Tuscany Retreats From Bill Capping Short-Term Rentals

Tuscany's regional government has backed away from a draft law that would have given the region power to cap short-term rentals, leaving the question of limits to individual cities for the time being. The bill had been moving through regional committee this year as a response to pressure from tourist hubs such as Florence, Pisa and Siena, where long-term rental stock has tightened as more apartments shift to nightly letting.

What the Shelved Law Would Have Done

The draft would have let the Tuscany region set limits on new short-term rental registrations in areas judged saturated with tourist accommodation, rather than leaving that decision to individual municipalities. The approach echoed Florence's own 2023 move to ban new short-term rental listings in its UNESCO-listed historic center, a measure the city adopted on its own after regional and national options stalled. Extending that logic to the whole region would have been a significant step: Tuscany draws visitors to small, rental-dependent towns well beyond Florence, including Siena, Lucca and San Gimignano, where tourism income and housing pressure are both concentrated in the same narrow historic cores.

Why Lawmakers Pulled Back

The retreat points to a familiar fault line in Italian rental regulation: the gap between what cities and regions want to restrict and what the law lets them restrict. Italy's competition authority has previously objected to municipal and regional caps on short-term rentals on the grounds that they can conflict with national rules protecting free enterprise, and Florence's own historic-center ban has faced legal challenges on similar grounds since it took effect. A regional law covering all of Tuscany would have been a bigger target for exactly that kind of challenge, and it appears that risk, combined with disagreement inside the governing coalition over how far to go, was enough to stall the bill before a final vote.

What Stays in Force Regardless

Nothing changes immediately for hosts operating in Tuscany today. Florence's ban on new short-term rental registrations in its historic center remains in effect, as do whatever local lodging taxes and registration rules individual Tuscan municipalities already apply. Nationally, every short-term rental listing in Italy is still required to carry a national identification code, the Codice Identificativo Nazionale, which platforms must display and which regional lawmakers have no power to override. Operators in Pisa, Siena and smaller Tuscan towns are, for now, back to dealing with whatever patchwork of city-level rules already existed before the regional bill was drafted.

What to Watch Next

The more likely outcome is not that Tuscany drops the idea of regional caps altogether, but that it comes back with a narrower version built to survive a competition-law challenge, perhaps limited to specific designated zones rather than a blanket regional power. Hosts and property managers in Tuscany's tourist towns should watch for individual municipalities moving on their own in the meantime, following Florence's example rather than waiting on the region. The episode also adds to a wider pattern across Italy, where Milan, Venice and other cities have each pursued separate short-term rental restrictions rather than a single national or regional standard, leaving operators to track rules city by city rather than under one coherent framework.