Sligo, Ireland Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Sligo, Ireland and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that nothing is stopping you tonight. Sligo has no local short-term rental licence, no council registration scheme and no bed tax to collect from guests, so on the surface it looks like one of the gentler markets in the country. The catch sits a layer above the council, in national planning law, and it has landed on this town harder than on anywhere else in the county.

Since 1 March 2026, letting a house, part of a house or a unit for 21 consecutive nights or fewer is a material change of use anywhere in Ireland, which means it needs planning permission unless an exemption covers it. Then in June 2026 the Government approved a draft policy saying that wherever the population runs above 20,000, permission for a short-term let should be presumed refused. Sligo town, the county town of County Sligo, had 20,608 residents at the 2022 Census. Unfortunately for anyone here with a spare house rather than a spare room, that's 608 people on the wrong side of the line, and Sligo is the only settlement in the county anywhere near it.

So let's go through what that means for an owner in 2026: which lettings stay exempt, what a change-of-use application costs and how long the council takes over one, the register that opens on 1 December, the tax on the income, how hard Sligo really enforces, and who to ring when your situation fits none of the boxes. Everything below comes from Sligo County Council's own pages, the Irish statute book, Revenue and the Central Statistics Office, verified in July 2026, and anything still sitting in draft gets flagged as such. Assuming you're weighing Sligo against a market with less exposure to all this, run each property through BNBCalc before you commit.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Sligo, Ireland?

Sligo County Council doesn't write short-term letting law, and that's the first thing worth getting straight, because it changes where you go looking for answers. The rules come from the Oireachtas and read identically in Sligo, Ballymote and Ballsbridge, so what the council controls is only how they land on your particular address. That's a smaller question than it sounds and a more expensive one to get wrong.

The operative provision is section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, rewritten by section 30 of the Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2026 with effect from 1 March 2026. It now reads, with no geographic qualifier attached at all, that the use of a house, part of a house or unit for short term letting purposes is a material change in the use. The same section defines a short term letting as a letting "on a professional or non-professional basis" for a period not exceeding 21 consecutive nights, in return for payment, and it catches a tenancy and a licence alike.

Material change of use counts as development under Irish planning law, so it needs permission unless something exempts it.

Two things about that definition changed recently enough to make older advice misleading. The threshold used to be 14 days rather than 21 nights, so a fortnight-long stay that sat outside the old rules sits inside the new ones. More importantly, the old section only bit inside a rent pressure zone, and the council's guidance was built around exactly that. It said that as of 18 December 2019 all of the Sligo/Strandhill Local Electoral Area had been designated a rent pressure zone, so the rules reached Sligo town and Strandhill and stopped there. Then rent pressure zones were abolished nationally on 1 March 2026, and since the Residential Tenancies Board confirms that national rent control replaced them, every townland in the county is in scope on identical terms.

Do be careful about what the council publishes, mind you. That page has since come down, and at my last check the URL returned a 404, as did the Form 15, 16 and 17 downloads that used to hang off it.

Nothing replaced it. The planning forms page carries no short-term letting form and the A-Z index has no entry for one, yet search engines still surface the old page, which is how a Sligo owner ends up reading a 2019 description of a regime that no longer exists.

The exemption that most Sligo hosts actually rely on comes from S.I. No. 235 of 2019, which inserted article 6(5) into the Planning and Development Regulations 2001 and has been in force since 1 July 2019. It exempts two arrangements, and both of them turn on the property being your principal private residence:

• Home-sharing. You can let up to four bedrooms in the home you actually live in, with a maximum of four occupants per bedroom, for as many nights as you like. There's no annual cap on this one.
• The 90-day absence. You can let the whole of that same residence while you're away from it, for a cumulative maximum of 90 days a year. Go past 90 and you need change-of-use permission for the rest.

Both routes carry paperwork rather than a fee, which is covered further down.

There's a genuine wrinkle worth knowing before you rely on the exemption, though. S.I. 235 of 2019 has never been amended, so it still frames itself around rent pressure zones and draws its definitions from the version of section 3A deleted on 1 March 2026. No replacement instrument has been made, and the exempted development regulations the Minister signed in July 2026 covered extensions, sub-division and garden structures without touching short-term letting. Citizens Information still describes the exemption as live, and my reading is that it holds, but do get Sligo's position in writing before you build a season around it.

