Short-term rentals in Spain: the single register and the EU regulation explained

If you have searched "registro único de arrendamientos" in the past year you will have found confident guides that are now out of date. Spain built a national register for tourist and seasonal lets, ran it for a year, revoked tens of thousands of numbers, and then saw the Supreme Court strike it down in May 2026, the same month the EU's own rules on short-term rental data began to apply. Here is how the pieces fit, in the order they happened.

The single register

Royal Decree 1312/2024, of 23 December, did two things. It set up a procedure for a Registro Único de Arrendamientos, run through the property registrars, which gave each flat or room rented for short stays its own number. And it created the Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos, a digital single window through which platforms send the state data on the listings they carry. Owners could apply from January 2025, and from July 2025 the number became compulsory for advertising a tourist or seasonal let on an online platform.

The system started slowly. In its first 90 days it received 18,104 applications, according to the government: 8,787 were granted, 7,393 were still being assessed and 1,924 had been revoked. Then the July deadline arrived and owners rushed in. By mid-September 2025, as Ara reported from the Ministry of Housing's figures, the register had received 336,497 applications, 264,998 of them (78.75%) for tourist use.

The registrars revoked 53,876 numbers, about one application in five. An application fell when it came with incomplete data, or data that broke the rules for tourist lets, and the owner didn't fix it in time. Andalusia led with 16,740 revocations, followed by the Canaries with 8,698, Catalonia with 7,729 and the Valencian region with 7,499. By city, Seville had 2,289, Marbella 1,802 and Barcelona 1,564. The ministry notified the platforms, Airbnb among them, that those listings had to come down, everywhere they appeared, since the same flat is often advertised on several sites at once.

The figures also showed something odd in Madrid. There, 83% of the flats that applied registered as seasonal lets, the reverse of the national pattern, and about a third of the 3,513 tourist applications were revoked. Seasonal lets of a few months fall under different rules from tourist lets, and the register made that switch visible for the first time.

The court ruling

The Generalitat Valenciana challenged the decree, and on 21 May 2026 the Supreme Court announced its judgment 620/2026. It annulled every provision that created the single register. The court held that the state has no power to set up a national register that sits on top of the regional registers of tourist flats that already exist, and that the EU regulation requires member states to have registration systems that meet its standards without requiring them to be national. It upheld the rest: the digital single window, the platforms' duty to send data and the use of that data for statistics.

So the state now receives the data and the regions hold the registers. For an owner, the regional tourist registration and any licence the town hall requires are what count, alongside whatever the platform asks for.

The EU regulation

Regulation (EU) 2024/1028, on data collection and sharing for short-term accommodation rentals, entered into force on 18 May 2024 and applies from 20 May 2026. Its logic is simple. Where a member state wants platforms to hand over data for an area, it must run a registration procedure there, and each unit gets a registration number, a unique identifier listed in a public registry. The authority can check a host's declaration at any time and, if the host doesn't correct it, suspend the number and order platforms to remove the listing. Platforms send activity data through one digital entry point per country, and each country publishes the list of areas where registration applies.

Spain's window was designed as that entry point, which is why the court's split leaves the European machinery largely standing: the data flows to Madrid, and the numbers come from the regions.

In December 2025 the Commission's European Affordable Housing Plan went further. Its questions-and-answers document says short-term rentals grew by almost 93% between 2018 and 2024 and can make up as much as 20% of the housing stock in the most popular destinations. It lists the benefits too, from extra income for hosts to a reason to renovate, and promised a law giving cities a clear, data-driven framework to take "targeted and proportionate measures", especially in areas of housing stress. Our explainer of the plan follows it to the legislative proposal that came next.

Neighbours and cities

Two more rules matter for anyone who lives next to a tourist flat. Since 3 April 2025, after Organic Law 1/2025 reformed the Horizontal Property Law, a new tourist flat in a block needs the express approval of three-fifths of the owners, holding three-fifths of the shares, without having to rewrite the community's statutes.

And cities can go much further. In June 2024 Barcelona announced it would apply the Catalan Decree-Law 3/2023 in full: no new tourist-flat permits, and no renewal of the roughly 10,000 that exist, so that they return to the housing market by November 2028.

Where we land

The left's instinct here is sound: housing is for living in, and where homes are scarce a city has every right to protect residents and the life of a neighbourhood, up to capping tourist lets. The liberal instinct is sound too: an owner who follows the rules deserves a cheap, predictable process and the security that a licence granted today means something tomorrow, and good data does more than a blanket ban.

What the past year shows is that the data is the tool both sides need. A single, visible record of every listing, held by whichever level of government the Constitution assigns, lets a city prove where tourist lets are squeezing residents and set limits for that zone, and lets everyone else see where they aren't. Limits should be local, published with the figures behind them and reviewed every few years, loosened where pressure eases and tightened where it grows. Spain already has the window and the regional registers; joining them into one map that councils can use is the next job. The same evidence-first approach runs through our pieces on rent control in Europe and on ending the war between tenants and landlords.