Short-term rental regulation across Europe has not converged. This atlas maps twenty destinations against the same 26-measure toolbox, scored on the two dimensions that matter to HOTREC: how far each regime eases housing pressure, and how far it levels the playing field between short-term rentals and hotels.
Each marker is one of the twenty case-study destinations. Colour shows the Level Playing Field score: how closely a regime holds short-term rentals to the obligations hotels already carry. Greener is more level; redder is more uneven.
Recoloured by STR Restriction: how strongly each regime limits short-term rental activity and the conversion of homes to tourist use. A destination can score well on one dimension and poorly on the other. The two do not move together.
Paris, Amsterdam, the Balearics, Barcelona, Athens, Rome and Istanbul sit at the top on Level Playing Field. Each combines several toolbox categories at once: access control plus fiscal alignment plus enforcement, rather than a single headline rule.
Prague, Bucharest, Dublin, Brussels and Budapest trail the field. The gap is rarely about ambition on paper; it is about thin enforcement infrastructure and missing fiscal parity, which the EU framework does not by itself supply.
Istanbul is the only regime where STR carries a heavier tax burden than hotels. Edinburgh reaches full safety parity through mandatory fire, gas and electrical certification. Madrid tightens licences hard yet levies no tourist tax at all, leaving a fiscal gap downstream.
From 20 May 2026, EU Regulation 2024/1028 standardises how STR data flows: registration numbers, monthly platform reporting, a single digital entry point. It deliberately does not set caps, licences, taxes or safety standards. The map below stays as varied after May 2026 as before it.
The same data as the map, sortable by either dimension. This is where the public-facing atlas would let readers reorder the field and trace each destination back to the toolbox.
| # | Destination | Country | Score | Headline measure |
|---|
For more than a decade European destinations regulated short-term rentals in isolation. Berlin built a housing-misuse permit. Paris built a 90-day cap. Barcelona built a licence phase-out. Amsterdam built a night cap. Each solved a local problem with a local tool.
From May 2026 the regulation standardises one thing: how data flows. Every host displays a registration number; every platform shares activity data with national authorities. Visibility, at last, becomes uniform.
But caps, licences, taxes and safety standards stay national, regional and municipal, and as different from one another as they were in 2014. The level playing field question is not closed by the new framework. If anything, uniform data makes the unevenness easier to see.