One local rule does sit on top of all that, and it catches larger houses. The Sligo County Development Plan 2024-2030 says at section 33.7.4 that "planning permission is required for all conversions of dwellings to guest accommodation where the number of bedrooms used for such purposes exceeds four". That's the same four-bedroom ceiling as the national exemption, restated as a local standard.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Sligo

Since that four-bedroom ceiling is still the outer edge of what you can do without asking anybody, the real question is which side of it your plan sits on. There are three shapes of short-term letting business in Sligo, and they're separated by whether you live in the property rather than by how much you earn from it.

The first is a room in your own home, which stays exempt and needs no permission at all. The second is that same home let whole while you're elsewhere, exempt up to 90 days a year and not a day beyond. The third is a dedicated short-term let you don't live in, and that one has needed change-of-use permission everywhere in Ireland since March 2026. Unfortunately for most people reading this in Sligo town, the third option is where the money usually sits, and it's the option the Government has just moved against.

Here's the shape of that move. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment announced on 19 June 2026 that under the new National Planning Statement, "for operators in locations with a population of over 20,000, there will be a presumption not to grant planning". Sligo's own County Development Plan puts the town's 2022 population at 20,608, and the CSO's Census 2022 town figures confirm it to the person. So Sligo lands with Letterkenny at 22,549 and Athlone at 22,869 on the restricted side, while Bundoran at 2,599 and Dungarvan at 10,081 sit well below.

Three per cent. That's the margin, and it's why a guide written for Sligo can't be reused for the coast twenty minutes up the road.

Keep in mind that this is a draft rather than a law. It was approved as proposed policy on 17 June 2026 and is still going through Strategic Environmental Assessment and EU Services Directive notification, with a final version expected in the autumn, and no list of affected settlements or their boundaries has been published.

Citizens Information does set out the narrow exceptions planned for larger towns, and each one involves a building unsuited to long-term living anyway: a heritage building worth preserving, an under-used space above a shop, or a small existing structure in the grounds. Those are restoration cases, not investment cases.

The rest of County Sligo gets a much better deal, at least on paper. Every other settlement sits well under the threshold, from Tubbercurry at 2,307 down through Strandhill at 1,982, Enniscrone at 1,291, Rosses Point at 883 and Mullaghmore at 172, so they fall into the two-year compliance window rather than the presumption against. Enniscrone, Easky, Mullaghmore, Rosses Point and Strandhill are also designated Settlements with Special Coastal Tourism Functions, and policy P-HHD-1 directs holiday accommodation into exactly those serviced settlements. The council actively wants tourism beds in those villages, which is a very different starting position from a residential street in town.

One more route opens up if you've been at this a while. There's a seven-year limit on the whole enforcement machine: under section 157(4) of the Planning and Development Act 2000, the council can't send a warning letter, serve an enforcement notice or take you to court more than seven years after an unpermitted use began. That limit is where the Department's promised presumption to grant permission past seven years comes from, provided the use causes no serious flooding, pollution or traffic hazard. So a Sligo house letting continuously since 2019 stands in a far stronger position than one that started in 2024. Dig out the booking records.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Sligo

Nothing in any of that is a licence, which is the point people most often get wrong when they ring the council. Sligo issues no short-term rental permit and charges nothing to renew one, so what you need instead is two separate authorisations from two separate bodies, arriving on two different timetables.

The first is planning, and that one belongs to Sligo County Council. A change-of-use application goes in on the standard form with a site notice, a newspaper notice, maps and drawings, and the council is obliged to decide within eight weeks unless it asks for further information, which restarts the clock in practice. Anyone can object in writing during the first five weeks for €20, and once the decision lands there are four weeks to appeal it to An Coimisiún Pleanála.

The money is the easy part. Sligo's own scale of fees sets an €80 floor on an ordinary application and €240 on retention, while Citizens Information puts the change-of-use rate at €3.60 per square metre against that €80 minimum, or €10.80 per square metre against the €240 one. Retention is the expensive door, mind you, and the council warns on its own page that you might not get it, or might be told to make costly modifications.

