Holiday Rentals in Mallorca: The Law, the Fines, and What's Changing
25 August 2026
If you're renting a Mallorca property to tourists, or thinking about buying one to do it, the legal picture right now is unforgiving and getting stricter, not looser. A licence freeze that's been in place since 2022, fines that can reach six figures, and a new EU rule that puts every listing's licence number directly in front of regulators. Here's where things actually stand.
Holiday rental vs. long-term rental: how the law actually draws the line
The dividing line is duration, not intent: any letting of 30 days or less counts in law as a tourist stay (an "Estancia Turística en Vivienda"), and the burden of proof runs against the owner, unless you can show the letting genuinely wasn't for tourist use, it's assumed to be one, which means it needs an ETV licence regardless of what you call it. Cross a 30-day term and you leave ETV territory entirely: the letting falls under Spain's residential tenancy law instead (the LAU, Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos), which needs a formal lease contract but no special tourist licence at all. Renting out under a rolling series of short lets to dodge the ETV requirement doesn't work either; regulators and platforms alike look at the actual pattern of stays, not just a single booking's length.
The ETV licence, and the moratorium on getting one
To legally let a property to tourists in the Balearics, it needs an ETV licence (Estancia Turística en Vivienda); without one, renting it out short-term to holidaymakers is illegal, full stop, regardless of what the listing itself says. The problem is that since 11 February 2022, the regional government has been under a strict moratorium: no new ETV licences and no transfers of existing tourist "places" between properties, island-wide.
That froze the market almost completely for four years. In spring 2026 it moved, but only slightly: the Consell de Mallorca opened a one-off release of 1,069 new tourist places, allocated by public lottery rather than first-come-first-served. Outside that lottery window, the moratorium remains the default position, and several municipalities have signalled they intend to keep it in place indefinitely rather than let it lapse.
Layered on top, Decree-Law 4/2025 (in force since April 2025) went further still: it permanently bans creating any new tourist places inside multi-family buildings (apartment blocks) across the entire archipelago, and removed the deadline island councils previously had to set their own local place ceilings, effectively making the restriction open-ended rather than a fixed-term policy.
Municipal rules go further than the regional baseline
Palma
Holiday rentals in apartments (flats within a multi-family building) are banned outright, not paused, banned. Only around 639 already-registered apartment properties are grandfathered in; no new ones are being added. Detached houses, villas and chalets are a separate category and can still apply, moratorium permitting.
Rest of Mallorca
Every municipality operates under the same island-wide moratorium on new ETV licences, in force since 11 February 2022, but local councils layer their own additional restrictions on top (stricter caps in some tourist-saturated coastal towns, extra documentation requirements in others), so "the law" in practice varies street by street, not just island by island.
Ibiza & Menorca
Under the same regional framework but with their own local wrinkles: Ibiza Town prohibits apartment-based tourist lets regardless of any prior licence, and Menorca's UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status is used to justify tighter place caps than the regional baseline.
The practical result: whether a specific property can legally be licensed at all doesn't just depend on Balearic-wide rules; it depends on the municipality, the building type, and sometimes the specific street or zone. See our own Tourist Licence Coverage breakdown for how licensed, potentially-eligible and neither-of-the-above listings actually split out by area, live.
The fines: up to €400,000, plus a daily penalty on top
Advertising a property without a valid ETV licence (on Airbnb, Booking.com, or anywhere else) carries fines of up to €400,000 for the most serious cases. That's not a hypothetical ceiling: since 2026, inspectors can also apply daily coercive fines of between €500 and €5,000 for every day an illegal listing stays up after a formal notice, which turns "just take it down and pay the fine" into an ongoing cost that compounds the longer a property owner ignores it.
Liability doesn't stop at the property owner, either; platforms that carry on advertising a property after being told it's unlicensed are exposed too, which is the enforcement lever behind the numbers below.
Airbnb's €64 million fine, and 20,000+ delisted properties
Spain's Ministry of Consumer Rights fined Airbnb €64,055,311 in December 2025, a serious-infraction penalty set at six times the profit the ministry calculated Airbnb had made from it, after identifying 65,122 illegal listings on the platform, which were pulled in July 2025. Enforcement action across Spain removed over 53,000 illegal listings in 2025 alone, more than 20,000 of them from the Balearics specifically. Airbnb asked Madrid's High Court (Audiencia Nacional) to suspend the payment while it appealed; the court refused in March 2026 and ordered payment in full regardless.
The new rule: platforms must hand listing data to regulators, and show the licence number
Separately from Spain's own enforcement, EU Regulation 2024/1028 takes effect across the bloc from 20 May 2026. It's a structural change to how short-term rental platforms operate, not just another fine: hosts must register with national authorities and get a unique identification number, that number has to be displayed on the listing itself on every platform it appears on (Airbnb, Booking.com, all of them), and platforms have to verify it before they're allowed to publish the listing at all.
On top of that, platforms are required to share activity data monthly with a "single digital entry point" per member state: host name, address, property details, booking dates, nights booked, revenue generated, so authorities can cross-check what's actually being booked against local registration databases and place caps, rather than relying on spot inspections. A listing that fails to comply can be ordered removed at the platform level, not just fined after the fact.
There's a genuine legal wrinkle worth knowing about here: Spain had already tried to build its own national short-term rental registry, the NRUA, under Royal Decree 1312/2024. In ruling 620/2026, Spain's Supreme Court annulled it: the state, it found, lacks the constitutional competence to run a centralised register that duplicates what the regions (the Balearics included) already operate themselves, since regulating tourist housing is a regional matter, not a national one. Notably, the same ruling explicitly left standing the rest of the framework: the single digital entry point and platforms' obligation to hand over activity data, so the EU-level data-sharing regime below isn't affected by this. It's a useful reminder that the legal architecture here is still actively being contested in court, not settled, even where the day-to-day obligations on platforms haven't changed.
What this means if you're buying, selling or already renting
For a buyer: a property's tourist-rental potential is now genuinely two separate questions: is it in a municipality/building type where a licence could ever be issued, and separately, is a place actually available under the current moratorium or lottery system. Neither answer is implied by the other. For an existing owner without a licence, the honest calculation has shifted: the daily coercive fine alone can exceed a season's rental income within a couple of weeks of an inspection notice, before the underlying fine is even factored in.
If you're weighing a long-term let instead, see Long-Term Rentals in Mallorca for the LAU basics, the deposit rules, and the tax picture, and our full Long-Term Letting Guide for the pre-purchase checklist.
Primary sources: the Balearic decree itself, BOIB, Decret Llei 4/2025, d'11 d'abril; the national reform, BOE, Ley Orgánica 1/2025, de 2 de enero; the EU regulation itself, EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2024/1028; the Supreme Court's own announcement of its ruling, Poder Judicial (CGPJ) press release, ruling 620/2026; and the Airbnb fine, from the Ministry of Consumer Rights itself, Ministerio de Derechos Sociales, Consumo y Agenda 2030, with the court's confirmation covered by Infobae. For our own live licence-coverage data by municipality, see Tourist Licence Coverage.