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

Do you own a place in Clonakilty, County Cork and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that Ireland has never banned short-term letting, and Clonakilty, a heritage town wrapped around a bay on the West Cork coast, lives off visitors for a good stretch of every year. The harder news, and it's the part that catches owners out, is that since 1 March 2026 letting a property that isn't your own home, for stays of 21 nights or less, counts as a material change of use everywhere in the country. So you'll need planning permission from Cork County Council before you take a single booking.

That isn't the whole picture, though, and this is where Clonakilty parts company with somewhere like Kinsale up the coast. No run of refused short-term-letting appeals hangs over this town that I could find, it sits far below the population line the government is drawing for tighter control, and Cork County as a whole grants far more of these applications than it turns down. So if the property is your principal home, you're on the cleanest path there is, an exemption that needs no permission at all up to 90 days a year. And if it's a second home, you're applying for change of use in a place where that request has a real chance, which is a better hand than most Irish tourist towns can deal you right now.

So let's walk through what it actually takes to do this properly: which lettings stay exempt, what the council charges and how long a decision takes, the tax layers that attach to a booking, the national register that opens in December 2026, how enforcement works here, and who to ring when you get stuck. Everything below comes from Cork County Council's own pages, the Irish statute book, Revenue and Fáilte Ireland, checked in July 2026, and where something is still moving I've said so plainly. Before you commit to any of it, run the property through BNBCalc first.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Clonakilty

That split between your own home and everything else is the whole game here, so the honest first question isn't what a licence costs. It's which of two very different situations you're standing in, because they run on completely separate rules. Get that wrong and nothing else lines up.

There's no Clonakilty by-law and no Cork County short-term rental ordinance, which surprises owners who arrive expecting a permit desk. The whole thing runs on planning law instead, and two pieces of it do nearly all the work.

The first is section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, which section 30 of the Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2026 rewrote in about the bluntest wording legislation manages. So using a house, part of a house or a unit for short term letting is now, in the section's own words, "a material change in the use". And since a material change of use is development, and development needs permission unless it's specifically exempted, that one line is what puts an investment property in front of a planner.

"Short term letting" now means letting a place to someone for payment for a period not exceeding 21 consecutive nights, professional or otherwise, and the commencement record for that Act fixes the change in force on 1 March 2026.

Two things changed that day, and both matter if you're reading older guidance. The previous version of section 3A only bit inside a rent pressure zone, so across much of rural and small-town Cork you could let short-term without troubling a planner at all. The new version has no geography in it, and reaches every townland in the county. The threshold moved too, from 14 days to 21 nights, which quietly pulls in the one and two week family bookings that make up most of Clonakilty's summer trade. Rent pressure zones themselves were abolished the same day, so that scaffolding is gone as well.

Watch out for the council's own page here, because it hasn't caught up. Cork County Council's short-term letting page still describes the 2019 position in full, right down to the seven local electoral areas then deemed rent pressure zones and the line that lettings outside them "are not impacted in any way by the new arrangements".

None of that survived 1 March 2026. Use the page for the forms and the email address, which are current, and ignore its account of who the rules reach.

The second piece of law is the exempted development regime, and that's what keeps ordinary home-sharing legal. S.I. No. 235 of 2019 inserted article 6(5) into the Planning and Development Regulations 2001, and it exempts two things: letting up to four bedrooms in the home you actually live in while you're living there, and letting that whole home while you're temporarily away, capped at a cumulative 90 days a year.

So the 90 days are the thing to count. Go past them on the whole-house version and you're back to needing change of use permission, since the count runs across the full year rather than resetting per booking. The council's page sets out the three reporting forms every local authority uses: Form 15 at the start of the year, Form 16 once you hit the cap, and Form 17 at year end, all lodged by email to [email protected].

One honest caveat there, because I'd rather flag it than gloss over it. That 2019 instrument was written around rent pressure zones and takes its definitions from the old section 3A, and nobody has amended it since the zones were abolished. Nothing in it has been withdrawn either, and Citizens Information still treats the 90-day cap and the three forms as live, so the safe reading is that home-sharing remains exempt. Do check it with the council in writing before you lean on it, though, and keep the reply on file.