If you genuinely can't tell whether your arrangement needs permission, there's a cheaper way to settle it than guessing. A section 5 declaration asks the council to rule formally on whether what you're doing counts as development and whether it's exempt. Sligo charges €80 for the request and must issue the declaration within four weeks, or three from receiving further information.

Before you pay even that, take the free option, since Sligo runs pre-planning consultations at no charge, face to face with the area planner for your patch, and says the normal wait is under two weeks. Bring a site location map. For €80 and a fortnight you can turn a guess into a written answer, and given what an unauthorised use costs to unwind, do take that trade.

Then there's the second authorisation, which is national and doesn't exist yet. Fáilte Ireland's short-term letting register opens on 1 December 2026, with a legal obligation on every operator to be registered by 31 December 2026. It applies per unit to anyone offering paid accommodation for stays of up to and including 21 nights, so it reaches the exempt home-sharer in Sligo town as surely as the permitted cottage in Mullaghmore.

The number it gives you has to appear on every listing and advertisement, has to be renewed annually because it expires, and comes with a legal declaration that the property complies with planning, building and fire safety requirements.

That declaration is the hinge of the whole system, mind you, because it turns an unanswered planning question into a signed statement. Fáilte Ireland says fees will be kept to a minimum and hasn't published them yet, so treat any number quoted elsewhere as invented.

Required Documents for Sligo Short-Term Rentals

Because that declaration ties the register to your planning position, the paperwork you assemble now is what you'll be certifying in December, and it splits by which of the three routes you're on.

If you're relying on the home-sharing or 90-day exemption, what you file is a set of notifications rather than an application, and Citizens Information sets out the deadlines for each one.

• Form 15, at the start of the year, within four weeks of the year beginning and at least two weeks before your first let.
• Form 16, within two weeks of the day you cross the 90-day threshold, if you ever cross it.
• Form 17, between 1 and 28 January, covering the year just finished.

Each goes to the planning authority with a statutory declaration and proof that the property is your principal private residence, and registering an exemption costs nothing. Remember that Sligo has taken these forms off its website, though, so ask the planning department for the current versions and the address they want them sent to.

If you're applying for change of use, you're making an ordinary planning application, and Sligo returns anything incomplete. The council's guide to making an application lists what has to arrive together:

• The completed planning application form from the council's planning forms page.
• Maps, plans and drawings showing the site and what's proposed.
• A site notice on the property and a newspaper notice in an approved paper, both in the prescribed wording.
• Written consent from the owner if you're not the owner, plus their name and address.
• The correct fee, since an application with the wrong fee is invalidated and returned.

Then, from December, everyone in all three categories files a registration with Fáilte Ireland. Citizens Information lists what it will ask for. Your name, address, date of birth and PPS number, then the property's Eircode, type and size, the compliance declaration and the fee. None of that is hard to produce, though what it produces at the far end is worth noticing, because the Eircode and the declaration together hand the council a mapped list of every short-term let in the county. Nobody has ever had one of those.

Sligo Short-Term Rental Taxes

Say you manage all of that and do get to the point of taking bookings. There's still tax on top, although this is the one part of the picture where Sligo is genuinely simple. There's no local bed tax, no occupancy levy and no tourist tax anywhere in Ireland, so the only collectors you'll ever deal with are Revenue and, above a threshold, the VAT system.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Income tax on letting profits	Your marginal rate, under Schedule D Case I or Case IV	Revenue, self-assessed
VAT on guest and holiday accommodation	13.5%, only above the €42,500 services threshold	You, remitted to Revenue
Local bed, occupancy or tourist tax	None in force	Nobody
Irish VAT on the platform's service fee	23%	Airbnb, on its own fee

The classification matters more than the rate, and it's the piece most Sligo hosts get wrong. Short-term letting income is not rental income in Irish tax law, because your guest holds a licence to occupy rather than a tenancy. Revenue's tax and duty manual on the provision of accommodation taxes it under Case I where the activity amounts to a trade and under Case IV where it's occasional, never under Case V, and you return it on a Form 11 or Form 12.

Don't reach for rent-a-room relief either, since that €14,000 exemption needs a letting of at least 28 consecutive days and an anti-avoidance rule puts it beyond doubt that it doesn't cover short-term tourist accommodation booked online.

