London's 90-Day Rule: Why Airbnb's Counter Isn't Enough
Sarah hosts in Hackney. She has 55 nights logged on Airbnb. She also took 40 bookings through Booking.com this year.
Airbnb shows her 55 nights. She thinks she has 35 left.
She has none. She's 5 over the legal limit — and she has no idea.
This isn't a rare edge case. It's the default experience for every London host on more than one platform. And it's the gap that nobody in the industry has bothered to fix.
What the 90-day rule actually is
In London, under the Deregulation Act 2015, you cannot let your entire home as a short let for more than 90 nights per calendar year without planning permission from your local council.
It applies to entire-home lets — if guests have the whole property to themselves, the limit applies. If you're renting a spare room while you still live there, it doesn't.
The limit resets on 1 January every year. Not from your listing date. Not from your first booking. The calendar year.
Break it without permission and councils can issue enforcement notices and fines of up to £20,000. Westminster and Camden are the most active boroughs for enforcement. Both have issued fines. Neither is theoretical.
How Airbnb enforces it — and why that's not the whole picture
Airbnb does enforce the 90-night limit in London. Once your listing hits 90 nights booked through Airbnb, it stops accepting new reservations automatically.
This creates a dangerous false sense of compliance.
Airbnb's cap only counts nights booked through Airbnb. The platform has no data on your Booking.com bookings, your Vrbo listings, or the guests you took as direct reservations. It tracks its own platform. That's all it can do.
The law doesn't work that way. The 90-night limit applies to all nights in your home, from any source. A council investigating a complaint doesn't ask which platform the bookings came from — they count everything.
So a host who hits Airbnb's 90-night cap and thinks they're protected may have broken the law weeks earlier, through bookings on another platform they weren't tracking against the same limit.
The multi-platform problem
This is where most experienced hosts get caught out — not newcomers who didn't know the rule existed, but hosts who knew about the 90-day limit and thought they were managing it.
The maths is simple:
- 55 nights on Airbnb
- 40 nights on Booking.com
- 8 direct bookings
That's 103 nights. The law says 90. The fine is up to £20,000.
Airbnb showed 55 nights. Nothing triggered an alert. No platform added it up.
There is no tool built into any of the major booking platforms that aggregates your total nights across all of them. Each platform tracks its own data. The host is responsible for tracking the total — and most have no system for doing it.
What happens if you go over
Going over 90 nights without planning permission is a breach of planning law, not just a terms-of-service violation.
Councils find out through neighbour complaints, data-sharing with platforms, and proactive inspection in high-enforcement areas. Westminster and Tower Hamlets have both pursued enforcement action publicly.
An enforcement notice requires you to stop letting. Fines run up to £20,000 per offence for persistent breaches. Airbnb and other platforms can suspend listings where council enforcement has been confirmed.
The consequences are real, documented, and increasing as councils get better at identifying non-compliant hosts.
How to track it properly
You need one number: your total nights across all platforms, updated after every booking, measured against a single 90-night limit.
A spreadsheet works if you're disciplined enough to update it after every booking on every platform without fail. Most hosts aren't — not because they're careless, but because it's a manual process that gets missed.
Letaro tracks your total nights across Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and direct bookings in one dashboard. The compliance gauge updates as you log nights. At 70 nights, you get an amber alert. At 90, it's red. The number is always visible, always accurate, always based on your real total — not just one platform's count.
Your Airbnb counter tells you one thing. Letaro tells you the truth.
Track your total nights free at letaro.co.uk
The 90-day rule applies to entire-home short lets in Greater London. Rules differ outside London. This post is informational and does not constitute legal advice.