Assuming the property isn't your home, there's still the change of use path to walk through, and in Clonakilty it looks like this. You're applying to Cork County Council, and the town's planning policy sits in Volume 5 of the Cork County Development Plan 2022-2028. That plan designates Clonakilty a Key Town, the largest settlement in the West Cork Municipal District and a target for real population growth: 4,592 people at the 2016 Census, a target of 6,162 by 2028, and 600 net new housing units needed to get there.

Three details in that plan shape how a planner reads your application. The town's drinking water supply "is at its limit", and the plan says the watermains need upgrading before any further significant development goes ahead in Clonakilty. Town centre vacancy is strikingly low too, since the Urban Capacity Study found one vacant residential unit out of 113 in the core, or 1%, and the town has since been picked as one of six national case study towns under the Town Centres First programme.

So the housing argument gets harder here, not easier, because there's no obvious stock of empty homes for a listing to have come out of. Do think about that before you apply.

Weigh a few things in your favour against that, though. I couldn't find a single published appeal refusing a short-term let here, so there's no settled local "no" for a planner to point back at, and the town is nowhere near the 20,000-population line the government is drawing for a presumption against new permissions. Cork County also grants most of these applications rather than refusing them.

None of that is a guarantee, mind you. It's still a very different starting hand from a town with three refusals on the record.

So what's realistically open to you? Four routes, worth knowing before you spend anything:

• Home-sharing in your own house. Rooms let while you're living there, unlimited. The whole house let while you're away, capped at 90 days a year with the three forms filed. This is the cleanest path in Clonakilty by a distance.
• A property that already holds permission for holiday or tourism use. Where the original grant specifically permitted holiday accommodation or short-term letting, the 2026 rules don't reach it, so dig out that parent permission before anything else.
• Applying for change of use. Viable here, given the county's grant rate and the town's size, though you're still making a real planning case about housing, so treat it as an application to win rather than a formality.
• Established use. Section 157(4) of the Planning and Development Act 2000 bars enforcement more than seven years after an unauthorised use began, which is a shield rather than a permission, and it carries a catch I'll cover under enforcement.

Assuming Clonakilty's own numbers don't stack up, the rest of the south coast tourism belt runs on the same national law over a different local housing picture. The Dungarvan regulation guide covers a comparable harbour town in Waterford, while the Bundoran guide covers a small seaside resort where the seasonal maths looks similar.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirements in Clonakilty

Since so much of that turns on permission, it's worth being precise about what you're applying for, because there's no short-term rental licence in Clonakilty and there never has been. Two separate things stand between you and a legal listing, and they come from two different bodies on two different clocks.

The first is planning permission from Cork County Council, and its fees are set nationally rather than locally. A change of use to short-term letting counts as a commercial application, so Cork County's own planning application guidance prices it at €80 or €3.60 per square metre of gross floor space, whichever is greater. Would you rather have the council rule formally on whether what you're planning even counts as exempted development? That's a declaration under section 5 of the Act, and it costs €80, while a third-party observation on someone else's application costs €20.

Retention is the expensive one. That's where you changed the use first and applied afterwards, and it's charged at three times the standard fee, so €240 or €10.80 per square metre. A normal application runs to a decision in about eight weeks assuming nothing's missing, and either side can appeal to An Coimisiún Pleanála after that.

The second thing is the national register, which doesn't exist yet. Fáilte Ireland's short-term letting register will cover anyone offering paid accommodation for stays of up to and including 21 nights, per unit, right across the country. The government confirmed in a press release updated on 6 August 2026 that it comes into effect from 1 December 2026, with a legal obligation to be registered by 31 December 2026. Once it's live, Fáilte Ireland's FAQ says registration is annual, each unit gets its own number, that number has to appear on every listing and advertisement, and platforms may only list units carrying a valid one.

Two details about the register are easy to miss, and both cost money if you do. Registering means signing a legal declaration that the property complies with planning, building and fire safety law, so the register isn't a way around the planning question. It's where that question gets asked again, in writing, over your signature. The fee is the other one, and it still hasn't been announced, beyond Fáilte Ireland saying fees will be kept to a minimum. Be aware that any figure quoted elsewhere is guesswork until they publish it.

Required Documents for Clonakilty Short-Term Rentals

None of that paperwork is exotic, but it arrives in three separate bundles depending on which route you're taking, and muddling them up is the commonest way to lose a few weeks. So work out your route first, then gather the matching pack.

