Tourist Rental Licence in Valencia and Alicante (2026 Guide)

So you have a property in Valencia or Alicante, or you are thinking about buying one to rent it out to tourists. Well, this guide is for you. I am going to walk you through what a tourist rental licence actually is in 2026. How you get one. Where new licences are frozen right now. What happens if you rent without one. And the tax that comes with all of it. Grab a pen and paper if you want, because there are a few dates and numbers that really matter here.

My name is Daniel Bertomeu and I work alongside my father, Juan Bertomeu. He is a lawyer with offices in Moraira and Denia, ICALI number 4643, and over 30 years dealing mostly with foreign clients on the Costa Blanca. Most of what I am writing here is what we deal with every week at the office.

And I am going to be honest with you from the start. 2026 has been a strange year for tourist rentals. Two big things happened almost at the same time. The Spanish Supreme Court killed off the new national registry in May. And Valencia city brought in the toughest caps in the whole country, also in the spring. So a lot of what owners believe right now is simply no longer true. I will tell you exactly what is real now.

One quick note before we start. This is the Valencian Community, so Valencia, Alicante and Castellon. If your property is in Barcelona, Madrid or the Canary Islands, most of the concepts here are the same, but the specific rules vary by region. The 10-day rule, the licence, the registration number, all of that exists everywhere. It is just that the details change from region to region.

And one honest disclaimer, because I would want one if I were you. This is general information. It is not legal advice for your specific property, and these rules have been moving really fast in 2025 and 2026. Dates, caps, town hall decisions, all of it changes. Before you act on anything you read here, check your exact case with us or with a lawyer you trust.

What actually counts as a tourist rental here (the 10-day rule)

Okay, first question. What even is a tourist rental in the Valencian Community? Because not every rental needs a licence.

A vivienda de uso turistico, a VUT, is a complete property that you rent out, ready to move in, for tourist purposes, for a period equal to or shorter than 10 days or nights to the same tenant. Equal or shorter than 10 days. Not 11, not 15, not 30. Ten days. Keep this number in your head because it defines everything along this guide.

So this is the line. If you rent to the same guest for 10 days or fewer, that is a tourist rental and you need a licence. If you rent for 11 days or more, you fall outside the tourism regulation completely. That is a seasonal or temporary rental, and it does not need a tourist licence at all. It is a different kind of contract.

Now a question I get a lot. But Daniel, what if one out of ten guests wants to stay two weeks? Can I just do it? Well, if your property is registered as a tourist rental, no. Once it is declared for uso turistico you are only allowed to rent it for 10 days or less. What you do in practice is you limit the maximum nights on Airbnb or Booking so nobody can book 12 nights in the first place. The administration is building systems to cross-check this, so I would not risk it. The risk is too high for what little you save.

And one more thing people always ask. Can I rent just a room? No. The property must be rented entirely. Letting it out room by room is now considered a very serious infraction, and the fines for that are brutal. We will get to the numbers later, but for now just remember, whole property only.

And one more requirement people skip. The property itself has to qualify. You rent the whole dwelling, furnished and ready to move in, with the basic equipment the rules expect, and the registration needs the cadastral reference. If the flat is half furnished, or your plan was to rent rooms separately, fix that before you file anything.

What if you just rent for more than 10 days instead?

So a lot of owners look at all this and ask me, Daniel, can I skip the whole licence if I only do longer stays? And the honest answer is yes, you can.

If you rent to the same person for 11 days or more, it is not a tourist rental anymore. It is a seasonal rental, an arrendamiento de temporada, under the normal rental law. No VUT licence. No tourism registry. A normal written contract for a genuine temporary stay. Winter guests, remote workers, people waiting for their own purchase to complete.

But be honest with yourself about the trade. You are out of the weekend Airbnb market, the price per night is lower, and the contract has to reflect a real temporary purpose, not a disguised tourist let. For a lot of owners in a frozen zone this is the realistic plan B. If that is your case, do the numbers both ways before you buy.

What changed in 2024 to 2026 (the part where everyone gets confused)

So this is the part where people get confused. The rules changed, and then they changed again. Let me lay it out simply.