VAT catches very few single-property owners, yet it catches them suddenly. Guest and holiday accommodation, expressly including web-based bookings, is taxable at the reduced 13.5% rate however long anyone stays, though you only register once your services turnover passes €42,500. One Sligo cottage rarely gets there. Three of them might, and the threshold attaches to you rather than to each property, so watch that line if you're scaling. Separately, Airbnb charges 23% Irish VAT on its own service fee rather than on the accommodation, which is the platform's liability and not yours.

Possible Write-Offs and Deductions

What you can deduct depends on which Case you fall into, and the gap is wide enough to change whether a property works at all. Under Case I, where the letting amounts to a trade, Revenue's manual gives you a wear and tear allowance on plant and machinery at 12.5% a year over eight years, plus any expense laid out wholly and exclusively for the trade. It reaches backwards too, since pre-trading expenditure counts for up to three years, so the bed linen and the repaint you bought before your first guest are both deductible.

Under Case IV, where the letting is occasional, that generosity disappears, because you get no capital allowances and no pre-trading deduction. You can only deduct the incidental costs of the accommodation itself: platform commission, cleaning, breakfast, and a fair share of the electricity, gas and heating your guests used. Anything you'd carry whether or not anyone stayed is out, and Revenue names insurance, the television licence and general maintenance. So at any real scale, the Case I question is worth an accountant's hour long before it's worth an argument.

Ireland Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

That tax treatment is national, and so is nearly everything else that governs your listing, which is why a Sligo host and a Dublin host now read the same statute. Ireland has no regional or county layer of short-term letting law at all, since the 31 local authorities apply one set of national rules and the only real variation between them is enforcement appetite and the wording of the development plan.

Three pieces of that framework are already settled, starting with section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, which as substituted on 1 March 2026 makes short-term letting a material change of use nationwide at 21 consecutive nights. Next comes the Fáilte Ireland register, opening on 1 December 2026 and closing its compliance window a month later. Then EU Regulation 2024/1028 obliges platforms to show valid registration numbers and delist anything without one, which the Department calls the first real legal basis for making a platform pull a non-compliant listing.

What hasn't landed is the legislation underneath the register. The Short Term Letting and Tourism Bill had a general scheme approved in April 2025 and pre-legislative scrutiny in early 2026, yet at my last check it still hadn't been published, and Fáilte Ireland's own page says registration opens once the necessary legislation has passed. The date has already slipped once, from May to December 2026, so I'd plan for 1 December and not be shocked if it moves again. The planning obligation binds you either way.

Penalties come from the planning acts rather than any short-term letting statute, and they aren't trivial. Under section 156 of the Planning and Development Act 2000, an unauthorised development on summary conviction carries up to €5,000, or six months in prison, or both, and then a further €1,500 for each day the use continues after conviction, with two years available on indictment.

That daily figure is the part that hurts, because it turns a one-off penalty into a meter running until you stop letting. Platforms carry their own exposure at up to 2% of turnover, which is exactly why they'll comply rather than argue.

Does Sligo Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Given how those daily fines accrue, the fair question is how likely anyone is to come looking, and Sligo's answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no. The council has never published a short-term letting campaign and I couldn't find one reported anywhere, but it does publish its whole planning enforcement record through the national oversight body, and that record says Sligo investigates complaints properly and would rather settle them than litigate.

In the 2024 performance indicator report, the National Oversight and Audit Commission recorded 94 planning enforcement cases referred to or started by Sligo County Council during the year and 100 cases closed, with 143 still under investigation at the end of December. The proportions are where it gets interesting, because Sligo dismissed just 14% of closed cases as trivial, minor, without foundation, statute barred or exempt, against a national average of 52.12%, while resolving 44% through negotiation against a national average of 7.62%. Another 42% closed through formal enforcement proceedings.

Read those two together and a pattern falls out. A council that dismisses one complaint in seven, where the average dismisses one in two, is investigating rather than filtering, and one that settles nearly half its cases by talking will usually offer a route to compliance before court. So that's the good news and the bad news in one sentence. You'll probably be contacted, and you'll probably be offered a way to fix it.

Enforcement is complaint-driven in practice, and Sligo takes reports through an online planning enforcement complaint form, noting that under the planning acts it's obliged to follow up substantive written complaints unless they're trivial or vexatious. So a neighbour who objects to weekend arrivals doesn't have to persuade anybody to open a file. They just have to write it down.

