n Mallorca the criminal risk has stopped being about letting without a licence. It is now about what you do in the 10 days after the notice arrives.
On Tuesday the Consell de Mallorca published its enforcement figures for January to July 2026.
146 sanction files opened, against 104 in the whole of 2025. A rise of 40%.
1,546 inspections.
4.37 million euros of proposed penalties across those 146 files. 2.1 million actually imposed on the 61 resolved so far, 36 of them classed as very serious.
Worth separating those two numbers, because most coverage this week ran one or the other as the headline and they are not the same thing. Proposed is what has been put on the table. Imposed is what has landed.
Then the bit that changes how you should read all of it.
Guillem Ginard, the island's tourism councillor, said the first files go to the public prosecutor this autumn. Not for unlicensed letting. For disobedience.
The ladder works like this.
Since January the Consell has used an abbreviated illegality declaration, the DIA. It orders the activity to stop without waiting for the sanction file to finish. 60 opened, 54 already resolved.
The owner then has 10 days to stop and pull the advert. The same order goes to the platforms, so the listing comes down whether the owner acts or not.
Miss the deadline and daily coercive fines start, between 500 and 5,000 euros a day, under the tourism law changes the Balearic government brought in this summer.
Carry on after that and Ultima Hora and Ara Balears both report the file can be sent to the Fiscalia for a suspected offence of disobedience.
So the exposure that ends up in a criminal court does not attach to the letting. It attaches to the silence that follows the order.
England, Wales and Ireland are all standing up registers right now. A register is a list of addresses until somebody funds inspectors to work it. Mallorca has 31 inspectors and 17 more staff processing sanctions, paid for out of the tourist tax. That is the finished version of the thing the rest of us are currently filling in forms for.
One honest caveat. The Consell's own press release was not reachable when I checked, so the figures above are four named outlets reporting a named councillor at a named press conference, not the primary document.
The fine is the part you can budget for. The 10 days after the notice is the part you cannot.
If a takedown notice landed on one of your units tomorrow, who in your business opens it?
