The Night Ledger: London’s Short-Let Cap and the Homes It Fails to Count

London’s 90-night rule is usually presented as a supply safeguard. Under the Deregulation Act 2015, an entire home in the capital can be let on a short-term basis for up to 90 nights in a calendar year without planning permission. Beyond that threshold, a host is expected to seek consent for a change of use. The logic is straightforward: short lets should be a sideline, not a substitute for long-term homes. In 2026, the evidence from borough enforcement teams, hosting platforms and residential streets suggests a different reality. The cap is functioning less as a supply valve than as a self-reported calendar—one that records nights declared, not homes protected.

A Cap That Relies on the Host’s Own Calendar

The first weakness is structural. The 90-night limit is not enforced at the point of listing. Platforms such as Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo do not routinely share entire-home booking data with London boroughs, and there is no compulsory registration system in England that would give councils a live picture of short-let activity. Instead, hosts are expected to keep their own records, and boroughs act when a complaint arrives. That makes compliance a matter of declaration rather than detection.

In practice, the calendar can be edited. A host can list a flat for 90 nights, remove it, relist it under a different account, or split the same property into separate room listings that fall outside the entire-home cap. Some properties are marketed to corporate clients through letting agents rather than consumer platforms, leaving an even fainter data trail. Others are let for ