Summary of total valid applications

This publication reports a snapshot of data from when the Short Term Lets Licensing Scheme opened to receive applications on 1 October 2022 until 30 June 2024. Local authorities are only required to provide data on all applications they have validated. An application is validated once local authorities confirm that all the required information and documentation has been provided, and the host has made an application fee payment.

There are applications where authorities do not have the information required to validate an application and are working with applying hosts/operators to obtain this information. Some, but not all local authorities provided data on the number of applications that they received but not yet been validated. This means the statistics in the publication are provisional and subject to upward revision in future releases.   

Table 1: Summary of total applications validated, granted and in operation, as at end June 2024

As Table 1 shows, 24,810 applications were received and validated by local authorities from 1 October 2022 to 30 June 2024. There were at least 5,810 additional applications received but not yet validated or invalid. This brings the total number of applications received to at least 30,620, of which 82% were validated applications.  

The majority (82%; 24,913) of the total reported 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.

Chart 1: Total applications validated, granted by date received, as of end June 2024

As Chart 1 illustrates, there was a substantial increase in applications in July to September 2023 compared with previous quarters. This quarter is just before the 1 October cut off for existing hosts and operators to apply for a provisional licence to continue operating. After this period the number of applications decreased, with 1,638 applications validated in the latest quarter (April to June 2024).

As advised in the previous publication, there was likely to be a revision to the number of valid applications reported as received in the quarter before the October 2023 cut off for existing operators. As expected, we report a large revision upwards (from 7,989 to 14,116) for July to September 2023. This revision was expected as authorities worked to validate the applications received. Local authorities are not required to provide us application data that has not been validated. Please refer to the revision table in the supporting documents, which also set out revisions for other quarters.

As of 30 June 2024, over two thirds (67%) of the validated applications were granted a licence (including those licenses which have lapsed now), and less than a third (31%) of the applications were pending determination. A minority of applications were withdrawn, refused or suspended (2%).

Application status varied by local authority (Table 9 in the supporting documents), from 2% (1 out of 51) of applications pending determination in East Dunbartonshire to 78% in Glasgow (579 out of 741 applications). Variations will be caused by various factors, such as the number of applications received, particularly those received before the October 2023 cut off for existing hosts and operators, as well as staff capacity within local authorities to process applications.

21,075 licences or exemptions were in operation as of 30 June 2024. Full licences accounted for 78% of this number and provisional licences pending a final decision accounted for 22%.

Local authorities have 12 months to process an application from existing hosts and 9 months for new hosts. 97% (5,771) of applications received between October 2022 and June 2023 had a licence granted within 12 months. 2% (117) of the applications received in this period were withdrawn and 1% (85) were pending determination as of end June 2024.