Nationally, compliance with the pre-2026 regime was poor enough to be worth stating plainly. Threshold's analysis, reported by the Irish Times in March 2026, counted more than 8,600 properties advertised as short-term lets nationwide against about 2,100 homes on the private rental market. It also found only 425 short-term letting planning applications lodged in the whole country between 2019 and May 2025.

Set against tens of thousands of listings, that's a compliance rate near zero, because everyone has been working on the assumption that nobody checks.

The register is what changes that assumption, and the mechanism is worth being honest about. Once every operator has filed an Eircode and a signed planning-compliance declaration with Fáilte Ireland, and platforms have to delist anything without a valid number, detection stops depending on a neighbour noticing suitcases and becomes a database query the council can run against its own planning register. Ocean FM's coverage of the North West in June 2026 put it plainly: existing short-term lets that haven't registered will have to secure planning permission to continue trading.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Sligo

So the order matters, because two of these steps can tell you the plan is dead before you've spent anything meaningful on it. Work through them in sequence.

1. Establish which route you're on. Principal private residence, a home you'll be away from, or a dedicated let? Exempt, exempt to 90 days, or needs permission. Nothing else makes sense until that's settled.
2. Check which side of the 20,000 line your address falls on. In Sligo town the draft policy presumes refusal for a dedicated let, while Strandhill, Rosses Point, Enniscrone, Tubbercurry and everywhere else in the county sit inside the two-year compliance window instead.
3. Count your years, if the property has been letting already. Continuous unauthorised use since 2019 or earlier puts you past the seven-year mark in section 157(4), which is the strongest position available in Sligo town. Dig out the booking history now, because you'll be asked to evidence it.
4. Book a free pre-planning consultation. Ring the planning section, bring a site location map, and get the area planner's read before you pay for drawings.
5. Take a section 5 declaration if the answer is still unclear. €80, four weeks, and a written ruling you can put in front of Fáilte Ireland in December.
6. Apply for change of use if you need it. Site notice, newspaper notice, maps, the right fee, eight weeks to a decision, four weeks of appeal after that. Don't start letting while it's in the system, since retention costs three times as much and can still be refused.
7. File the exemption notifications if you're exempt. Form 15 at the start of the year, Form 16 if you cross 90 days, Form 17 in January. Ask the planning department for them, because the council no longer publishes them.
8. Sort your tax classification before your first payout. Case I or Case IV decides what you can deduct, and watch the €42,500 VAT threshold if you're running more than one property.
9. Register with Fáilte Ireland from 1 December 2026 and put the number on every listing. Diarise the renewal, because the number expires each year.

Who to Contact in Sligo about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whatever step you get stuck on, one department handles almost all of it, and it isn't at the address most people try first. The council's headquarters is County Hall on Riverside, yet planning sits in City Hall on Quay Street. Turn up at the wrong one and you lose an afternoon.

Planning permission, exemptions and section 5 declarations

• Address: Planning Department, Sligo County Council, City Hall, Quay Street, Sligo, F91 PP44
• Phone: 071 911 4450
• Email: [email protected]
• Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10.00am to 4pm
• Pre-planning appointments: 071 911 4451, or 071 911 4452 and 071 911 4453, free of charge
• Conveyance queries: [email protected]

Ring that number for the three questions no guide can answer for your address. Is the council still operating the article 6(5) exemption as written, where does Form 15 go now the page is down, and would your street count as a housing-pressure area?

Enforcement, and how a complaint about you would arrive

• Address: Planning Enforcement, Sligo County Council, City Hall, Quay Street, Sligo, F91 PP44
• Phone: 071 911 4442 or 071 911 4443
• Email: [email protected]
• Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10.00am to 4pm
• Complaints: through the online planning enforcement complaint form

That contact is worth knowing in both directions, since a neighbour's complaint about you lands there and it's also who you'd be negotiating with afterwards. Sligo's 44% negotiated-resolution rate says that conversation is worth having early.

General council enquiries

• Address: Sligo County Council, County Hall, Riverside, Sligo, F91 Y763
• Phone: +353 (0)71 911 1111
• Email: [email protected]
• Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm

Registration and tax

Registration isn't a council matter at all. Fáilte Ireland runs the register from 1 December 2026, and its own FAQ is blunt that it has no role in planning, so it will point you straight back to the council. Income tax, VAT and the Form 11 belong to Revenue, which is a third conversation again.

