If you are letting a whole flat or house in London on Airbnb, Booking.com or anywhere similar, there is a limit on how many nights a year you can do it for. It is 90. Go past that without permission and you are, in planning terms, using the property for something it is not approved for.
Most landlords hear about this late, usually from a neighbour or a managing agent, and assume it is either a myth or a technicality. It is neither. It is also not as restrictive as it sounds once you understand what actually counts.
Where the rule comes from
Short-letting a London home used to be caught by a much older piece of law. Under the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act 1973, letting a residential property in Greater London as temporary sleeping accommodation for less than 90 consecutive nights counted as a material change of use, and a material change of use needs planning permission.
That made almost all short-letting in London technically unlawful, which by the 2010s was plainly out of step with how people were using their homes. The Deregulation Act 2015 carved out an exception: you may now let a London property as short-term accommodation for up to 90 nights in a calendar year without applying for anything, as long as whoever is providing the accommodation is liable for council tax on it.
Two things follow from that wording, and both matter.
It is Greater London only. This is a London rule. A property in Windsor, Reading, Watford or Slough is not subject to the 90-night cap. Those areas have their own considerations, but this particular limit is not one of them.
It resets on 1 January. The 90 nights are per calendar year, not per rolling twelve months. A property booked solidly from October gets a fresh 90 nights in the new year.
What counts towards the 90
The cap applies to letting the whole property as short-term accommodation. In practice:
- Nights the entire home is let to guests count. Whether it is booked through Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, a corporate agent or a friend of a friend makes no difference.
- Nights you are living there yourself do not count. Nor do nights it sits empty.
- Letting a room while you remain in residence is a different thing. If you are living in the property and renting out a spare room, you are not changing the use of the dwelling, so the 90-night cap is not what governs you.
- Longer lets are outside it entirely. The rule is aimed at short-term accommodation. A proper tenancy, or a let of more than 90 consecutive nights to the same occupier, is a different use and is not counted against your 90 short-let nights.
That last point is worth sitting with, because it is the basis of how a lot of London properties are run profitably and lawfully: short lets through the high-demand months, then a longer corporate or medium-term let to fill the rest of the year.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Airbnb applies the limit automatically. If you have an entire-home listing in Greater London, Airbnb caps it at 90 nights a year on its own and stops taking bookings once you hit it. Most hosts take that as the system looking after them.
It is not, quite. Airbnb's cap only counts Airbnb nights.
The legal limit attaches to the property. Airbnb's cap attaches to the listing. So if you run the same flat on Airbnb and on Booking.com, each platform sees only its own share, each shows you comfortably inside 90, and the property can quietly pass 150 nights without either one flagging anything. Nobody warns you, because from each platform's point of view nothing is wrong.
If you list on more than one site, the count is yours to keep. It has to be the total across everything, including direct bookings.
What happens if you go over
Exceeding the limit is not a criminal matter and nobody arrives at the door. It is a planning matter, and it is handled by the local council's planning enforcement team. Councils generally act on complaints rather than by patrolling listings, and the complaint usually comes from a neighbour or the building's freeholder.
The council can require you to stop, and can pursue the matter formally if you do not. There are financial consequences for ignoring a formal enforcement notice, and some London boroughs are considerably more active on this than others. Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea have long-standing enforcement teams; outer boroughs vary a great deal.
The practical risk is less the penalty and more the abruptness: an enforcement notice can end your bookings mid-season, with guests already holding reservations.
How to let for more than 90 nights
You apply to the council for planning permission for change of use, from a dwelling (use class C3) to short-term accommodation. If it is granted, the cap no longer binds you, and you can ask Airbnb to lift the automatic limit on your listing by providing the permission.
Be realistic about the odds. In dense residential boroughs these applications are often refused, because the council's own housing policy is usually working in the opposite direction. It is far more commonly granted for properties already operating commercially, or in buildings where short-letting is established. It is worth a conversation with the planning department before you spend money on an application.
The three things that catch people out more often than planning
In our experience the 90-night rule is rarely the thing that actually stops a landlord. These are:
Your lease. If the property is leasehold, and most London flats are, the lease may prohibit short lets outright, or bar business use, or require the freeholder's consent. This is entirely separate from planning and is enforced by the freeholder, who has a much more direct route to stopping you. Read the lease before you list, not after.
Your mortgage. A standard residential mortgage usually does not permit short-term letting. Some buy-to-let products do not either. Lenders differ widely, and the fix is often just a conversation and a consent, but it needs doing in advance.
Your insurance. Ordinary home or landlord insurance generally will not cover paying guests. If something happens and the policy was never written for short lets, you may find you are not covered at all.
What we do about it
Managing a London property to the 90-night limit is part of the job, not an afterthought. We track the nights against the property rather than the platform, so a flat listed in more than one place still has one honest count. We plan the year around it: short lets concentrated where the rates are highest, then a longer let to cover the rest, so the ceiling shapes the calendar instead of cutting it off in October.
And where a property has the making of a case for planning permission, we will say so, rather than quietly running it to the line.
If you have a London property and you are not sure where you stand, send us the postcode and we will tell you what it can realistically earn inside the rules.
This is general information about how the rule works, not legal advice. Boroughs differ in how they interpret and enforce it, and your lease and mortgage are specific to you. Check with the local council's planning department, and with a solicitor where a lease is involved, before making decisions on a particular property.