Short-term Letting in the City of Cape Town

Short-term Letting in the City of Cape Town

Part of the guide: Rental rules by city

This is a draft by-law, not law. The City of Cape Town published its draft Short-Term Letting By-Law, 2026 for public comment in August 2026, and the comment period closed on 5 October 2026. The City has not yet published a final text. The 50% rule itself sits in the City’s Rates Policy, which Council approved on 29 June 2026, and the City’s FAQ says rating categories change from 1 July 2027. Quotations below are from the published draft. Where this article goes beyond what the draft says, it says so. General information, not legal, tax or rates advice.

Read the proposal: the full draft by-law (PDF) · the City’s executive summary (PDF) · the City’s call for comment, which closed on 5 October 2026

If you let a property short-term anywhere in the City of Cape Town, this draft by-law is the thing to read this year. It does three separate things, and most coverage collapses them into one.

  1. It makes registration compulsory, and puts your registration number on every listing.
  2. It makes the City a recipient of your calendar data, continuously, from the platforms.
  3. It sets a 50% threshold that decides whether your property is rated as residential or commercial.

The third is the one that costs money. The first is the one that arrives first. This is the overview; the threshold has its own article because the maths deserves the room.

Who it applies to

Section 3 is broad, and deliberately so. It covers owners and operators of property listed on a booking platform, anyone who “manages, markets, offers, or makes available a property or part of a property for short-term letting… for reward,” and — this is the part people miss — any booking platform that “facilitates, enables, advertises, promotes or publishes listings.”

“Part of a property” matters. Letting one room is in scope. So is a cottage on the same erf — and because the erf is the unit, that cottage is counted against the whole property’s capacity, which is its own article.

And “booking platform” is defined widely enough to catch far more than Airbnb: “any online marketplace, mobile application or intermediary service that facilitates transactions between owners or operators and guests for accommodation services.” A direct-booking website that takes reservations is doing exactly that.

Registration, and the number on every listing

Section 4 is the operative one, and it is unusually specific about who must do what.

“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.”

— s 4(2)

Note the order. Registration comes before advertising, not after your first booking. And the obligation attaches to all listings, not your main one.

The draft then loads a matching set of duties onto platforms:

  • s 4(3) — the platform must let owners capture the registration data for each listing.
  • s 4(4) — that data is the physical address, the erf number, the municipal account number “as reflected on the municipal account”, and “any requested supporting evidence”. Have a rates account to hand.
  • s 4(5) — the platform must share that data with the City.
  • s 4(6)–(7) — the City verifies it and issues a unique number per property, to both the platform and the owner.
  • s 4(8) — “A booking platform must ensure that the City-issued registration number is clearly displayed on every listing.”
  • s 4(9) — the platform must “keep and maintain accurate records of all registered properties listed on its platform and make such records available to the City.”
  • s 4(10) — a platform “may not display or advertise any property (a) that is not registered with the City; or (b) where the unique registration number is not displayed.”

Read s 4(10) twice if you run your own booking site. It is not a duty to nag the owner. It is a duty not to publish.

Section 5 adds the other end: on transfer of ownership the City may cancel the registration and tell the platform, and the Municipal Valuer re-categorises the property. A number that came with the house is not yours. What the draft does not say is whether a buyer also inherits the seller’s last twelve months of letting, or starts from zero. SASTRA has asked the City to clarify.

What the City will be collecting

Section 7 lists the data the City will receive:

“(a) the physical address of the property…; (b) the municipal account number as reflected on the municipal account; (c) the availability data of each listing on a booking platform; (d) the occupancy data of each listing on a booking platform; and (e) any other data relevant to the implementation of this By-law.”

The City may also “determine the format and frequency” of that sharing, and s 13 allows it to contract directly with platforms to implement and monitor the by-law.

This changes the posture entirely. Your availability is not a number you will be asked to self-report at year end. It is a feed.

The 50% threshold

Section 8 is short and expensive:

“All properties that meet or do not exceed the 50% of total annual room nights threshold may be regarded as residential property… All properties that exceed the 50% of total annual room nights threshold will be regarded as commercial property and property rates will be levied accordingly.”

— s 8(2)–(3)

Two things the by-law’s own text leaves out, and where the answers are.

“Total annual room nights” is defined, but circularly. Section 1 gives it as “the maximum annual capacity of a property for short-term letting” — capacity, without saying how capacity is counted. The City’s short-term letting FAQ says bedrooms × 365, and the arithmetic in the threshold article uses it.

