This page is the hub for GuestGuru's dossier on unlicensed hosts: six briefs that use measured data to show how large unlicensed short-term rental is in Budapest, who it harms, and what can be done about it. Every figure comes from BPDB, GuestGuru's own market database, which merges the district councils' accommodation registers, the NTAK register and listings on Airbnb and Booking.com.¹

Why we are doing this

GuestGuru manages short-term rentals on behalf of Budapest homeowners. Day after day we watch law-abiding hosts compete against operators who obtain no permit and pay no tax. We believe that unlicensed letting is one of the market's biggest problems, and that today's regulation approaches the question from the wrong end.

Terézváros showed why. Private accommodation letting has been banned in the district since 1 January 2026, yet seven months later 864 listings are running there, three-quarters of them unlicensed.¹ As long as unlicensed operators cannot be shut down, every restriction and tax increase falls on those who follow the rules: it cuts back legal supply, leaves the unlicensed host in place, and hands them a competitive advantage. That is a disadvantage for legal hosts, lost revenue for the city, and — we believe — bad business for Budapest tourism as it competes with the neighbouring capitals.

This is why we propose reversing the order: clean up the market first, then measure how much of a problem is left.

The situation in six numbers

15,125 active short-term rental listings are running in Budapest, 4,952 of them unlicensed¹
76.5% is the share of unlicensed listings in Terézváros, where letting has been banned since January¹
72,200 guest nights disappeared from District VI in a single quarter; hotels absorbed less than a quarter of the loss²
HUF 1.3–3.1 billion is the estimated annual tax shortfall, depending on the method³⁴
97.2% is the share of operators running at most three properties: this market is made up of families and small businesses, not large corporations⁵
nearly 9× as many Budapest homes stand genuinely empty (95,320) as are let short-term (10,703);⁶⁷ the derivation is on a separate page: Budapest's empty homes

The briefs

Six versions were written from the same factual base, each for a different reader:

	For whom	What it gives you
Plain-language version	for hosts, residents and building managers	What we measured, what happened after we reported it, and what you can do — without the jargon
Policy brief	for policy work	Two or three pages, the seven proposals with their reasoning
Decision-maker brief	for decision-makers	The full material: methodology, international precedents, timeline, risks
Press background	for journalists	The story, with quotable statements, and eight questions worth following up
Short press summary	for journalists with five minutes	The story, six numbers and the proposals, in two pages
Fact sheet	anyone with one page to spare	Eleven numbers, three claims, three requests

Each covers the same argument, only at a different length and in a different register. If you read just one, the press background contains the whole story.

The argument in one paragraph

Budapest has 15,125 active short-term rental listings, 4,952 of them unlicensed.¹ Districts restrict the supply they can see — but they cannot see a third of it. So the cap cuts back the legal operator, leaves the unlicensed one in place, and even hands them a tax advantage. Terézváros demonstrated this in real time. This is why we propose reversing the order: clean up the market first, then measure how much of a problem is left.

What we propose

The detailed package of proposals is in the policy brief and the decision-maker brief. Its core is three steps:

Market clean-up first. Identify unlicensed listings and have them removed from the platforms before any new restriction or tax increase arrives. Our test on the Booking side shows that the platform cooperates when there is someone to cooperate with: it removed the reported listings within six days.
Give the platforms someone to negotiate with. Today 23 district clerks supervise the Budapest market, and there is not a single body that negotiates with the platforms.
A uniform tax base and filing regime, so that automatic tax collection by the platforms can begin. Bratislava has had this in place since 2021,⁸ and in France the tourist tax collected more than doubled in the first year of mandatory platform collection.⁹

Contact

Questions, interviews, data requests: hello@guest.guru. The measurement methodology and the correspondence with the authorities are available on request.

Sources

Links were checked on 13 August 2026. The academic publishers' sites (ScienceDirect, Wiley, Emerald) may require a subscription for the full text; the citation and the DOI identify the study without them.