Home-sharing under the exemption needs the shortest pack of the three. Form 15 goes in at the start of the year, and within two weeks before your first letting. Form 16 follows within two weeks of the day you hit 90 cumulative days of whole-house letting, and Form 17 closes out the year. All three go to [email protected], and the council treats them as your registration, so don't forget that a missing form is what turns an exempt letting into an unauthorised change of use.

Applying for change of use means making an ordinary planning application. You'll need the completed form, a site notice put up on the property and a notice published in an approved newspaper, site location and layout maps, floor plans, the fee, and a description that says plainly what the use is.

Clonakilty then adds a wrinkle most West Cork towns don't, because most of the town centre sits inside an Architectural Conservation Area, with over 200 structures on the Record of Protected Structures. Where the building is protected or in that area, expect conservation questions to land alongside the housing ones, so make sure you factor that into your timeline and into the design of anything you propose.

Relying on established use is different again, because there the evidence is the whole case, and it has to be continuous. Bank records, payout histories, booking calendars, old advertisements and Fáilte Ireland invoices all do this job, and the more independent strands you put on file, the better. Keep in mind that a gap resets the seven-year clock, so a season you didn't let can quietly cost you the argument.

The register itself asks for the least. Fáilte Ireland says the application will be data-only with no supporting documents to upload, collecting the property's address and Eircode, the host's PPS number, date of birth and contact details, and the unit's type and bed capacity. That's lighter than most owners expect, which means the real work sits earlier. Get the planning position sound well before December 2026, rather than scrambling for it after.

Clonakilty Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming you get through the planning question and are able to start taking bookings, there's still tax to deal with, and Ireland handles it differently from most places you might be comparing Clonakilty against. There's no bed tax, no occupancy tax and no tourist levy here, at national or county level. What you get instead is income tax arriving under a heading most landlords don't expect, plus a VAT threshold that only some hosts ever cross.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
Income tax on letting profits	Your marginal rate, Case I or Case IV	Revenue, via self-assessment
VAT on guest accommodation	13.5%, only above the turnover threshold	Revenue
VAT on the platform's service fee	23%	Airbnb, on its own fee
Local tourist or bed tax	None in force	n/a

That first heading matters more than it looks. Revenue's manual on the taxation of short-term lettings is explicit that short-term guests hold a licence to use the property rather than a tenancy, so the money is never rental income under Case V. It's taxed as trading income under Case I, or as miscellaneous income under Case IV where the activity is occasional. You return it on a Form 11 or Form 12, and the practical upshot is that the rental-income shortcuts landlords reach for simply don't apply to you.

The one that catches people out is rent-a-room relief. That €14,000 exemption sounds tailor-made for a spare room in a Clonakilty townhouse, and it isn't available. Revenue's manual on the relief requires a letting of at least 28 consecutive days and carries an anti-avoidance rule putting it "beyond doubt that the relief does not apply to short term tourist accommodation based on home sharing, including where it is provided through online booking sites". So don't budget around it. It won't be there.

VAT is the layer that only bites at scale. Revenue's manual on guest and holiday accommodation puts guest and holiday accommodation, expressly including web-based bookings, at the reduced 13.5% rate whatever the length of stay, but registration only kicks in above the services threshold of €42,500. A single Clonakilty house at normal seasonal occupancy usually sits under that line, while two or three of them together might not, so watch the threshold, since it's measured on turnover rather than profit.

Separately, Airbnb applies 23% Irish VAT to its own service fees, which isn't the same as anyone collecting accommodation VAT on your behalf. No platform hands your tax to Revenue for you here. That job stays with you.

On the deductions side, because the income is trading or miscellaneous rather than rental income, the question is the ordinary one for a small trade: expenses wholly and exclusively incurred in earning it. That covers the platform's commission, cleaning and laundry, utilities, insurance, repairs, accountancy, and capital allowances on furniture. Apportionment is the fiddly part, though, and worth an accountant's eye early. A whole house let for four months gives you a defensible time-based split on standing costs, while a spare room let year-round means splitting by floor area and by days, and Revenue expects that basis to stay consistent once you pick it.

