Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics, to 31 December 2024

• There were at least 33,952 applications for a short-term licence as of end December 2024. 31,416 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 (76%; 25,827) of all 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 (24,315 or 77%) of validated applications relate to secondary letting (i.e. where a non-primary residence is let out), with 3,159 (10%) being for home sharing, 2,338 (7%) for home letting, and 1,604 (5%) for a mixture of home sharing and letting. Similar proportions are reported for licences granted.
• 27,406 licences or exemptions were in operation as of 31 December 2024. Full licences and renewals accounted for 94% (25,772) of this number and 6% (1,537) were provisional licences pending a final decision. There were 97 temporary licences and exemptions.

Background

The full publication is available at Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics, Scotland, to 31 December 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 October 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 14,116 to 18,149) for July to September 2023, with smaller revisions in other quarters.