Brussels Drafts Law to Give Cities More Airbnb Crackdown Power

The European Commission is working on legislation that would spell out, for the first time at EU level, how far cities and towns can go in restricting short-term rentals. The move responds to years of legal uncertainty that has left municipal caps, license freezes and outright bans vulnerable to challenge whenever a host or platform argues they overstep EU single-market rules.

Nothing has been tabled as a formal bill yet. Officials in Brussels are still shaping the proposal, and any final text would need sign-off from the European Parliament and a majority of member states before it takes effect, a process that typically runs a year or more even once a draft is published. For hosts and property managers, the near-term change is nothing. The medium-term one could be significant: a bloc-wide legal foundation that makes it harder to overturn local restrictions on appeal.

Why cities need the cover

Local governments already impose registration rules, license quotas and outright caps on short-term lets, but the legal basis for doing so has been built case by case rather than set out in EU law. Courts have generally allowed member states to restrict short-term rentals where a genuine housing shortage can be shown and the rules apply without discriminating against out-of-town owners or foreign platforms. That standard has held up in disputes over Paris-area registration rules, but it leaves plenty of room for operators to contest specific ordinances as disproportionate, and several cities have had individual measures struck down or delayed while courts sort out the details.

A dedicated EU law would let cities point to a single, agreed legal framework instead of litigating the same question market by market. Barcelona's plan to retire all roughly 10,000 tourist apartment licenses by 2028, Amsterdam's per-property night caps and Paris's 120-night limit on renting out a primary residence have all faced some form of legal pushback since they were introduced.

What changes for hosts and managers

Not much this year, and that is the point worth sitting with. The legislation is still at the drafting stage, and the Commission has given no timeline for a formal proposal, let alone adoption. Hosts operating in cities that already cap licenses, such as Barcelona, or that limit annual nights, such as Amsterdam and Paris, should expect those restrictions to hold and to get harder to challenge once a clearer legal basis exists. Operators in cities weighing new restrictions, rather than defending existing ones, are the ones most likely to feel the effect first, since local councils will have stronger legal footing to move ahead with caps they have so far held back on pending litigation risk.

Where this sits alongside existing EU rules

This is separate from the EU short-term rental data-sharing rule adopted in 2024, which requires platforms to register listings and share host and booking data with national authorities starting in 2026. That regulation is about transparency and enforcement data. The legislation now taking shape in Brussels is about legal authority itself: whether a city can restrict short-term rentals at all, and on what grounds. Together, the two would give municipalities both the information to identify unregistered listings and a firmer legal basis to act once they find them.