Not yet, but it is scheduled to be: Barcelona's city council announced in June 2024 that it will not renew any of the city's roughly 10,100 tourist-apartment licences when they expire in November 2028, after which no whole-apartment short-term let will be legal in a residential building. No new licences have been issued since 2014, so buying a flat in Barcelona for Airbnb today means buying at most two years of legal operation.
The detail
The mechanism is Catalan, the decision is Barcelona's. The Catalan government's Decree-Law 3/2023 made tourist-use licences in municipalities with a housing shortage time-limited — five years, renewable — and capped them at 10 per 100 residents. Barcelona's mayor, Jaume Collboni, used that renewal point to announce on 21 June 2024 that the city will let every licence lapse rather than renew it. Spain's Constitutional Court dismissed the property owners' challenge to the decree on 13 March 2025, which removed the last obvious legal route to reversing the plan.
The market has already priced it. A licensed flat used to carry a premium over an identical unlicensed one because the licence was the scarce asset; that premium has been shrinking since 2024 and will be zero by 2028. Owners are exiting three ways — selling to residents, switching to long-term tenancies, or moving to seasonal lets of over 31 days, which Catalonia now regulates separately and which the platforms treat as a different product with lower nightly rates and higher void risk. None of those three pays what nightly letting paid.
Enforcement is not waiting for 2028. Barcelona runs a dedicated inspection team against unlicensed listings, the platforms are required to display the licence number on every Barcelona listing and remove those without one, and Catalonia's tourism law sets fines for the most serious infractions at up to €600,000. Since 1 July 2025 every Spanish short-let listing has also needed a national registration number issued by the Property Registry, which a Barcelona flat without a tourist licence cannot obtain.
The numbers that matter
Where this stops holding
This is Barcelona city, not Catalonia or Spain: coastal municipalities along the same coast keep licensing under the 10-per-100 cap, and Madrid, Valencia and Málaga are on their own trajectories, mostly tightening. A future council could reverse the non-renewal decision, but the legal framework that allows it has survived its main constitutional challenge, and the political direction across Spanish cities since 2024 has run one way.
Sources
- Decreto-ley 3/2023 de Cataluña — régimen urbanístico de las viviendas de uso turístico (BOE)
- Catalan News — Barcelona to eliminate all tourist apartments by November 2028 (21 June 2024)
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on short-term rental data collection
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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.