Ireland-Wide Short-Term Rental Rules

Everything Cork County Council does sits on top of national law, and 2026 has been the busiest year that law has ever had, so it pays to know which parts are settled and which parts are still drafts you shouldn't plan a purchase around.

The settled part is the one already covered. Section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as substituted on 1 March 2026, makes short-term letting a material change of use everywhere in the State at 21 nights or fewer. The same Act abolished rent pressure zones outright, and the Residential Tenancies Board confirms national rent controls replaced them on that date. No Irish town should now be described as being in a rent pressure zone, which is a real trap when you're reading older guidance or a pre-2026 planning decision.

The unsettled part is where new permissions are heading, and Clonakilty's size is the reassuring thing to watch. A draft National Planning Statement on Short Term Letting was approved in June 2026, and the Department of Enterprise's summary sets out three things it would do. New permissions in settlements above 20,000 people would face a presumption against them, while smaller places would instead get a two-year compliance window. And a use that has run continuously for seven or more years without enforcement would get a presumption in its favour.

Clonakilty is well under 20,000 on any measure, so on the current draft it lands in the smaller-settlement group rather than the tighter one, and that's the single most useful thing the statement says about this town. Be aware that it's still a draft, though, subject to environmental assessment and an EU notification process, with a final version expected in the autumn. It isn't law yet.

Two more national threads are worth tracking, and the first is the Short Term Letting and Tourism Bill, since the whole register depends on it. That Bill still hadn't been published as of my last check, having gone through pre-legislative scrutiny in February 2026. Meanwhile Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 has applied since 20 May 2026, requiring registration numbers in listings, a single digital entry point per member state and monthly data reporting by platforms, with Ireland completing implementation by the end of 2026. That regulation is why the register isn't going to quietly slip away, whatever happens with the Bill's timing.

Because the local layer is where the real variation lives, the picture in a city looks nothing like the picture in Clonakilty. Our Limerick guide covers a city well over the 20,000 line, where the presumption against new permissions would bite. The Bray guide covers a large commuter town in the Dublin belt, and the Carlingford guide covers a small tourism village much closer to Clonakilty in scale.

Does Clonakilty Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Being a small town under the national thresholds doesn't mean nobody's watching, so it's fair to ask how hard Cork County Council actually pushes here. The honest answer is that enforcement is complaint-driven rather than systematic, but the penalties behind it are serious enough that you don't want to test them.

Cork County Council's enforcement page lays the sequence out plainly, and it starts with somebody complaining in writing on the enforcement complaint form. The council then issues a warning letter to whoever's carrying out the development, investigates to decide whether formal action is warranted, and moves to an enforcement notice and prosecution if it is. Any person can also go to the Circuit or High Court themselves for an order restraining an unauthorised use, which is a route a neighbour or a residents' group can take without the council's help at all.

The penalties come from section 156 of the Planning and Development Act 2000, and the daily figure is the one that does the real damage. On summary conviction in the District Court the maximum is €5,000, or up to six months' imprisonment, or both. Where the offence continues after conviction, add up to €1,500 for every further day it runs.

That part compounds fast.

Retention isn't the safe fallback it sounds like, either. It costs three times the normal fee, and the council warns in terms that permission for retention "does not automatically absolve you from prosecution if enforcement action has already been taken against you".

So apply first, then let.

That brings us back to the seven-year point, which gets repeated in host circles more confidently than it deserves. Section 157(4) of the Act really does stop the council issuing a warning letter or an enforcement notice once seven years have passed since an unauthorised use began, and that much is solid. The very next paragraph, though, lets proceedings start at any time in respect of any condition concerning the use of land, so a house whose original grant carries an occupancy or holiday-use condition gets no shield at all.

Being safe from enforcement isn't the same as holding permission, either, and the incoming register is about to make that gap expensive, since it asks you to declare a compliant planning position that established use alone doesn't give you.

For a sense of scale, the Irish Examiner reported in February 2025, from a briefing prepared for the Minister for Enterprise, that of 167 short-term letting change of use applications lodged nationally during 2024, 122 went to Cork County Council, which granted 87 and refused 9. No other county except Wicklow even reached double figures.