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Sligo on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Being bounced between those three bodies is one of the things owners here complain about most, though what follows is my read of the public record rather than a survey. Reddit blocks automated access and its terms don't allow the commercial use this would need, so nothing below comes from a thread I haven't read. Council chamber coverage, local radio and national reporting are what I've gone on instead.

• Nobody here argues the rules are unenforceable any more. That debate ended once the register arrived with platform delisting attached to it. What owners argue about now is whether the 20,000 line sits in a defensible place, which is a different conversation entirely.
• The margin feels arbitrary to owners here, and honestly it's hard to argue with them. A town over the line by 608 people gets a presumption against permission, while a village twenty minutes up the coast gets two years to comply and a development plan that actively wants tourism accommodation. Nothing about Sligo's housing market changes at the 20,000th resident.
• Local politics reads the way it does all along the western seaboard. Ocean FM's reporting on the Sligo rental crisis names growth in Airbnb-let properties as one pressure on supply, while its June 2026 piece carried a councillor's claim that overseas buyers have taken coastal property in the North West out of the long-term market. Whether short-term letting causes the shortage or merely follows it is genuinely contested, mind you, since an Economic and Social Research Institute study reported alongside the Threshold figures found no link between short-term let growth and falls in new rental tenancy registrations from 2019 to 2023.
• The seven-year rule is where the practical hope sits. Among owners letting since before the 2019 regulations, the view is that established use is worth more than any argument about fairness, so documenting continuous use is the most valuable thing to do this year.
• Nobody has seen the fee. Fáilte Ireland hasn't published registration costs, and until it does, every projection anyone builds for December has a hole in it.

Before you decide whether eight weeks and an uncertain answer are worth it, do look at what the Ireland short-term rental market actually returns, because the two halves of this question get answered in different places. Rules tell you what you're allowed to do. They never tell you whether it's worth doing, and a line drawn on a census number can move a property from one answer to the other without anything about the property changing at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Sligo, Ireland in 2026?

Yes, with a caveat that depends on the property. Letting rooms in the home you live in stays exempt under article 6(5) of the Planning and Development Regulations 2001, with no annual night limit, and letting that home whole while you're away is exempt up to 90 days a year. A dedicated short-term let needs change-of-use planning permission from Sligo County Council, and draft national policy presumes refusal in towns above 20,000 people, which includes Sligo town at 20,608.

Do you need planning permission for a short-term let in Sligo?

For anything other than your own principal private residence, yes. Section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as substituted on 1 March 2026, makes letting a property for 21 consecutive nights or fewer a material change of use anywhere in Ireland, and material change of use is development requiring permission. It applies across County Sligo now, not only in the Sligo/Strandhill area that was a rent pressure zone before those were abolished.

How much does short-term letting planning permission cost in Sligo?

Sligo County Council's scale of fees sets a minimum of €80 for an ordinary planning application and €240 for retention. Citizens Information gives the change-of-use rate as €3.60 per square metre against that €80 floor, or €10.80 per square metre against the €240 floor for retention. A section 5 declaration, which asks the council to rule on whether you need permission at all, also costs €80, and pre-planning consultations are free.

When do you have to register a Sligo short-term let with Fáilte Ireland?

The national short-term letting register opens on 1 December 2026 and every operator must be registered by 31 December 2026. It applies per unit to anyone offering paid accommodation for stays of up to and including 21 nights, including exempt home-sharers. Registration produces a number that must appear on every listing, must be renewed annually, and requires a declaration that the property complies with planning, building and fire safety rules. Fees haven't been announced.

What tax do you pay on a Sligo short-term rental?

Short-term letting income is taxed as trading income under Schedule D Case I, or as occasional income under Case IV, never as rental income under Case V, because guests hold a licence rather than a tenancy. You self-assess on a Form 11 or Form 12. Rent-a-room relief doesn't apply. VAT at 13.5% applies once your services turnover exceeds €42,500. There's no bed tax, occupancy tax or tourist levy anywhere in Ireland.

Last verified: July 2026. Every ordinance, tax rate, state law, and contact detail in this guide links to or comes from its official source.