An owner asked me in June whether his flats were legal. He had a registration number, a full calendar, and a folder from his gestor he had never opened. I could not answer him from those three things, and neither could he. The number he was leaning on had been annulled three weeks earlier.
Madrid regulates the same flat three times over, through three authorities under no obligation to agree with each other. One of the three has just been taken away.
Three doors, three answers
Spain ran the single rental register. From July 2025 a short-term let needed a number from it before a platform would list you, and everybody had this one, because Booking and Airbnb enforced it for you.1 It was also the weakest of the three. It proved you filed, not that you were allowed.
It is now gone. On 19 May 2026 the Supreme Court annulled the registration procedure, holding that the State had no competence to run a national register on top of the ones the regions already keep. The ruling took effect on publication in the BOE on 8 June.2 What survived is the digital ventanilla única and the platforms' duty to hand over data. What died is the number itself. If you filed for one, you spent a year complying with something that no longer exists, which is worth knowing before you treat the other two doors the same way.
The Comunidad de Madrid decides what the flat has to be. Its rooms, its capacity, its paperwork. That was Decreto 79/2014, and Decreto 27/2026 rewrote a large part of it in April.3
The Ayuntamiento decides whether the activity may happen in that building at all. That is planning, and it is the Plan RESIDE, approved at the end of August 2025 and in force from its publication that September.4
A number from the first never satisfied the second. Satisfying the second does not get you the third. The most recent count puts about 12,600 flats advertised on the platforms against 1,170 holding a municipal licence, which tells you how often the two line up.5
The clause almost nobody has read
Article 18 sets how many people a flat may sleep. It used to read like this. Under 25 m² of useful floor area, two people. Between 25 and 40 m², four people in at least two habitable rooms. Then two more people for every additional 10 m², each needing another independent habitable room.
It now starts at 25.50 m² and runs to 40 m² for four people. Above that you get two more people for every additional 12 m², still needing another habitable room each time.6
Two things are buried in there. The band for flats under 25 m² was not tightened, it was deleted, so there is no capacity a very small flat is allowed to have at all. And the step went from 10 m² to 12 m², which quietly takes beds off larger flats. On paper a 60 m² flat drops from eight places to six. A 70 m² flat drops from ten to eight.
If you price by head, that is not a technicality. That is your revenue line.
There is one line of relief, in the paragraph straight after. Two convertible places are allowed in the living room, including where the kitchen is integrated into it, provided the size and the layout permit. They count towards the maximum rather than sitting on top of it.6 Whether that gets a bed back depends on the floor plan, not on the fitting out.
You have three years, whatever you have read
Several summaries say the new sizes apply now and there is no grace period. The decree says otherwise. Anything already operating on a filed declaration has three years from 26 April to meet articles 10, 14, 17 quáter and 18, and article 18 is the one carrying the sizes. You can also ask to be excused particular requirements.7
The catch is in the next paragraph. Do a substantial refurbishment before those three years are up and the new standard applies to you immediately. So the flat you were going to refit in spring is the flat that loses its three years.
Who the decree is written at
The old text spoke of the titular de la vivienda, the holder of the dwelling. The new one speaks of the titular de la actividad, the holder of the activity. That change runs right through it, including in the article headings.8
If you manage other people's flats, the name on the declaration may now be yours, and so is everything that follows from it. Two smaller changes point the same way. A community of owners can approve, condition or prohibit the activity in its building, and town halls can now cap how many flats a building or a zone is allowed.
What the city did first
Plan RESIDE is the harder of the two that are left, and the city started moving on this well before it arrived. In the historic centre, tourist flats scattered through residential buildings are finished. Not restricted, not allowed. Outside the centre they survive where there is independent access at ground or first floor.
New licences have been suspended since April 2024, under the transitional plan that ran until RESIDE replaced it. Inspections went from 481 in 2024 to 588 in 2025. Fines for operating without a licence run 30,001 euros, then 60,001, then 100,001.
The number I would act on
Madrid had 22,435 tourist flats in August 2024 and 13,431 in May 2026. That is nine thousand gone in eighteen months, the steepest fall of any city in Spain.5 Deregistrations from the regional register were 1,153 in 2024 and 3,053 in 2025.
That is not a market being killed. It is a market sorting itself, mostly by people who did the arithmetic and left before somebody did it for them.
If you run flats here, this month's work is one sheet with four columns. Municipal position, useful floor area, independent habitable rooms, and the date you last checked any of it. Most operators I meet fill in the first from memory and go quiet on the rest.
I am not a lawyer and this is not advice. All of it comes from the decree and the ruling rather than from a summary of either, which I would recommend to anyone before they move anything. I started this piece with two published summaries that contradicted each other on the numbers, and both were describing a rule that had already changed. The register section is the sharpest version of that problem. Plenty of what is written about it online still describes an obligation the Supreme Court removed in June.
Notes
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Real Decreto 1312/2024, de 23 de diciembre, which created the Registro Único de Arrendamientos and the Ventanilla Única Digital. Text in the BOE. The registration obligation applied from 1 July 2025. ↩
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Tribunal Supremo, sentencia 620/2026, de 19 de mayo de 2026, published in the BOE on 8 June 2026. Press release from the Consejo General del Poder Judicial. The annulment reaches the registration procedure only. The ventanilla única, the platforms' duty to transmit data and the statistical reporting were left standing. ↩
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Decreto 27/2026, de 25 de marzo, modifying Decreto 79/2014, de 10 de julio. Full text as published in the BOCM of 6 April 2026. Its disposición final segunda sets entry into force at twenty days after publication, which is 26 April 2026. ↩
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Plan RESIDE, the modification of the Plan General that replaced the Plan Especial de Hospedaje of 2019. Definitively approved by the Consejo de Gobierno of the Comunidad de Madrid on 27 August 2025 (expediente 135-2024-00206) and published in the BOCM on 22 September 2025. The city's own page on viviendas de uso turístico. ↩
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INE figures for flats advertised on the platforms, set against the municipal register of licences. Reported here. The two count different things. The INE number is flats visible on Airbnb, Booking and Vrbo, the municipal number is licences granted, so the gap between them is not all illegality. It is still the closest thing to a like-for-like that gets published. ↩ ↩2
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Decreto 27/2026, new article 18.4: "Para viviendas entre veinticinco metros con cincuenta centímetros cuadrados útiles y cuarenta metros cuadrados útiles, hasta cuatro personas en, al menos, dos piezas habitables. Por cada doce metros cuadrados útiles adicionales en, al menos, una pieza habitable más independiente, se permitirán dos personas más." The convertible places follow in the same paragraph, "que computarán para la capacidad máxima de la vivienda". BOCM, 6 April 2026. ↩ ↩2
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Disposición transitoria of the same decree: existing activity declared by declaración responsable has "el plazo de tres años desde la entrada en vigor del decreto para adaptarse a lo establecido en los artículos 10, 14, 17 quáter y 18", and may request a dispensa under article 7. The substantial refurbishment exception is in its second paragraph. ↩
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The shift is visible in article 18.4 itself, which opens "Los titulares de la actividad de alojamiento turístico respetarán las siguientes capacidades máximas", where the old text addressed the holder of the dwelling. ↩