Before, under the old Decreto 10/2021, licences were basically perpetual. You got it once and that was it. That is over now. Decreto-ley 9/2024 came into force on the 8th of August 2024, and it changed the whole system. The two big things you need to know are these.

One. Licences are now valid for five years, and you have to renew them. Not forever anymore. If you do not renew before it expires, your property gets removed from the tourism registry automatically.

Two. There is grandfathering, which is good news if you already have a licence. If your property was already registered in the tourism register on the 7th of August 2024, the day before the new rules kicked in, its registration stays valid for five years counted from the 8th of August 2024. So it runs until the 8th of August 2029. You have time. But mark that date and renew at least a month before it runs out.

And then 2025 and 2026 brought the national registry drama, which is honestly the messiest part of all this. So let me give that its own section, because a lot of owners are still repeating rules that are no longer true.

The national NRUA is dead. Your regional number is what matters now.

Okay, this is the big update for 2026, and most owners have not heard about it yet.

In 2024 the State created a national Single Registry, the NRUA, by Real Decreto 1312/2024. From the 1st of July 2025 it became mandatory. Everyone had to get a national registration number on top of their regional licence, and Airbnb and Booking were going to require it to let you list.

And then the Supreme Court annulled it. Sentencia 620/2026, ruled on the 19th of May 2026, its ruling published in the BOE on the 8th of June, with a second judgment against the same decree following on the 21st of May. The court said the State had stepped on the autonomous regions' powers over tourism, basically duplicating registries that the regions already run. So the national NRUA is gone.

What does that mean for you in plain words? Your regional Valencian number, the VUT number from the Generalitat, is the number that matters now. That is your valid reference. Airbnb and Booking can no longer demand the national number to let you list. And if you already went and got a national number, do not panic, just keep your regional one in order and we will see what the administration says.

One thing that did survive, so do not relax completely. The Ventanilla Unica Digital, the data-sharing system where the platforms hand your booking data over to the administration, that is still alive. The platforms still report. So the regional licence still has to be real and in order. The shortcut of just not registering does not work.

Step by step: how to actually get the licence

Okay, so how do you get the thing. The order matters, and it changed. You start at the town hall, not at the regional government. A lot of people do this backwards and waste months because of it.

Step one. The urban compatibility certificate. This is the informe municipal de compatibilidad urbanistica, and it is mandatory for every property. It is a report from your local town hall confirming that the PGOU, the town's urban plan, actually allows tourist use at your exact property. No certificate, no licence. If your town has suspended licences or changed its planning rules, this document has to be less than six months old.

Step two. The declaracion responsable plus your cadastral reference. The declaracion responsable is the responsible declaration you submit to the tourism authority. And your property needs its own unique referencia catastral. Each property, its own reference. You cannot share one cadastral reference across two flats. If you do not have it yet you can temporarily use a provisional code, but you need the final reference within a year or the registration starts to fall apart.

Step three. Register with the Registro de Turismo through the online platform. In the Valencian Community this is done electronically through a platform called autoregistro. It can be a real pain if you are not used to the Spanish system, which is half the reason people hire us to do it for them.

Step four. You get your numero de registro turistico, your tourist registration number. That is the one that says you can legally operate.

Step five. Put that number on every single advert. Airbnb, Booking, Idealista, the estate agent's listing, your social media, everywhere. The platforms are obliged to check it.

Now on cost and time. Realistically you are looking at from around 800 euros all in, taxes and fees included, and a minimum of about two months for the regional registration to go through. Sometimes longer, and usually the delay is the town hall, not us. We can have our part done in a few weeks, but we still have to wait on the ayuntamiento.

On cost, the municipal compatibility report itself is usually somewhere around 70 to 90 euros in fees. The rest of what you spend depends on who does the work for you.

Three different registrations people keep confusing

This is one of those points where I tell you to grab the pen and paper again, because people mix these three up all the time. There are three separate obligations and people confuse them all the time, as if they were one thing. They are not the same thing.

One. The regional tourist licence. This is your VUT number from the Generalitat Valenciana, the one that lets you legally run a tourist rental. This is the important one.

