A third of Budapest's short-term rental listings are unlicensed
And the tightening rules are precisely the ones that do not touch them. GuestGuru Kft., August 2026
Eleven numbers
| 15,125 | active short-term rental listings in Budapest (Airbnb 9,033, Booking 6,092) |
| 4,952 | of those are unlicensed: no NTAK number, a non-existent one, or a stolen one. 32.7% of the supply |
| 2,764 | listings that display an identifier which does not exist in the register |
| 1,472 | listings that give no identifier at all, although it has been mandatory for two and a half years |
| approx. HUF 3.1bn | of tax lost each year: tourist tax, tourism development contribution and the itemised flat-rate tax.1 Of this, HUF 1.3bn is the measured base (Airbnb, two tax types), the rest is an estimate |
| 97.2% | of operators have at most 3 properties, and they account for 72.2% of all properties.2 This is a market of families |
| 82.7% | of operators have exactly one property, and every second property is theirs.2 |
| 661 | unlicensed listings in District VI, seven months after the total ban. 76.5% of local supply |
| −72,200 | guest nights in District VI in a single quarter. Hotels absorbed 24% of the loss |
| −22.8% | in District VI's tourist tax revenue in the first half of 2026, a shortfall of HUF 280 million |
| 9× | nearly nine times as many Budapest homes stand genuinely empty (95,320) as are let short-term (10,703).34 The housing crisis is not here |
Source: BPDB5 · HCSO data from the Hungarian Parliament's Infojegyzet 2026/66 · district tourist tax series7 · AirDNA8 · statement of the Hungarian Hospitality Employers' Association9 · derivation of the empty-homes figures10
Three claims
1. The order is wrong. Districts restrict the supply they can see. 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.
2. Terézváros showed what this costs. After the ban, three-quarters of the listings still running in the district are unlicensed. Meanwhile 72,000 guest nights and HUF 280 million in tax revenue disappeared, and hospitality turnover fell by 30 per cent. The guests did not move to hotels: hotels absorbed less than a quarter of the loss. The same happened in New York, only on a larger scale, and there rents did not fall either.1112 A 2022 study in the American Economic Review measures the same thing: 49–70 per cent of Airbnb guests would not have booked a hotel, and in peak season 87 per cent.13 Valued at the HCSO's average daily spend, the 72,200 lost guest nights amount to roughly HUF 2.35 billion in visitor spending, in a single quarter.14
3. The authorities cannot act, because the circle closes. When strangers began advertising with one of our clients' NTAK numbers, we approached four authorities. The accommodation classification body, NTAK and the tax authority all sent us to the district clerk. The clerk's office replied only that "the numbers have been corrected"; we were given no information about any sanction. Three months, five authorities, and to this day we do not know whether proceedings were ever opened. In the end Booking.com removed the listings, in six days, on the basis of a web form.
Three requests
1. Clean up the market first, restrict afterwards. Let us first uncover the unlawful operations, then measure how much of a problem is left.
2. One Budapest-level enforcement point instead of 23 district clerks. Two or three people holding the data and the platform relationship in one pair of hands. Let them request from Airbnb and Booking the booking data of unlicensed hosts for the past three to four years: from that point on, enforcement pays for itself. EU Regulation 2024/1028, applicable since 20 May 2026, already provides the legal basis.15
3. A uniform Budapest tourist tax base. Today 23 districts calculate it in 23 different ways, which is why platforms cannot collect the tax. In France, when the rule became uniform, the tax collected across the same set of municipalities jumped from €24 million to €58 million.16 Bratislava has 17 boroughs, yet a single city decree governs them all, and Airbnb has collected the tax automatically since 2021.17
We will hand over BPDB free of charge, with access for the authorities. The system is built and running: it shows on a map what is wrong with each listing, broken down by district and by operator.
GuestGuru Kft. manages 180 homes in Budapest. We are not an authority and we do not want to play volunteer police. Our interest goes only this far: that operating lawfully should not be a competitive disadvantage, and that regulation should not punish compliant accommodation instead of the non-compliant ones.
hello@guest.guru · Révay utca 6. fszt. 7, 1065 Budapest
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.
- 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.↩
- BPDB (Budapest Database), GuestGuru Kft.'s own market database. A merge of the district councils' accommodation registers, the NTAK register 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.↩
- Tourist tax and accommodation revenue series of Budapest District VI (Terézváros), updated on 29 July 2026.↩
- 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.↩
- Eltűntek a turisták, bajban vannak a terézvárosi éttermek [The tourists are gone, Terézváros restaurants are in trouble]. Turizmus.com, 24 June 2026, based on a statement by the Hungarian Hospitality Employers' Association (MVI). https://turizmus.com/cikk/vendeglatas/terezvaros-ettermek-fprgalomcsokkenes-airbnb-tiltas-mvi-eltuntek-a-turistak↩
- GuestGuru: Budapest's empty homes. The full derivation of the housing-stock breakdown, its methodology and downloadable charts. /en/feketezok/ures-lakasok↩
- Local Law 18 of 2022, New York City (Short-Term Rental Registration Law). Enforcement began on 5 September 2023. The law is applied by the city's Office of Special Enforcement. https://www.nyc.gov/site/specialenforcement/index.page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Law_18_of_2022The second link is a summary article, not a primary source. The official text of the law is available in the New York City Council's legislative records.↩
- NYC's Airbnb ban failed to lower rents. AOL / The Wall Street Journal analysis based on CoStar and Miller Samuel data, September 2025. https://www.aol.com/news/nyc-airbnb-ban-failed-lower-212121367.htmlA press analysis based on market data, not a peer-reviewed study. We found no peer-reviewed causal study of the effect on rents.↩
- Chiara Farronato – Andrey Fradkin: The Welfare Effects of Peer Entry: The Case of Airbnb and the Accommodation Industry. American Economic Review, 112(6): 1782-1817, 2022. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20180260. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180260 https://andreyfradkin.com/assets/airbnb_welfare_paper.pdf↩
- HCSO STADAT 27.2.1.2: Number of foreign trips to Hungary and the related expenditure by length of stay, quarterly. Q1 2026, multi-day trips: 1,492 thousand trips, 4,496 thousand days spent, HUF 146,787 million of expenditure, i.e. HUF 32,600 per day. Updated on 5 June 2026. https://www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/tur/hu/tur0043.htmlA national average across all foreign multi-day visitors, and it includes accommodation charges. Q1 is the weakest season. A visitor day and a guest night in commercial accommodation are not the same concept, so the value derived from this is an order-of-magnitude estimate.↩
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 April 2024 on data collection and data sharing relating to short-term accommodation rental services. Applicable from 20 May 2026. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32024R1028↩
- 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.↩
- Tourist tax. Bratislava.sk, queried on 12 August 2026. A single city decree with two bands: €3.50 in the Old Town and €3.00 in the other boroughs, per person per night. https://bratislava.sk/en/city-of-bratislava/taxes-and-levies/tourist-tax↩