If your city has a cap — London’s 90, Paris’s 90, Amsterdam’s 30 — 2026 is the year it stops being theoretical.
The asymmetry nobody mentions
The platform reports what it intermediated. You are accountable for what the property did.
Those are not the same number, and the gap is where hosts get hurt:
- Two platforms. 60 nights on Airbnb and 45 on Booking.com is 105 nights. Neither platform’s report shows a breach. The property is 15 over.
- Direct bookings. They appear in nobody’s report and still count against you.
- A change of agent mid-year. In London the 90 nights attach to the property, not to you — so a new managing agent inherits whatever the last one used up.
So the authority may end up with a clearer view of one channel than you have of all of them, while remaining responsible for the total. The only defence is your own count, across every channel, kept as you go.
What a host should actually do
Get the number, if your jurisdiction issues one. It is usually free and one-off. Paris’s is 13 characters through the national téléservice; Italy’s CIN also has to be displayed physically at the property; Greece’s AMA comes from AADE.
Count every channel in one place, including direct. Any channel you cannot see is a hole in your own figure, and a report with a hole in it is worse than no report.
Keep a per-night record as you go. You cannot reconstruct a past year from today’s calendar — a block added now retroactively closes days that were open at the time, and a feed that goes away takes its blocks with it. The evidence has to be captured on the day.
That last point is the whole game, and it is why we built a ledger rather than a counter.
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: EUR-Lex — Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 summary, Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 full text, European Commission — new rules bring increased transparency.