Yes — more than 30 major cities have tightened short-let rules since 2023, and EU Regulation 2024/1028 has required a verified registration number for every EU listing since May 2026. The direction of travel is close to one-way: in the markets we track, we can point to many cities that added a restriction in the last three years and very few that removed one. Underwrite on the assumption that your market gets stricter, not looser.
The detail
Cities move down a predictable four-rung ladder, roughly three to six years per rung. First comes registration — cheap, popular and easy to legislate, and it produces the dataset that justifies everything after it. Second comes a night cap, usually 90 to 180 nights, often limited to primary residences. Third comes a licence freeze, where existing operators are grandfathered but no new permits are issued. Fourth is phase-out, where existing permits are given an expiry date.
Real examples of each rung: registration is now the EU-wide baseline under Regulation 2024/1028. Amsterdam sits at a hard 30-night cap; Paris at 120 nights for primary residences, with the November 2024 loi Le Meur letting communes cut that to 90 and tightening the micro-BIC tax allowance. Lisbon and Porto froze new Alojamento Local registrations in their densest parishes. Barcelona is on rung four — the city announced in June 2024 that all 10,101 tourist-apartment licences will expire by November 2028. New York effectively skipped to the end with Local Law 18, which cut whole-home short-term listings by roughly 80% within six months of enforcement beginning in September 2023.
The driver is housing politics, not tourism policy, which is why the ratchet only turns one way. Where a city can attribute rent inflation to short lets, restriction is close to costless for the administration that imposes it. The practical implication for an investor is that the regulatory question is not whether your market has rules, but which rung it is on and how fast it is moving.
The numbers that matter
Where this stops holding
The trend is strong but not universal, and treating it as universal will make you miss good markets. Some jurisdictions have chosen to tax rather than restrict — Victoria in Australia introduced a 7.5% short-stay levy in January 2025, which is a cost to model, not a ban. Leisure markets without a housing shortage, particularly coastal and rural areas where short lets are the historic accommodation stock, have largely been left alone. And enforcement capacity is not the same as legislation: several cities with strict rules on paper prosecute almost nobody — a real fact about the market you would be entering, though not one to build a business on.
Sources
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on short-term rental data collection
- Scottish Government — short-term lets licensing
- Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023
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A HostPal Invest report runs the real occupancy, nightly rate, RevPAR, regulation risk and a buy / wait / avoid verdict for one specific property or drawn area, in any of 117 markets — not a national average. Street-Level reports from £29.