BPDB (Budapest Database), GuestGuru Kft.'s own market database. A merge of the district councils' accommodation registers, the NTAK register (Hungary's National Tourism Data Supply Centre) and listings on Airbnb and Booking.com. Queried on 12 August 2026.↩
Csorba György: Rövid távú szálláskiadás 2 [Short-term rental 2]. Infojegyzet 2026/6, Office of the National Assembly, Information Service for Members of Parliament, 1 June 2026. Data source for Figure 2: HCSO Dissemination database, GB2012. https://www.parlament.hu/infoszolgThe Infojegyzet publishes the figure but does not link it to the Terézváros ban, and does not draw this conclusion from it. The data belongs to Parliament; the interpretation is ours.↩
AirDNA estimated last-twelve-months revenue (revenue_ltm) for the active Airbnb listings flagged as unlicensed in BPDB. Queried on 12 August 2026.AirDNA estimates rather than measures; the error of the estimate is unknown.↩
Act CXVII of 1995 on Personal Income Tax. From 1 January 2025 the itemised flat-rate tax for private individuals providing paying-guest accommodation is HUF 150,000 per habitable room per year in municipalities where the number of guest nights exceeded 2 million in the second year preceding the tax year. Budapest is such a municipality. https://njt.hu/jogszabaly/1995-117-00-00 https://nav.gov.hu/ado/szja/A_fizetovendeglatokat_erinto_valtozasokSection 57/A(4c) of the Act obliges the tax authority (NAV) to publish the list of affected municipalities by 31 January each year. In 2025 Budapest is the only entry on that list. A private individual may elect the itemised flat-rate tax for at most three properties; companies are taxed differently. The definition of a "habitable room" differs between NAV, NTAK and some district councils.↩
The public accommodation registers of the Budapest district councils, loaded into BPDB. 12,445 permits, assigned to 8,081 named providers. Queried on 13 August 2026.An aggregation based on provider names. It groups by identical names, so it cannot see ownership links: actual concentration may be higher than this, not lower.↩
HCSO 2022 census database, table WBL018, HU11 (Budapest): 961,061 dwellings, of which 800,338 occupied and 160,723 unoccupied (16.7%). Queryable without authentication. https://nepszamlalas2022.ksh.hu/adatbazis/The figure of 170,000 circulating in the press is the HCSO's 2023 preliminary release; the final database gives 160,723. Nationally the same correction went from 599,000 to 571,997.↩
BPDB, measurement deduplicated to unique NTAK identifiers, August 2026. The 14,602 dwelling-type Airbnb and Booking listings map to 9,415 unique properties (on average 1.55 listings per dwelling); at dwelling level there are 10,703 units let short-term, of which 6,703 are compliant and about 4,000 unlicensed (39%).The difference between the listing-level numbers (15,825 active listings, 5,374 unlicensed, 34%) and the dwelling-level ones is deduplication: the same dwelling may advertise on several platforms. The two levels must not be mixed.↩
City of Bratislava signs agreement on automated collection of taxes. Airbnb Newsroom. In force from 1 July 2021; this was the first such agreement in the Visegrád Four. https://news.airbnb.com/city-of-bratislava-signs-agreement-on-automated-collection-of-taxes ↩
Airbnb remits €58 million in tourist tax to French municipalities for 2019. Airbnb Newsroom, December 2019. https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-remits-e58-million-in-tourist-tax-to-french-municipalities-for-2019/A figure published by Airbnb. The 2018–2019 jump is a clean signal because the set of municipalities did not change in the meantime.↩

Why we are doing this

This is why we propose reversing the order: clean up the market first, then measure how much of a problem is left.

The situation in six numbers

15,125 active short-term rental listings are running in Budapest, 4,952 of them unlicensed¹
76.5% is the share of unlicensed listings in Terézváros, where letting has been banned since January¹
72,200 guest nights disappeared from District VI in a single quarter; hotels absorbed less than a quarter of the loss²
HUF 1.3–3.1 billion is the estimated annual tax shortfall, depending on the method³⁴
97.2% is the share of operators running at most three properties: this market is made up of families and small businesses, not large corporations⁵
nearly 9× as many Budapest homes stand genuinely empty (95,320) as are let short-term (10,703);⁶⁷ the derivation is on a separate page: Budapest's empty homes

The briefs

Six versions were written from the same factual base, each for a different reader:

	For whom	What it gives you
Plain-language version	for hosts, residents and building managers	What we measured, what happened after we reported it, and what you can do — without the jargon
Policy brief	for policy work	Two or three pages, the seven proposals with their reasoning
Decision-maker brief	for decision-makers	The full material: methodology, international precedents, timeline, risks
Press background	for journalists	The story, with quotable statements, and eight questions worth following up
Short press summary	for journalists with five minutes	The story, six numbers and the proposals, in two pages
Fact sheet	anyone with one page to spare	Eleven numbers, three claims, three requests

Each covers the same argument, only at a different length and in a different register. If you read just one, the press background contains the whole story.