Availability or occupancy is not specified in the by-law. Section 7 collects both. Section 8 says which threshold, not which measure. The City’s FAQ says availability: a property is commercial when it is available for short-term letting for more than 50% of its total annual room nights. A flat listed all year that sells thirty nights is at 100% on that measure and 8% on the other. Plan for availability: it is the City’s stated measure, it is the worse outcome, and it is the one you control.

The rates consequence itself lives in the City’s Rates Policy, not in this by-law — the by-law only says rates “will be levied accordingly.” Council approved that policy on 29 June 2026, and the City’s FAQ says rating categories change from 1 July 2027. Only the rates category changes: as SASTRA reads it, zoning stays residential and other municipal tariffs are not affected.

Enforcement

  • s 9 — no owner or operator may let contrary to the by-law; no platform may advertise or facilitate letting in contravention of it.
  • s 10 — an authorised official may issue a compliance notice naming the provision contravened, the remedy, and the period to comply.
  • s 11 — offences include advertising or listing contrary to the by-law, failing to display a valid registration number, and using a cancelled number. Penalty: “a fine or imprisonment of up to six months, or both.”
  • s 12 — the City may also seek an interdict, in addition to criminal proceedings.
  • s 14 — a person affected by a decision taken under the by-law may appeal under section 62 of the Municipal Systems Act, in writing, within 21 working days of being notified. Whether that covers a disputed rates category, or only registration decisions, the draft does not say.

Section 11 applies to “any owner, operator or booking platform.” The exposure is shared.

Section 17 provides for transitional arrangements, so there should be a grace period — but its length is for the City Manager to announce, not something to plan around.

What the industry asked for

SASTRA, the South African Short Term Rental Association, published a response for hosts to send to the City, after a workshop in the last week of the comment period with the City, the Western Cape tourism department, hotel groups, FEDHASA and Airbnb. Its main requests:

  • Count nights booked, not nights offered, and set the line at 65%. The by-law already collects occupancy data, so nothing new would be needed.
  • Value commercially rated homes on what they earn. Homes are valued on what they would sell for; hotels and guest houses on their income. SASTRA says the first can be more than double the second, so the commercial rate lands on a higher base.
  • Do not make platforms the enforcer. It objects to s 4(10), under which a platform must take down a listing with no number.
  • Define the data sharing: what is collected, how often, and what else it may be used for.
  • Make registration digital, with a simple way to move between categories as a property’s use changes, and a simple way to dispute.

SASTRA’s own survey of hosts in July 2026 found that 80% expected the higher rates to affect whether their letting stays viable, and 22% would consider closing a listing. It puts the number of short-term lets in the City at about 27,000. These are an industry body’s figures, and they are its case rather than the City’s. The workshop also discussed applying the same approach in other Western Cape municipalities, so hosts outside the City should watch this too.

What to actually do now

  1. Watch for the revised draft. The comment period closed on 5 October 2026. The two unresolved points above are what to look for in the next text, above all a definition of “maximum annual capacity”.
  2. Find your availability number. Not your occupancy — your availability, as the union across every channel over a rolling 365 days. Most hosts cannot produce it, which is the real problem.
  3. Get ready to hold a registration number per property and to show it everywhere the property is advertised, including your own site.
  4. Decide, deliberately, which side of 50% you want to be on. Crossing it is not illegal; being reclassified by accident is just expensive. If you are running a commercial operation, run it properly.

How Airflow handles it

Two pieces, and they map onto the two halves of the by-law.

The calendar half. Airflow’s letting-limit gauge measures availability as the union across every connected channel plus your own bookings and blocks, over a rolling 365 days, with Cape Town (draft 2026) as a preset alongside London’s 90 nights, Amsterdam’s 30 and Paris’s 90. It forecasts the date you cross rather than only telling you afterwards, and it produces a per-property statement that distinguishes days it actually observed from days reconstructed from your bookings. The mechanics are in the threshold article.

The registration half. A registration number belongs to the property, so it lives on the property — set it once in the resource’s settings and it appears wherever that property is published: its Airflow Stay listing, its direct-booking site, and the guest-facing pages. That is the shape s 4(2) and s 4(8) require, and it is the only shape that survives you adding a fourth sales channel.

If you would rather think about this as a general problem than a Cape Town one — night caps are spreading, and a night cap is an accounting problem, not a calendar problem. Cape Town is unusual only in attaching a rates bill rather than a fine.

Sources

Verify against the City’s own published draft before acting. Section numbers above refer to the August 2026 draft and may move before adoption.

Short-term rentalsTaxCalendarMulti-propertyDirect bookingsGuide