Short-term rentals, in Italy and abroad, are creating increasingly complex situations from a housing point of view. In Vieste, 13 thousand residents on the Gargano, every year there are over 2 million tourist presences. The provisional data from the Puglia Regional Tourist Observatory count 1,526 accommodation facilities, around 48 thousand beds available every day and 933 “non-business rentals”, i.e. houses rented to tourists by private individuals without a VAT number. Those who live there say they can no longer find a 4+4 contract, and receive offers valid only for the winter months, with the obligation to vacate the apartment before the summer.
Vieste is not an isolated case: it is the extreme version of a phenomenon that affects all of Italy. To understand how important short-term rentals really are, we analyzed data from Inside Airbnb (an independent project that periodically extracts all the adverts published on the platform) relating to six Italian cities (Rome, Milan, Naples, Florence, Bologna, Venice) and four European cities (Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin), updated between the end of June and the beginning of July 2026. In total, over 218 thousand adverts. The result is that the Italian problem is not the absolute number of houses rented to tourists, but where they are concentrated and how much they yield compared to a traditional rental and the fact that there is still a lack of regulations in this sense.
How many short-term rentals are there in Italy: Florence, Rome and Milan in the lead
The first data concerns density, that is, how many advertisements exist per 1,000 inhabitants. It is the size that counts, because an apartment taken away from the residential market has greater weight in a small city than in a metropolis.
Rome has the highest absolute number, 34,409 advertisements, but distributed across 2.7 million inhabitants. Florence and Venice have respectively a third and a quarter of the ads of Rome, but almost triple the density.
And the internal concentration is even clearer. In Florence, 73.7% of all ads are in the historic center alone. In Rome 51.9% is in Municipality I, the central one so to speak. The same goes for Venice: 70.8% of the municipality’s advertisements are located in the districts of the historic centre. There are 5,960 apartments in the Serenissima compared to a population that fell below 48 thousand residents in August 2025, compared to over 62 thousand in 2005. It means one Airbnb advert for every 8 residents.
How much does an apartment on AirBnb make compared to a 4+4 rental
For each listing, we estimated the nights actually booked in the last 12 months using the Inside Airbnb model, which reconstructs bookings from reviews left (assuming that only one booking in two leaves a review) multiplied by the average length of stay, with a maximum limit of 255 nights per year. Applied to Rome, the model returns 88 average nights booked per listing, the same value published by Inside Airbnb.
Multiplying the estimated nights by the asking price gives the annual gross revenue. We compared it with what the same property (assuming 70 m²) would yield if rented long-term, at the rents per square meter recorded by Immobiliare.it Insights. The comparison only concerns entire apartments that have had at least one booking in the last year.
In Venice, almost 2 out of 3 apartments earn more on Airbnb than with an ordinary rental contract, and the median property earns over 7,700 euros more per year. In Rome half of the apartments are above the affordability threshold. The opposite case is Milan: it has 22 thousand adverts, but only 29% yield more than a long-term rental, because the Milanese rents (€22.6/m², the highest in Italy) bear comparison. In short, tourist pressure on the residential market bites especially where traditional rents are relatively low and tourist demand is very high: medium-sized art cities, not metropolises.
Two methodological clarifications: the estimated revenues are gross, net of taxes, platform commissions, cleaning and management, while the rental fee is also gross but with much lower management costs. And Immobiliare.it’s fees are prices requested in the adverts, not transaction values. The comparison indicates an order of magnitude of the economic incentive, not a calculation of net profitability. Furthermore, in the case of Venice, the rent of €16.1/m² is the average for the municipality, Mestre included: in the historic center the rents are higher and the real gap is therefore smaller than the raw data suggests.
Who really rents: small owners or professional managers
The political debate often revolves around the figure of the small owner who “rounds out the family budget” – this is the argument used in Puglia to ask for those with a maximum of two houses to be excluded from future limits. The data tells a more complex reality.
The share of adverts belonging to hosts with 3 or more properties is more than 50% in 5 out of 6 Italian cities. If you raise the bar to ten or more properties, it is still 39.8% of adverts in Milan and 30.8% in Florence. The largest single manager controls 477 advertisements in Milan, 260 in Rome, 250 in Florence.
The data is also relevant on a fiscal level, because the 2026 Budget Law (law 199/2025) has lowered the threshold of properties beyond which business activity is presumed from 4 to 2, with the third party having to register for a VAT number. The dry coupon remains at 21% on the first property and rises to 26% on the second.
On the regularity front, the National Identification Code (CIN) has been mandatory since 1 January 2025 and platforms must remove adverts that do not have it. In the July 2026 data, the share of ads without any license code is 16.8% in Naples, compared to 6% in Rome, 4.3% in Bologna, 4% in Florence, 2.6% in Venice and 1.2% in Milan.
House prices growing by 4% in the second quarter of 2026: the largest increase in Turin
The picture is part of a real estate market that continues to push upwards: the cause does not belong only to the widespread diffusion of B&Bs but is one of several. According to provisional data released by Istat, as of 17 September 2026, in the second quarter the house price index (IPAB) increased by 1.7% on the previous quarter and by 4.0% on an annual basis, decelerating compared to +5.1% in the first quarter. Both new homes (+5.0%) and existing ones (+3.7%) are growing.