I couldn't find an official publication of those numbers to check them against, mind you, and they cover the whole county rather than Clonakilty, so treat them as an indication rather than a statistic. What they suggest is encouraging for a Clonakilty owner all the same: this is a council that grants the clear majority of these applications, and its handful of high-profile refusals clustered in one particular pressured town.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Clonakilty

Given how much of that turns on facts you can nail down before spending money, the order below is doing real work. The first three steps are the ones that tell you whether the rest is worth starting at all.

1. Settle whether the property is your principal private residence. It decides everything else. Where it is, you're on the exemption path, and the whole-house limit is 90 days a year with the three forms filed.
2. Pull the property's planning history. Get the original grant for the house or the scheme and read the conditions. A specific permission for holiday or short-term letting use means the 2026 rules don't reach you, while an occupancy condition means the seven-year shield doesn't reach you either.
3. Ask the council in writing. A section 5 declaration costs €80 and gets you a formal ruling on whether what you're planning is exempted development, which beats an assumption every time. Send the same query to [email protected] so it's on file.
4. Apply properly if you need permission. Change of use is a commercial application at €80 or €3.60 per square metre, with a site notice and a newspaper notice, and about eight weeks to a decision. Never start letting and apply for retention afterwards, since retention costs three times as much and doesn't stop enforcement.
5. Mind the conservation area. Where the building sits in the town-centre Architectural Conservation Area or on the Record of Protected Structures, get conservation advice before you design anything, because those questions arrive alongside the housing ones.
6. File Form 15 if you're home-sharing, at the start of the year and before your first letting, then Form 16 at 90 days and Form 17 at year end.
7. Register with Revenue and set the tax up before your first guest. Case I or Case IV, not Case V, and keep an eye on the €42,500 VAT threshold if you add a second property.
8. Diary the register. It opens on 1 December 2026 and you must be registered by 31 December 2026, per unit, renewed annually, with the number displayed on every listing.
9. Keep the evidence from day one. Booking records, payout statements, invoices and council correspondence all live in the same folder, and you'll want it whether you're arguing established use, compliance, or a register declaration later.

Once the rules are clear, the question that decides whether any of this is worth doing is whether the numbers work at Clonakilty's seasonality, which is where the Ireland market data tells you more than any regulation summary can. A 90-day exempt letting through a strong coastal summer is a very different business from a year-round listing, so make sure you model it that way before you buy anything.

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

Whichever of those steps you get stuck on, four bodies handle nearly all of it, and knowing which one owns your question saves a genuine amount of time. Clonakilty sits in the West Cork Municipal District, and planning for it is administered by Cork County Council from County Hall, with a West Cork divisional mailbox for area queries.

Planning permission, exemptions and the three forms

• Address: Cork County Council, Planning Department, Ground Floor, County Hall, Carrigrohane Road, Cork, T12 R2NC
• Phone: (021) 4276891
• General planning email: [email protected]
• Short-term letting forms and queries: [email protected]
• West Cork area planning: [email protected]
• Opening hours: 9am to 4pm, Monday to Friday

The council's own planning department contact page carries all of those. It also puts the Planning Policy Unit on Floor 13 of the same building, at [email protected], which is where development plan questions belong. Before you ring anyone, mind you, the council's planning and development hub is worth half an hour on its own, since it carries the Planning Enquiry and online submissions system, the Planning Weekly Lists, and a section on exempted development applications.

Complaints and enforcement

Enforcement complaints go to [email protected], in writing, using the council's enforcement complaint form. Remember that this line runs in both directions. It's how a neighbour reports your listing, and it's also where you find out what's been alleged about yours.

Appeals

An Coimisiún Pleanála takes appeals against a council decision, and its case files are the best free research you'll find before applying anywhere in the county.

• Address: 64 Marlborough Street, Dublin 1, D01 V902
• Phone: (01) 858 8100, or 1800 275 175
• Appeals email: [email protected]
• Case files: [email protected]
• Opening hours: 9.15am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday, with no lunchtime closing

Its contact and case access pages are the route to the inspector's report and board order for every appeal, so if a comparable West Cork decision does land, that's where it'll show up first.

Registration

Fáilte Ireland runs the national register, and only the register. Planning stays with the council, so don't expect the register team to adjudicate anything Cork County Council has decided.

