Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics Scotland to 30 June 2025

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 2025. 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. The overall size of revision in the number of valid applications has decreased from 18% in the previous publication, to 8% in this one.

Table 1: Summary of total applications validated, granted and in operation, as at end June 2025

As Table 1 shows, 36,594 applications were received and validated by local authorities from 1 October 2022 to 30 June 2025. At least 1,446 additional applications were received but are either not yet validated or have been deemed invalid. This brings the total number of applications received to at least 38,040, of which 96% were validated applications.  

Chart 1: Total applications validated, granted by date received, as of end June 2025

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 1,313 applications validated for the latest quarter (April to June 2025).

We report a large revision upwards in the total number of validated applications received  (from 18,149 to 19,988, an increase of 10%) for July to September 2023. This revision was expected as authorities worked to validate the applications received, and smaller than previous revisions (29% for the publication previous publication, and 77% for the publication before that). 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 2025, 89% of the validated applications were granted a licence (including those licences which have lapsed now), and 6% of the applications were pending determination. A minority of applications were withdrawn, refused, suspended, or refusal to consider (4%).

The number of applications having been decided or pending determination varied by local authority (Table 9 in the supporting documents). From one application pending determination in East Ayrshire (1 out of 117) and Shetland Island (1 out of 471) to 32% in Glasgow (349 out of 1,107 applications). Highland had the largest number of applications pending determination, accounting for 31% of the overall Scotland total (689 out of 2,256) and 8% of the 8,727 valid application received in Highland. 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.

31,774 licences or exemptions were in operation as of 30 June 2025. Full licences (First and Renewed licences) accounted for 97% of this number, and provisional licences pending a final decision accounted for 2%, and Temporary and Exemptions accounted for 1%.