Three things happened in European short-term rentals this week, and one of them has been badly under reported.
Article 10(1)(e). Where an authority restricts short-term rentals to safeguard housing affordability, the measure only stands where that authority "applies and enforces Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 in the relevant geographical area", including "orders requiring the removal or disabling of listings without a registration number".
Plenty of places restrict while barely enforcing. Under this text that is a defect in the measure, and you can cite the article.
Article 11 gives affected operators effective judicial review, "including the possibility to challenge the assessments carried out by the competent authority". Article 12 caps any measure at 5 years.
Article 14 is the limit. The Regulation "shall not apply to measures adopted before" entry into force, so everything already on the books sits outside it. And none of this is law yet. It is a proposal, COM(2026) 599 final, now with Parliament and Council.
If you operate professionally you have been on the single 15.5% fee for months. Airbnb's rollout put Germany and the UK on 22 June, and hosts on property management software moved earlier still. The 13 October date in circulation is for hosts not yet on it. For most of this audience it is not a deadline.
The part worth your time is VAT. Airbnb's Help Centre says "VAT is charged on the Host service fee for a reservation", across roughly 60 countries including the UK, Ireland and Spain. Hosts who give Airbnb a valid VAT number "may not be charged VAT on Airbnb service fees".
Without one, 20% VAT on a 15.5% fee is 18.6%. If you manage for individual owners, check which of them has a number on file.
Reported by PhocusWire and shorttermrentalz from an email Google sent partners. No public Google post exists, so treat the wording as second hand. If your channel manager feeds it, look at what that traffic did this week.
The driver is the Digital Markets Act. The Commission fined Google 890 million euros on 23 July, 460 million of it for self-preferencing on Google Search, and Google "is required to comply with the Commission's decisions within 60 days". That is 21 September.
Two of those three went the operator's way, which is not how most weeks go.
An authority that will not enforce its own register may find it cannot lawfully restrict you either.
Is the authority where you operate actually enforcing the register it already has?
