Airbnb 90-day rule in London: The 2026 host’s guide
Last updated: June 3, 2026
Managing short-term rentals in London comes with one rule every host needs to understand: the 90-day rule. Under the Deregulation Act 2015, entire-home short-term lets in Greater London are capped at 90 booked nights per calendar year, unless the property has the necessary planning permission.
In practice, this means platforms such as Airbnb will automatically block further bookings once a listing reaches 90 nights. For hosts, going beyond the limit without approval can lead to enforcement action and fines of up to £20,000.
We’ll explain how the Airbnb 90-day rule works, who it applies to, what happens if you exceed the limit, and how professional short-let management can help you stay compliant. As an experienced property management company operating in London and other UK markets, GuestReady helps hosts navigate local regulations while making the most of their rental income.
Key takeaways
- Entire-home short-term lets in Greater London are capped at 90 booked nights per calendar year, unless the host has the right planning permission.
- Airbnb automatically blocks London entire-home listings once they reach 90 nights, but the legal cap applies across all platforms combined, not just Airbnb.
- Hosts who exceed the limit risk enforcement action, fines of up to £20,000 per offence, and separate mortgage or lease consequences.
This is general information, not legal advice. For specific planning or tax questions, speak to a qualified solicitor or accountant who works in London short-lets.
1. What the Airbnb 90-day rule actually is
The 90-day rule is a piece of planning law, not an Airbnb policy. Section 44 of the Deregulation Act 2015 amended a 1973 statute and said, in effect: yes, Londoners, you can short-let your home for up to 90 nights a year without going through a full change-of-use planning application. Anything more, and you need permission from your council.
Airbnb introduced automatic enforcement in January 2017, becoming the first platform to do the council’s job for it. The cap was popular with residents’ groups in central London, where whole stairwells had quietly turned into self-check-in lockbox corridors. Other platforms have circled the idea ever since. Only Airbnb has actually built it. If you’re still weighing up whether short-term letting in London is the right route for your property, the fundamentals of the regulatory landscape are worth understanding before you list.
A few things to be precise about, because most guides get them wrong:
- The 90 nights are booked nights, not advertised nights.
- The cap applies to entire-home lets only. If you’re renting out a room while living in the property yourself, you don’t count toward the 90.
- It’s per property, not per host. Two London flats means 90 nights each, not 180 between them.
- Stays of 90 or more consecutive nights are categorised as long-term lets and don’t count toward the cap. That single fact is the basis of every legitimate workaround you’ll read about later.
Want to see how much you can earn in London from your rental? Feel free to use our London rental income estimate tool!
Estimate your property’s potential
We could spend a thousand words on whether the rule works. Here’s the short version:
| The case for | The case against | |
|---|---|---|
| Housing supply | Keeps family-sized homes in the rental pool in central boroughs. | Punishes occasional hosts more than the year-round commercial operators it was aimed at. |
| Local rents | Real downward pressure in Westminster, Camden, and Hackney. | The effect is real but modest. Nobody is calling London affordable. |
| Community | Fewer rotating-door lockbox stairwells. | The committed bad actors carry on. The casual hosts give up. |
| Income | Forces hosts to think about hybrid strategies, which usually earn more anyway. | Caps a pure-Airbnb business model at roughly a quarter of the calendar year. |
| Tourism | Barely a dent in London’s total supply. | Doesn’t really hurt London. Would hurt smaller markets if copied wholesale. |
2. How the Airbnb 90-day rule is enforced in 2026 (the bit most guides skip)
This is where the practical detail lives, and it’s the part that has shifted most since the rule first landed in 2017. Let’s take a look below!
Airbnb blocks the calendar automatically
Since January 2017, Airbnb has been counting booked nights on every entire-home London listing. When the total hits 90, the calendar locks for the rest of the year. The listing stays visible, but no new bookings can be confirmed until 1 January, when the counter resets.
It’s a hard stop. The block isn’t a polite reminder. You can’t argue with it. The only way through is to show Airbnb proof of planning permission for a change of use, at which point they’ll lift the cap on your specific listing.
The legal cap is platform-agnostic, and that catches people out
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding of the rule. The 90-night limit is a legal limit on the property. It is not a limit on Airbnb specifically. If you take 90 nights on Airbnb and then another 30 on Booking.com, you’ve broken the rule, even though Booking.com didn’t stop you.
In 2026, most professional managers run a single unified calendar and stop accepting bookings at night 90 regardless of platform. Self-managing hosts who think of the cap as “an Airbnb thing” tend to discover the truth via a letter from their planning department.
Planning permission is available in theory
You can apply to your council for permission to short-let beyond 90 nights, and a fraction of those applications succeed. The approval rate depends almost entirely on the borough and the building. Westminster, Camden, and Kensington & Chelsea have approved very few such applications in recent years. Outer boroughs are more pragmatic. A flat in a building that already operates as serviced apartments is a much stronger case than a flat above a family home on a quiet residential street.
Budget 8 to 13 weeks for a decision, professional fees in the low thousands, and the real possibility of refusal.
Councils have noticeably sharpened their teeth since 2023
For the first few years of the Airbnb 90-day rule, enforcement was patchy and largely complaint-driven. That’s changed. Westminster, Camden, and Tower Hamlets in particular have built up dedicated short-let enforcement work. Recent headlines include a landlord ordered to pay around £75,000 in fines for running multiple unauthorised lets in central London. The £20,000 statutory maximum is per offence; portfolio operators can rack that up several times very quickly.
Most enforcement actions start with neighbour complaints. Noise, bins, constant rolling suitcases at all hours. Be a good neighbour, and you cut your enforcement risk substantially, regardless of paperwork.
3. What happens when you hit 90 nights
The calendar locks. Until 1 January.
That’s true whether your 90 nights ran from January to March or were scattered across the whole year. The system doesn’t distinguish. Once you cross the threshold, you’re out of the short-term market on Airbnb for the rest of the calendar year.
What that means in practice:
- Plan your 90 nights deliberately. Peak summer and Christmas usually beat off-peak weeks in central London by a wide margin.
- Watch the counter if you list on multiple platforms. Once you’re past 60, that’s the moment to slow down and lock in the highest-value remaining bookings.
- Decide what to do with the rest of the year before it sneaks up on you.
The most common move at this point is to switch to mid-term lets. More on that in a moment.
4. The penalties
The famous figure is £20,000. That’s the statutory maximum fine per offence under planning law for breaching the cap. In practice, council action tends to unfold along these lines:
- Investigation. Triggered most often by a neighbour complaint or council platform monitoring. You’ll be asked to produce booking records.
- A planning enforcement notice. A formal order to cease the unauthorised use. Ignoring one is a criminal offence.
- A fine. Often less than the £20,000 ceiling on a first offence, but capable of stacking quickly for repeat or portfolio operators. The £75,000 Westminster case wasn’t an outlier.
- A listing takedown request. Councils can ask Airbnb to remove non-compliant listings. Airbnb generally complies.
Then there are the second-order consequences that quietly surprise hosts:
- Mortgage. Most residential mortgages prohibit short-letting outright. A breach can entitle your lender to demand repayment or move you onto a punitive rate.
- Lease. Most London long-leasehold flats prohibit short-letting in their lease covenants. A breach is grounds for forfeiture proceedings from the freeholder, which is as dramatic as it sounds.
- HMRC. Since January 2024, Airbnb has reported all UK host earnings directly to HMRC under DAC7. Undeclared short-let income is now very hard to hide. Council investigations tend to surface this part too.
The fine is the public number. The lease and mortgage exposure is the part that quietly ends letting careers.
5. Approaching your 90-day limit?
If your London property is heading for the cap before the year is out, GuestReady can pivot you onto mid-term rental management (stays of 90 or more consecutive nights) with no compliance risk. These bookings sit outside the cap entirely, and our pipeline of corporate relocators, insurance placements, and visiting professionals fills the rest of your calendar at strong rates.
6. What hosts actually do (the workarounds)
You cannot bypass the cap itself. You can, legally, build a year-round letting strategy around it. These are the four routes we see London owners take, roughly in order of how often they work.
Switch to mid-term lets after day 90
The most popular option by some distance. Once Airbnb blocks your calendar, you list the property for stays of 90+ consecutive nights through corporate housing channels, relocation agents, and dedicated mid-term platforms. The legal logic: a 90+ night stay is not “temporary sleeping accommodation” under the Deregulation Act. It’s a tenancy (typically a licence or short AST, depending on the contract).
Nightly rates drop. Occupancy and net yield often go up, because turnover costs, cleaning frequency, and guest churn fall sharply. This is the strategy that lets London short-let income work as a serious year-round business rather than a long summer.
Apply for planning permission
Worth doing if the property is genuinely well-suited. A flat in a serviced apartment building, a former HMO already used as visitor accommodation, or a property in an outer borough with a more accommodating planning department all have a fighting chance. Not worth doing for a flat in a Westminster mansion block.
Diversify platforms within your 90 nights
The cap is on total nights, not Airbnb nights. Within your 90, you can list across Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and direct booking channels in parallel, which gives you better rate flexibility and protects you from a single-platform downturn. The discipline is keeping one accurate, centralised count of booked nights.
Convert to standard long lets
The fallback. A 12-month assured shorthold tenancy through a high-street agent gets you out of the short-let market entirely. Income is more predictable, the regulation is more familiar, and you don’t have to think about platform compliance ever again. It’s the right call for owners who’ve decided the short-let path is more friction than it’s worth, which is a reasonable conclusion for plenty of people.
7. The 2026 national registration scheme
The biggest UK short-let story of 2026 is the long-awaited national registration scheme, brought in under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.
A note on timing. Across the sources we’ve reviewed in late 2026, the scheme is described variously as “targeted for April 2026,” “launching Spring 2026,” and “in implementation phase as of mid-2026.” The statutory instrument is moving, but slowly. Treat any specific date as provisional and check GOV.UK before making decisions on it.
When it goes fully live, every English short-term let will need to:
- Register on a new national portal run by DCMS.
- Receive a unique registration number.
- Display that number on every listing across every platform.
- Confirm basic safety compliance: gas safety certificate, EICR, smoke and CO alarms, fire risk assessment.
Platforms will be obliged to verify the registration number and delist unregistered properties. Civil penalties of up to £5,000 have been proposed for operating without registering.
The parallel change is the proposed C5 use class, a new planning category specifically for dedicated short-term lets. Existing short-lets would be reclassified into C5 automatically, with new permitted development rights to move between residential (C3) and short-let (C5) without a fresh planning application. Local authorities will be able to remove those rights via Article 4 Directions in high-pressure areas.
The point London hosts need to hold onto: registration sits on top of the 90-day rule, not in place of it. Even with a shiny new registration number, you still cannot legally exceed 90 nights without planning permission.
8. The Airbnb 90-day rule outside London (short answer: it doesn’t apply)
This is the single most common misconception about UK short-let regulation. The 90-night statutory cap applies only to Greater London (32 boroughs plus the City of London). Anyone telling you it applies in Bristol or Manchester is wrong, and you can quote us on that.