Two. The national NRUA. This was the extra national number from July 2025. As I said above, the Supreme Court killed it in May 2026. So right now, this one you can basically ignore. It is dead.

Three. SES.Hospedajes, the guest data registry. This one is completely separate from your licence, and it surprises a lot of owners. Under Real Decreto 933/2021, mandatory since the 2nd of December 2024, you have to collect around 18 data points on the lead guest and everyone staying with them, including minors and their kinship, and send it to the Ministry of the Interior within 24 hours of check-in. You keep that data for three years. Fines here run from 100 euros up to 600,000 euros under the public security law.

So please, do not think that getting your licence means you are done. The licence is the licence. The daily guest reporting is a different legal duty entirely. You need both of them.

Can your neighbours block you? Yes.

This one matters a lot, especially if your property is a flat in a building rather than a detached villa.

Since the reform of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal that came into force on the 3rd of April 2025, a community of owners, the comunidad de propietarios, can prohibit or condition new tourist rentals. They need a three-fifths majority of the total owners representing three-fifths of the participation quotas, and they register that ban in the community statutes.

So this is the part you have to understand. The ban cannot be retroactive. If you were already legally running your tourist rental before the community voted, you are generally protected and you can keep operating. But if you are applying now and your property is part of a community, you need express authorisation, and the community can vote you down.

And this is exactly why, if you are buying a flat to rent it touristically, you do not just sign the deposit and figure it out later. Before you commit a single euro, somebody has to read the community statutes and the recent AGM minutes to check whether there is already a ban, or one being voted on. This is the kind of due diligence a lawyer does before you commit.

It can be us or any other lawyer, but somebody has to read those documents. If you want to sanity-check a specific flat before you go further, we built a quick tool for that, the can-I-rent-this-property checker, which I will link below.

Where new licences are frozen right now

Even if you do everything right, in some towns there are simply no new licences being issued at all. This is the moratorium problem, and it is very real.

Town halls in Spain can decide to stop issuing new tourist rental licences for a period, usually justified as saturation or housing pressure. On the Costa Blanca and around, you are looking at moratoria or zoning suspensions in places like Benidorm, Calpe, Altea, Alicante city and Valencia city. So if your property is in one of those, the answer to can I get a new licence might just be, not this year.

And then there is Valencia city. The town hall gave final approval to its new rules at the end of March 2026, lifting the licence moratorium it had run since 2024 and replacing it with rules that are probably the most restrictive in the whole country. The caps work as three thresholds at once. A maximum of 2 percent of the housing in each neighbourhood can be tourist apartments. A second saturation cap on tourist beds relative to the registered population.

And a maximum of 15 percent of ground-floor premises per block. On top of that, new tourist apartments are only allowed on ground or first floors of mixed-use buildings, with their own independent street access. The old town, Ciutat Vella, sits outside these rules with its own separate plan. They estimate something like 9,000 illegal units in the city.

I will be honest about my own opinion here, because I think it is worth saying. Some of these town hall freezes are populist. It is easy and popular to say no more tourist licences. And in a lot of cases I think it is legally shaky, because if your property objectively meets every urban planning requirement, a blanket no is the kind of thing a brave lawyer could challenge in court.

My father is the experienced one. I am the young one, and I say this honestly, I am eager to find a case like that. But for now, the practical reality is what it is, and you have to plan around it.

In Alicante city the pressure is on the old town and Playa San Juan. So if you are buying there to rent, check the current status street by street before you commit.

Fines, and what happens if you rent illegally

So what actually happens if you rent without a licence, or you break the rules. The sanctions go in tiers, and the top tier is not a joke.

Minor infractions, up to 10,000 euros. Serious infractions, from 10,001 up to 100,000 euros. Very serious infractions, up to 600,000 euros. And renting room by room, which I mentioned earlier, sits in that very serious bracket.

But the fine is not even the worst part. On top of the money you get the immediate cessation of the activity, removal from the tourism register, and a ban on re-registering. So you do not just pay and carry on. You lose the licence and the ability to get a new one. That is why, especially if your property is in a community of owners, I keep telling people, do whatever you have to do to not lose the licence you have. Getting a new one from scratch is genuinely hard, between the community vote and the town hall moratoria.

