Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics Scotland to 31 December 2024

Summary of total valid applications received

This publication reports a snapshot of data from when the Short Term Lets Licensing Scheme opened to receive applications on 1 October 2022 until 31 December 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 December 2024

As Table 1 shows, 31,416 applications were received and validated by local authorities from 1 October 2022 to 31 December 2024. At least 2,536 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 33,952, of which 93% were validated applications.  

The majority (76%; 25,827) 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 December 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 845 applications validated for the latest quarter (October to December 2024).

We report a large revision upwards in the total number of validated applications received  (from 14,116 to 18,149, an increase of 29%) 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 31 December 2024, 86% of the validated applications were granted a licence (including those licenses which have lapsed now), and 11% of the applications were pending determination. A minority of applications were withdrawn, refused, suspended, or refusal to consider (3%).

The number of applications having been decided or pending determination varied by local authority (Table 9 in the supporting documents). From no applications pending determination in East Ayrshire (0 out of 105) to 40% in Glasgow (388 out of 967 applications). Highland had the largest number of applications pending determination, accounting for 49% of the overall Scotland total (1,634 out of 3,305) and 23% of the 7,160 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.

27,406 licences or exemptions were in operation as of 31 December 2024. Full licences accounted for 94% of this number and provisional licences pending a final decision accounted for 6%.

Local authorities have 12 months to process an application from existing hosts and 9 months for new hosts. 88% of the 25,572 valid applications received between October 2022 and December 2023 had a licence granted by December 2024. 2% (639 of the applications received in this period were withdrawn and 9% (2,178) were pending determination by the end of December 2024.