The trend growth is more marked in the Center (+5.1%) and in the North-East (+4.2%), more limited in the North-West (+3.9%) and in the South and Islands (+2.6%). Among the cities, the greatest acceleration is in Turin, with +8.5% on an annual basis, followed by Rome (+6.4%, from +5.5%) and Milan, with a clear slowdown to +2.4% from +7.1%, especially due to the slowdown in new goods (from +20.1% to +1.1%).
The most significant detail, however, is another: all this takes place, writes Istat, “in a context of substantial stability in sales volumes”, with the Real Estate Market Observatory of the Revenue Agency recording a +0.1% trend in residential, against +4.4% in the previous quarter. Prices that rise while transactions stop: a market, therefore, in which the number of available homes is the critical factor, and is exactly the variable on which short-term rentals affect.
How Barcelona and Berlin get around short-term rental limits
The European comparison is the most instructive part of the analysis, but requires attention: the numbers must be read together with the local rules, otherwise they are misleading.
At first glance, Barcelona (5.8 adverts per 1,000 inhabitants) and Berlin (2.2) appear to have the phenomenon under control, with densities respectively 6 and 16 times lower than Florence. But looking at the “minimum stay” field something different emerges.
In Barcelona, 35.9% of adverts require more than 30 minimum nights, and these adverts are not distributed randomly: 2,644 ask for exactly 31 nights and 2,647 exactly 32. Together they make up 95.7% of all “long” adverts in the city. Catalan law defines tourist habitat the accommodation sold for periods equal to or less than 31 days: setting the minimum at 31 or 32 nights means exiting the definition of tourist rental, and therefore from the HUT licenses, the tourist tax and the 2028 deadline which will revoke the over 10 thousand existing licenses.
In Berlin, 33% of adverts exceed 30 nights, and 3,778 of these (89%) ask for exactly 92 nights, i.e. just over three months, the threshold beyond which the rental does not fall under the prohibition on distracted use (Zweckentfremdungsverbot), i.e. the prohibition on using an asset for a purpose or function different from that officially declared or authorised.
In Italy the same mechanism exists but it is marginal: in Rome the adverts over 30 nights are 7.5%, in Florence 6%, and are concentrated at 31 nights, just beyond the 30 day threshold which defines short-term rentals. In Amsterdam they are 0.5%, because the Dutch rule does not set a minimum number of nights, but a maximum of 30 nights per year for the main residence: a threshold that cannot be circumvented by extending the stay.
The correct reading, therefore, is not that Barcelona and Berlin have fewer homes taken away from their residents, but that a significant part of their assets has left the “short-term rental” category while remaining outside the ordinary residential market. This is the question that Inside Airbnb explicitly asks in its reports: is the shift towards long stays a response to new travel needs or a way to avoid the rules? The exact concentration on the values 31, 32 and 92 suggests the latter.
What does theAffordable Housing Act of the European Union
On 9 September 2026 the European Commission presented theAffordable Housing Actthe regulation which for the first time provides local authorities with a common framework to limit short-term rentals. It does not introduce bans: it sets out criteria to identify “areas under housing stress”, with the ratio of house prices to incomes as the key indicator.
However, the conditions are stringent. A Municipality wishing to intervene will have to demonstrate that short-term rental activity has significantly damaged the accessibility or availability of housing for at least 3 years, that less restrictive measures would not achieve the same result, and that it has already fully applied EU Regulation 2024/1028 on the registration of advertisements, in force from May 2026.
According to data cited by the Commission, short-term rentals represent around 1.2% of European housing stock, but up to 20% in the most exposed tourist locations, and activity on the main platforms grew by 93% between 2018 and 2024. In the same period, rents increased by 59% in Berlin and 103% in Lisbon. 40% of Europeans consider access to housing an urgent problem, a share that rises to 51% among those living in cities.
The proposal must now pass through Parliament and Council and can be modified. Airbnb has said the plan “will not add a single home to the long-term rental market”, and industry associations CCIA Europe and EU Travel Tech dispute the strength of the link between short-term rentals and the housing crisis.
What’s happening now in Italy
Italy does not have a national law that allows Municipalities to limit tourist rentals, and this is the crux. Florence has built its own regulation on urban planning tools: blocking new openings in the UNESCO area from May 2025, extended on 4 June 2026 to nine areas of the belt, with five-year authorizations linked to the individual property.
The Tuscany TAR confirmed the legitimacy of the regulation in May 2026. Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna have legislated at regional level and in both cases the Government has challenged the rules before the Constitutional Court. Puglia, third, brings its law to the Regional Council on 18 September 2026.
The result is a mosaic in which the same activity is regulated differently a few kilometers away, and in which the most exposed municipalities (those like Vieste, with 13 thousand residents and 48 thousand beds) are also those with the fewest tools to intervene.