• Address: Fáilte Ireland, 88-95 Amiens Street, Dublin 1, D01 WR86
• Phone: 0818 888 800, or +353 1 574 1990 from outside Ireland
• Hours: Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00
• Register information: the short-term letting register pages

For tax, Revenue handles income tax and VAT registration, and MyEnquiries inside myAccount or ROS is the fastest route to a written answer you can keep.

What Airbnb Hosts in Clonakilty Report About Local Regulations

Talking to any of those offices is one thing, and hearing what owners around the town make of all this is another. I couldn't read Reddit for this, since it blocks automated access, so what follows is my read of the public record rather than any kind of survey, and for Clonakilty that record is quieter than you'd expect for a town this popular with visitors.

The most striking thing is what isn't there. Unlike Kinsale, where three separate change-of-use refusals went all the way to the national appeals board and left a paper trail owners still argue over, most recently 5 Viking Wharf in January 2025, Clonakilty has no comparable run of published short-term-letting decisions that I could find. That absence cuts two ways, and it's worth sitting with both. There's no settled local "no" for a planner to reach for, and the county's overall grant rate suggests a reasonable application here has a real chance. Then again, it also means you can't lean on a neighbour's approval as precedent the way you might in a town with a track record, so each application still stands on its own housing case.

A few themes come out of the wider West Cork conversation, and they line up with what the county's own policy is telling you:

• The housing argument is the one that decides these applications. Clonakilty is a Key Town under orders to add 600 homes by 2028, against a water supply already at its limit and a town centre that's 1% vacant. So a planner's core question is whether your listing takes a unit the town needs, and that's harder to answer here than somewhere with empty stock.
• The exemption is underused, and it's the safest ground going. Plenty of owners assume they need permission when a spare-room or away-from-home letting inside the 90-day cap would keep them exempt. Be aware that the forms are the whole obligation there, so filing them on time is what protects you.
• Everyone's watching the register, and nobody has a fee yet. The recurring worry locally is the December 2026 deadline and the declaration behind it, not the day-to-day letting. That's the right thing to worry about, because it's where an informal arrangement gets asked to prove itself.

None of that is a reason to write Clonakilty off, mind you. If anything it's the opposite of Kinsale's story: a real tourism town, an open-minded county, and no wall of refusals in the way. What has changed across Ireland since March 2026 is the question being asked. It used to be whether short-term letting was allowed where you happened to own, and now it's whether the home you want to let was going to house somebody. Answer that one convincingly and the paperwork tends to follow.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Yes, and Clonakilty is more open than many Irish tourist towns. Letting rooms in your own principal private residence is exempted development, and so is letting that whole home while you're away, up to 90 days a year, provided you file Forms 15, 16 and 17 with Cork County Council. Any other property, meaning a second home or an investment, is a material change of use since March 2026 and needs planning permission first, but Cork County grants most of these applications.

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

For any property that isn't your principal private residence, yes. Section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as substituted on 1 March 2026, makes short-term letting a material change of use everywhere in Ireland, with no rent pressure zone limit and a threshold of 21 consecutive nights. Cork County Council decides the application and An Coimisiún Pleanála hears appeals. Unlike Kinsale, Clonakilty has no published refusal on record.

How much does it cost to apply for change of use in Clonakilty?

A commercial change of use application costs €80 or €3.60 per square metre of gross floor space, whichever is greater, under Cork County Council's published fee schedule. A section 5 declaration asking whether something is exempted development costs €80, and a third-party observation costs €20. Retention, applied for after the fact, costs three times the standard fee, so €240 or €10.80 per square metre.

Is there a tourist tax or bed tax on short-term rentals in Clonakilty?

No. Ireland has no national tourist tax, no occupancy tax and no local bed tax, and Cork County Council doesn't levy one. What applies instead is income tax on your letting profits, assessed as trading income under Case I or miscellaneous income under Case IV rather than as rental income, plus VAT at 13.5% on guest accommodation once your turnover passes the €42,500 services threshold.

When does Ireland's short-term letting register open?

The Fáilte Ireland register comes into effect from 1 December 2026, with a legal obligation to be registered by 31 December 2026. It covers anyone offering paid accommodation for stays of up to 21 nights, applies per unit, renews annually, and requires a declaration that the property complies with planning, building and fire safety law. The registration number must appear on every listing, and platforms may only advertise units holding a valid one. The fee hasn't been announced.

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