The argument in one paragraph

What we propose

The detailed package of proposals is in the policy brief and the decision-maker brief. Its core is three steps:

Market clean-up first. Identify unlicensed listings and have them removed from the platforms before any new restriction or tax increase arrives. Our test on the Booking side shows that the platform cooperates when there is someone to cooperate with: it removed the reported listings within six days.
Give the platforms someone to negotiate with. Today 23 district clerks supervise the Budapest market, and there is not a single body that negotiates with the platforms.
A uniform tax base and filing regime, so that automatic tax collection by the platforms can begin. Bratislava has had this in place since 2021,⁸ and in France the tourist tax collected more than doubled in the first year of mandatory platform collection.⁹

Contact

Questions, interviews, data requests: hello@guest.guru. The measurement methodology and the correspondence with the authorities are available on request.

Sources

BPDB (Budapest Database), GuestGuru Kft.'s own market database. A merge of the district councils' accommodation registers, the NTAK register (Hungary's National Tourism Data Supply Centre) and listings on Airbnb and Booking.com. Queried on 12 August 2026.↩
Csorba György: Rövid távú szálláskiadás 2 [Short-term rental 2]. Infojegyzet 2026/6, Office of the National Assembly, Information Service for Members of Parliament, 1 June 2026. Data source for Figure 2: HCSO Dissemination database, GB2012. https://www.parlament.hu/infoszolgThe Infojegyzet publishes the figure but does not link it to the Terézváros ban, and does not draw this conclusion from it. The data belongs to Parliament; the interpretation is ours.↩
AirDNA estimated last-twelve-months revenue (revenue_ltm) for the active Airbnb listings flagged as unlicensed in BPDB. Queried on 12 August 2026.AirDNA estimates rather than measures; the error of the estimate is unknown.↩
Act CXVII of 1995 on Personal Income Tax. From 1 January 2025 the itemised flat-rate tax for private individuals providing paying-guest accommodation is HUF 150,000 per habitable room per year in municipalities where the number of guest nights exceeded 2 million in the second year preceding the tax year. Budapest is such a municipality. https://njt.hu/jogszabaly/1995-117-00-00 https://nav.gov.hu/ado/szja/A_fizetovendeglatokat_erinto_valtozasokSection 57/A(4c) of the Act obliges the tax authority (NAV) to publish the list of affected municipalities by 31 January each year. In 2025 Budapest is the only entry on that list. A private individual may elect the itemised flat-rate tax for at most three properties; companies are taxed differently. The definition of a "habitable room" differs between NAV, NTAK and some district councils.↩
The public accommodation registers of the Budapest district councils, loaded into BPDB. 12,445 permits, assigned to 8,081 named providers. Queried on 13 August 2026.An aggregation based on provider names. It groups by identical names, so it cannot see ownership links: actual concentration may be higher than this, not lower.↩
HCSO 2022 census database, table WBL018, HU11 (Budapest): 961,061 dwellings, of which 800,338 occupied and 160,723 unoccupied (16.7%). Queryable without authentication. https://nepszamlalas2022.ksh.hu/adatbazis/The figure of 170,000 circulating in the press is the HCSO's 2023 preliminary release; the final database gives 160,723. Nationally the same correction went from 599,000 to 571,997.↩
BPDB, measurement deduplicated to unique NTAK identifiers, August 2026. The 14,602 dwelling-type Airbnb and Booking listings map to 9,415 unique properties (on average 1.55 listings per dwelling); at dwelling level there are 10,703 units let short-term, of which 6,703 are compliant and about 4,000 unlicensed (39%).The difference between the listing-level numbers (15,825 active listings, 5,374 unlicensed, 34%) and the dwelling-level ones is deduplication: the same dwelling may advertise on several platforms. The two levels must not be mixed.↩
City of Bratislava signs agreement on automated collection of taxes. Airbnb Newsroom. In force from 1 July 2021; this was the first such agreement in the Visegrád Four. https://news.airbnb.com/city-of-bratislava-signs-agreement-on-automated-collection-of-taxes ↩
Airbnb remits €58 million in tourist tax to French municipalities for 2019. Airbnb Newsroom, December 2019. https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-remits-e58-million-in-tourist-tax-to-french-municipalities-for-2019/A figure published by Airbnb. The 2018–2019 jump is a clean signal because the set of municipalities did not change in the meantime.↩

The unlicensed rentals dossier

Why we are doing this

The situation in six numbers

The briefs

The argument in one paragraph

What we propose

Contact

Sources

The unlicensed rentals dossier

Why we are doing this

The situation in six numbers

The briefs

The argument in one paragraph

What we propose

Contact

Sources