London's 90 Nights: How to Count Them Before the Council Does
Ask a London host about the 90-night rule and you will get the number right and the mechanics wrong. The number is not the interesting part. Four details decide whether you are actually inside it, and three of them surprise people.
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.
Where the rule comes from
This is worth two sentences, because the usual shorthand is misleading.
The Greater London Council (General Powers) Act 1973, s.25 made using residential premises in Greater London as temporary sleeping accommodation a material change of use — meaning it needed planning permission. All of it. Not “over 90 nights”; any of it.
The 90 nights come from the Deregulation Act 2015, s.44, which carved out an exception: you may do it for up to 90 nights in a calendar year without permission.
So 90 is not a limit the law grants you. It is the edge of an exemption from a prohibition. Past it, you are not “over the cap” — you are carrying out development without planning permission, which is a different and worse category of problem.
The four details
1. There is a second condition. The exemption requires both fewer than 90 nights and that the person providing the accommodation is liable for council tax on the premises. Hosts remember the nights and forget this entirely.
2. It attaches to the property, not to you. If the flat is let by two different operators in the same year, both periods count towards the same 90 nights. Change managing agent in July and you inherit whatever the first one used. Buy a flat that has been on Airbnb all spring and you inherit that too — which is a question worth asking before you exchange.
3. It resets on 1 January, not on a rolling twelve months and not on your financial year. A calendar-year counter is genuinely easier to manage than a rolling one, because you always know where the line is.
4. Letting a room while you are there is not caught. If you remain in the property — renting the spare room — that is not a change of use under the 1973 Act, so the 90 nights do not apply. The rule is about letting the whole dwelling as temporary sleeping accommodation.
The arithmetic that catches people
Platforms cap what they can see. Airbnb will stop you at 90 nights of Airbnb bookings in Greater London. It has no idea about your Booking.com nights, and no idea about the couple who found you on Instagram and paid by transfer.
60 on Airbnb + 25 on Booking.com + 10 direct = 95. No single platform shows a breach. The property is five nights over, and the property is what the rule is about.
This is exactly the gap that the EU’s monthly platform reporting widens elsewhere, and the principle is identical here: the authority sees channels, you are responsible for the total, so the only figure that protects you is your own.
Counting it properly
The setting is four fields. For London:
- What you count: nights let (occupancy). London caps what you sell — an empty calendar costs you nothing. (This is the opposite of Cape Town, which counts what you offer.)
- Per night, not per room-night. The rule is about the dwelling.
- Calendar year, resetting 1 January.
- Limit 90.
Pick “London (90 nights)” from the rule list and those are filled in. Import your bookings from every channel — including the direct ones — and the count is the property’s, not one platform’s.
Then the two things that matter:
A forecast date. On the calendar as it stands — every night already booked — the day you would pass 90. Knowing in May that you will cross in September is a pricing decision. Discovering it in September is a planning application.
Closures chosen by value. If you are on track to go over, the nights to give up are the ones that earn least. Airflow ranks the remaining year against your own seasonal rates and suggests closing upward from the cheapest, never touching the next few months. You lose nights you were not going to earn much from, and keep the August weekends.
If you want to go past 90
Then you need planning permission for a change of use, and that is a conversation with your borough rather than a setting in any software. Several London boroughs publish their enforcement approach; the City of London publishes guidance on short-term letting.
What the ledger gives you in that conversation is a per-night record of what the property actually did, which is considerably better than reconstructing a year from listing screenshots.
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: City of London — short term letting. Related: Short-Term Rental Rules by City, 2026, A Night Cap Is an Accounting Problem.