What actually applies elsewhere:
| Location | 90 night cap? | What really applies |
|---|---|---|
| Greater London | Yes, 90 nights/year | Deregulation Act 2015. Airbnb auto-blocks at 90 nights. |
| England outside London | No statutory cap | Planning rules case-by-case. Article 4 Directions in some areas. National registration scheme due 2026. |
| Bristol | No | Planning permission is likely required where short-letting amounts to a “material change of use.” No London-style cap. |
| Bath & North East Somerset | No statutory cap | Article 4 Directions in central areas. Planning permission often required for whole-home lets. |
| Manchester, Brighton, Liverpool | No | Planning rules case-by-case. Watch local Article 4 activity. |
| Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland | No statutory cap | Mandatory short-term let licensing since October 2022. Operating without a licence is a criminal offence. |
| Wales | No statutory cap currently | Visitor Accommodation Register is being introduced. Visitor levy to follow. |
| Northern Ireland | No | Certification and registration via Tourism NI are required for tourist accommodation. |
The general rule of thumb in 2026: outside London, there may be no night cap, but there is almost certainly a registration, licensing, or planning conversation to have with the local authority before you list.
How GuestReady can help
We manage hundreds of London properties and have built our compliance workflow around the 90-day rule rather than against it. For owners, that usually means:
- A pricing and calendar plan that gets the most out of your 90 nights.
- An automatic handover to mid-term lets once the cap is hit, with no compliance risk.
- Registration scheme readiness as the national portal goes live.
- Safety certification, planning advice, and platform compliance, all handled.
As a STAA-accredited short-term let management company, our London team runs all of this as part of a single service.
Talk to our London property management team!
Frequently asked questions
Is the Airbnb 90-day rule enforced automatically?
Yes. The calendar locks at 90 booked nights for entire-home listings in Greater London, and lifts on 1 January. Hosts with planning permission for a change of use can submit proof and have the block removed.
Can I get permission to exceed 90 days in London?
In principle, yes, by applying to your borough for a change-of-use planning permission. Approval rates vary sharply by borough. Central boroughs (Westminster, Camden, Kensington & Chelsea) approve very few such applications. Outer boroughs are more pragmatic. Allow at least 8 to 13 weeks for a decision.
Does Airbnb 90-day rule apply to rooms or whole homes?
Whole homes only. Hosted stays, where you live in the property while a guest rents a room, are exempt and don’t count toward the cap.
What happens if I break the 90-day rule?
You can be fined up to £20,000 per offence under planning law, and your listing can be removed. Less obviously, breaching the rule can also breach your mortgage terms (most residential mortgages prohibit short-letting) and your lease (most London long-leases do too), with consequences that run independently of any planning fine.
Does the Airbnb 90-day rule apply outside London?
No. It applies only to Greater London. Outside London, planning rules, Article 4 Directions, and the 2026 national registration scheme apply. Scotland has had mandatory licensing since October 2022. Wales is rolling out its own registration scheme during 2026 and 2027.
Can I list the same property on Airbnb and Booking.com to get past 90 nights?
No. The cap is on the property, not on Airbnb. 90 nights across all platforms combined. Multi-platform listing inside your 90 is fine, and often sensible, but it doesn’t get you past the cap.
What’s the difference between the 90-day rule and the new national registration scheme?
They’re separate. The 90-day rule is a London-only planning cap. The registration scheme is an England-wide requirement to register your property and display a number on listings. London hosts need to comply with both.
How do I keep my property earning past 90 days?
Mid-term lets (90+ consecutive nights) are the most common answer, because they sit outside the cap entirely. GuestReady’s mid-term rental management handles the pivot end-to-end. Other routes: apply for planning permission, or move to a 12-month tenancy.
How is the 90-night count tracked across years?
It resets on 1 January. Airbnb’s counter zeroes out on that date, and the legal cap resets in parallel. A booking spanning the new year is split by check-in date for counting purposes.
Has the 90-day rule been extended to other UK cities?
Not as a statutory cap, no. You may see articles claiming that Bristol or Manchester have a 90-day rule. They don’t. Outside London, controls take the form of planning rules, Article 4 Directions, registration schemes, and (in Scotland) mandatory licensing, rather than a fixed night cap.
