Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics, to 30 June 2024

• There were at least 30,299 applications for a short-term licence as of end June 2024. 82% (24,810) of these applications were validated. Not all authorities report applications still to be validated to the Scottish Government as they are not required to.
• The majority (82%; 24,913) of these applications were received before the 1 October 2023 cut off for existing hosts and operators to apply for a provisional licence to continue operating whilst waiting for a full licence confirmation.
• The majority (18,965 or 76%) of validated applications relate to secondary letting (i.e. where a non-primary residence is let out), with 2,575 (10%) being for home sharing, 1,937 (8%) for home letting, and 1,333 (5%) for a mixture of home sharing and letting.  Similar proportions are reported for licences granted.
• 21,075 licences or exemptions were in operation as of 30 June 2024. Full licences accounted for over three quarters (76% or 16,052) of this number and 22% (4,560) were provisional licences pending a final decision. There were 461 temporary licences and exemptions.

Background

The full publication is available at Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics, Scotland, to 30 June 2024.

This statistical publication reports on the operation of the short term lets licensing scheme under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 (Licensing of Short-term Lets) Order 2022.

Official statistics are produced in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics.

As advised in our May publication, there was likely to be a revision to the number of validated applications reported in the quarter before the October 2023 cut off for existing operators to apply and continue operation provisionally. As local authorities worked to validate large numbers of applications received. As expected, we report a large revision upwards (from 7,989 to 14,116) for July to September 2023, with smaller revisions in other quarters.