And they do enforce it. Complaints to Valencia city council multiplied between 2023 and 2024, and the platforms have been pulling illegal listings by the thousand. The days when nobody checked are over.

The tax that comes with renting

We are tax advisors as well as lawyers, so let me cover this part properly, because it is the part people forget about, and it comes back one year later.

If you rent your property to tourists as a non-resident, you pay income tax through Modelo 210. The rate splits two ways. If you are resident in the EU or EEA, it is 19 percent, and you can deduct your expenses, mortgage interest, a 3 percent building depreciation, all of it prorated to the days the property was actually rented. If you are resident outside the EU, so UK, US, Canada, the headline is 24 percent on the gross, traditionally with no deductions. And since 2024 this rental income is declared once a year, in the first 20 days of January, not quarterly.

Now I have genuinely good news for British owners after Brexit. In July 2025 the Audiencia Nacional ruled that non-EU residents, and this hits UK owners directly, can also deduct rental expenses for IRNR. That used to be reserved for EU and EEA residents only. It is a court ruling, not yet a change in the law itself, so the tax office may still push back, but it is a strong argument to have. So if you are a UK owner who has been paying 24 percent on the gross with nothing deducted, that ruling is worth talking to someone about.

And there is one thing that confuses a lot of people, so let me clear it up now. The tourist tax, the tasa turistica. It does not apply in the Valencian Community. The law that would have created it was repealed before it ever came into force, back in early 2024, and no town here has reinstated it as of 2026. So if you read somewhere that you owe a Valencia tourist tax, no, you do not. That is one less thing to worry about.

Buying a property to rent it out? Read this first.

If you are still at the buying stage, this section might save you a lot of money and stress, because there are traps here.

The biggest one. The licence does not transfer when you buy. A tourist licence is tied to both the owner and the property. So when ownership changes, the new owner has to notify the tourism authority and effectively re-apply for a fresh five-year licence, with an updated urban compatibility certificate from the town hall. Do not assume that because the listing says licensed tourist rental, you automatically inherit it. You do not. And if your town is in a moratorium, you might not be able to get a new one at all.

So before you sign the arras, the deposit contract, you want to run a proper due-diligence check. Does the town's PGOU allow tourist use at this exact address? Is there a moratorium right now? For a flat, do the community statutes already ban tourist rentals, or is a vote pending? And separately, on the purchase tax. From the 1st of June 2026 the ITP on resale property in the Valencian Community drops from 10 to 9 percent, but it jumps to 11 percent on the whole purchase if the property is worth over a million euros, not just the portion above.

And the tax base is the higher of the declared price or the valor de referencia, so do not try to under-declare, because the tax office benchmarks it.

Honestly, with everything that is now pending on tourist rentals, the role of the lawyer at the buying stage is bigger than it used to be. I would not go straight into I want this one, I will buy it and start renting. Wait a second and check it properly first.

If you just want a fast first read on whether a specific property is even viable for a licence, we put together a free tourist-licence-checker tool on the site. You answer a few questions about the property and the town and it gives you a sense of where you stand before you spend money on anything. It is not a substitute for the real due diligence, but it is a good starting point, and it is free.

How we can help

So that is where things stand in 2026. The 10-day rule, the five-year licence, the town-hall-first order, the dead national NRUA, the SES.Hospedajes guest data, the community vote, the moratoria, the fines, and the tax. It is a lot, I know.

We handle the whole thing for non-residents, end to end, from our offices in Moraira and Denia. The urban compatibility certificate, the declaracion responsable, the registration, the licence, plus the Modelo 210 tax side and the purchase due diligence if you are still buying. All in one place, from the first town hall document to the Modelo 210. It can be us or any other lawyer you trust, but get a lawyer on this one.

If you are in Alicante you are about 45 minutes from us. Valencia is about an hour and a half. And if you are anywhere around Benidorm, Calpe, Javea, Moraira, Denia, Teulada, Oliva, you are 20 minutes away. You can come to the office or we can do it all online, whatever suits you. Book a consultation and we will take it from there.

Thanks for reading this far. If something here did not fit your exact situation, that is normal, these cases get specific. Just reach out and we will look at yours properly.