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Date Published: 18/12/2024

Valencia's holiday let laws: A short stay for short-term rentals?

New regulations could radically reshape – or eliminate – the holiday rental sector in just five years

by John Michael Kirby, Technical Architect and Building Engineer

In Spain’s Valencia region, two new laws have come into force which radically overhaul the way the sector of short term holiday lets in houses and apartments and rooms works. Some sources in the tourism industry say that these changes entail the end of the sector and therefore will result in a substantial loss of employment and income.

By examining both laws in detail, I hope to provide you with the information so that you will be able to decide for yourself. I will only examine the most common case in which the activity is a business, someone or company offers accommodation and receives a payment.

The first law is a Real Decreto, a national law (as opposed to a Decreto Ley which is an autonomic or regional law); we have new ones of both types which affect the sector. The new national law, Real Decreto 933/2021, which came into effect on December 2, 2024 creates an obligation to do two things: register and maintain a register of reservations and register and maintain a register of people that stay.

If you would like to be able to read the law in your language all you have to do is use Google translate, you can translate text, documents or whole web-pages in seconds. Here’s a video I made of how to do that.

In the region of Valencia only the first part is a novelty; the obligation to collect and maintain guest data has existed since the regional law Ley15/2018 came into force, which was subsequently updated in 2021 by Decreto 10/2021. Here is a link to the new platform.

The registration process is simple. I did it in 10 minutes, and the platform for notifications is also simple. That said it is inflexible, as there’s no way of modifying any data once you have made a notification, so the only way of correcting an entry is by cancelling the notification and starting from scratch. Hopefully future versions of the platform will make modifications possible.

Post-2018 it was necessary to make only one notification, that of the guests that stayed in a property and now you have to make two – one when someone makes a formal reservation, establishing a contract, and the second when the people arrive.

In all cases, you only have 24 hours to make the notification or you incur sanctions of both a financial type and administrative type IE fines and you can lose your license.

Since 2018 in the case of the Valencia region minors were considered to be under 16 and adults 16 and older; the obligation of data collection only corresponded to adults. Under the new law a guest registration form must be completed by anyone aged 14 onwards and minors must also have a registration completed for them. So all guests have to be registered, irrespective of their age.

The data sheets and the electronic record must be maintained for 3 years after the service or reservation date. The fines and sanctions are listed in the law.

There's a useful list of all the data you need to collect in annex 1 of the law which you can just copy and paste to make your own registration forms.

In conclusion, in the Valencia region where the Guardia Civil registration page has existed since 2018, this is not a huge change and doesn’t require a great deal of extra work. The reservation registration literally takes less than a minute if you know what you are doing. See video.

The second law Decreto Ley 9/2024, is a regional law and came into effect on 02 August of this year. It stipulates the requirements for properties and property owners in order to be able to offer the service of short term holiday lets.

Let me first say that it is a big deal and does have the potential to not just control and restrict the sector as mentioned in the preamble, but to completely destroy it in less than 5 years. Article 2 subsection 2, leaves it in the hands of each town council to “limit” through town planning the number of holiday properties in each building, in the whole sector, in each area and in all zones. That number could and will in all likelihood be zero in many cases.

The technical requirements, all stated in Annex 3 are really logical and innocuous and all the administrative requirements at a regional level stated throughout the law but, most specifically in article 23 are also reasonable with one exception. A short term holiday stay is defined as ten days or less. A stay of 11 days or more is sanctionable both financially and administratively. A fortnight is not considered to be a short term holiday rental and that just doesn’t correspond to reality. It’s a very common period to take for a holiday.

All licenses now expire after 5 years post the introduction of the law, hence my assessment that the sector could be completely eliminated in less than 5 years, as the law came into force 3 months ago.

As mentioned, Valencia already had a law governing these types of properties: the regional law Ley15/2018, which was subsequently updated in 2021 by Decreto 10/2021. The big departure from that law is the requirement for renewal every 5 years and the power for a local council to completely eliminate that type of property from its area.

Essentially, the regional government has not taken a decision about the future of the sector. It has delegated that decision and the future of the sector entirely in the hands of the 542 local councils. The Generalitat had an opportunity to lead but, with the inclusion of article 2 subsection 2, it has chosen to merely be a bystander to what happens.

The only exception to this omnipotence of local councils is if the licence was issued pre Ley 15/ 2018. Those cases are still required to renew the licence every 5 years, but only with reference to the technical requirements in annex 3.

In all cases, a period of 5 years has been given for properties with existing licences post- or pre-2018 to become compliant with the technical requirements. By that time, the only ones left in the sector could be those with licenses issued before Ley 15/2018.

In conclusion, my assessment is that the national law Real Decreto 933/2021 pertaining to registration is sensible and proportionate. The platform is user friendly and the process is not onerous. However, the regional law Decreto Ley 9/2024 is designed to give the appearance of control, for example by introducing new fairly trivial prohibitions such as it is now expressly forbidden to rent out rooms in a house. So they have essentially banned B&Bs, which we all love. Simultaneously they have also tried to avoid any blame should the sector face total collapse as a result of its introduction by handing over absolute control to local councillors. Its only merit is that it has managed to be both superficially proactive, although it bans the wrong things both in terms of time and activities, making it both meek and directionless at the same time.

John Kirby is a Technical Architect and Building Engineer (UPV), having won the award for outstanding academic achievement. He is the first foreigner to win that award and the only foreigner to ever be Municipal Technical Architect in Spain and a Judicial Property expert witness in Spain. He is Commisioner for Expatriates of the Valencian government and Ambassador for Spain and Gibraltar for Chartered Association of Building Engineers (UK).

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