Short-Let or Long-Let in Malta? What the 2026 Rules Changed

Malta rewrote its short-let rulebook in June 2026, and one number in it decides which side of the law a property sits on: 90 days. No single booking in a licensed short-let may run longer than that, which turns the old habit of stretching a holiday let into a four-month tenancy from a grey area into a licensing problem.

If you own a property in Malta and have been letting it flexibly - tourists in summer, a worker on a three-month contract in winter - the 2026 regulations force a choice. Here is what each route now demands.

The 90-day line that decides everything

The Tourism Accommodation Regulations, subsidiary legislation S.L. 409.24, were made by Legal Notice 92 of 2026 and came into force on 15 June 2026. Among the operating conditions they impose on licensed short-let rented accommodation is a hard ceiling: no individual booking may exceed 90 consecutive days.

That cap is the boundary between two completely separate legal regimes. Up to 90 days per booking, with a Malta Tourism Authority licence, you are running tourism accommodation, answerable to the MTA. Beyond it, you are letting residentially under the Private Residential Leases Act (Cap. 604), answerable to the Housing Authority. Different act, different regulator, different paperwork - and no licence lets you straddle both.

What the short-let route now costs in paperwork

Operating or even advertising a short-let without a valid MTA licence is prohibited outright. Getting one is not a form-filling exercise. The Authority's application requirements include:

• Identity documents for the applicant, the operator and the designated contact person, plus valid police conduct certificates.
• The latest approved Planning Authority development permission with drawings showing the unit outlined in red - or a Pre-1968 Compliance Certificate for older buildings.
• An architect's certification that the unit conforms to its planning permission and is fit for habitation.
• Third-party liability insurance covering the property and the common parts.
• A waste collection management plan, required both on application and at renewal.

The obligations continue once the licence is issued. A named natural person must be reachable 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to take complaints, with their contact details kept current. A notice displaying the licence number and that person's name and contact details has to be affixed outside the property. Where the unit sits in a condominium, the block administrators must be notified in writing once the licence is issued - the neighbours are no longer meant to find out when the wheeled suitcases start arriving.

The long-let route answers to a different authority

Choose stays longer than 90 days and Cap. 604 takes over. A long private residential lease cannot be agreed for less than one year - Article 8 deems any shorter term to run for a full year regardless of what the contract says. The lease has to be in writing and carry the seven elements Article 6(1) makes mandatory, including a signed inventory of photographs with short descriptions, and miss one of them and the whole contract is void rather than merely defective. The full list is in what a rental contract in Malta must contain.

The lease then has to be registered with the Housing Authority, and an unregistered lease has no legal standing at all - the deadline, the fee and the late-registration penalty are covered in how many days you have to register a rental contract in Malta. Compared with an MTA licence application, this is the lighter route: no architect, no planning drawings, no insurance certificate, no 24/7 phone duty.

What you give up is flexibility. Article 9 requires a landlord who does not want the lease to continue to send a registered letter at least three months before the term ends; miss it and the lease is deemed renewed for a further year. Article 11 locks the tenant in for six, nine or twelve months depending on the term, but it locks the landlord in for the whole term. A long let is a year of committed occupancy, not a season of it.

Two occupancy caps that look identical and are not

S.L. 409.24 caps a licensed short-let at two persons per bedroom approved by the Planning Authority, and at ten persons per unit unless the property has independent access from a public road. Basement areas cannot be used as bedrooms at all.

Those numbers will look familiar to anyone who has registered a long lease since September 2024, because the residential side caps occupancy at two per bedroom up to ten as well - explained in how many people can legally live in a rented home in Malta. The shape is the same; the instruments, the regulators and the enforcement routes are not. A unit that satisfies one is not automatically compliant under the other, and the short-let version adds the planning-approval and basement conditions on top.

What 15 June 2026 actually replaced

The regulations are a consolidation, not just an addition. S.L. 409.24 absorbed four separate instruments that previously governed different accommodation types: the Tourism Accommodation Establishments Regulations (S.L. 409.04), the Host Family Accommodation Regulations (S.L. 409.10), the Holiday Premises Regulations (S.L. 409.11) and the Licensed Accommodation Regulations (S.L. 409.21). Licences are now issued against five property types - studio, apartment, house, villa or farmhouse.

Existing licences and decisions taken under the old regime continue to have effect under the transitional provisions, so nothing was invalidated overnight. The catch is renewal: bringing an older licence forward means meeting the new standards, so the waste plan and the 24/7 contact person arrive at renewal date even for long-standing operators.

Which route fits which property

The honest read is that the 2026 rules raised the floor for casual short-letting. A one-bedroom flat in a block, let out a few weeks a year, now carries an architect's certificate, an insurance policy, a waste plan, permanent signage and a phone that has to be answered at three in the morning. That overhead is absorbed easily by a professional operator with several units and barely at all by an owner with one.

For a single unit in a residential block - the typical Sliema, Gzira or St Julian's apartment - the long-let route is now substantially simpler to comply with, and it trades nightly rate for occupancy you do not have to chase. The short-let route still makes sense for genuinely tourism-oriented stock: a seafront villa, a farmhouse in Gozo, a property with independent street access where the ten-person cap is not the binding constraint.

What no longer works is the middle. Housing a relocating worker for four months on a tourism licence breaches the 90-day booking cap, and doing it without any licence at all invites a three-year disqualification that sticks to the property. If a stay is going to run past 90 days, it belongs in a registered residential lease.

The rule in short

• The Tourism Accommodation Regulations (S.L. 409.24, Legal Notice 92 of 2026) came into force on 15 June 2026 and consolidated four earlier subsidiary laws.
• No individual short-let booking may exceed 90 consecutive days - that is the legal line between tourism accommodation and residential letting.
• A short-let licence requires planning permission, an architect's certification, police conduct certificates, third-party liability insurance and a waste collection management plan.
• Licensed operators must keep a named person contactable 24/7, display the licence number and that contact outside the property, and notify condominium administrators in writing.
• Operating unlicensed brings a three-year disqualification that attaches to the property as well as the person.
• Short-lets are capped at two persons per approved bedroom and ten per unit without independent road access, with no basement bedrooms - similar in shape to the residential cap, but a separate rule under a separate regulator.
• Stays beyond 90 days fall under Cap. 604: a written lease of at least one year, seven mandatory elements including the signed photo inventory, and registration with the Housing Authority.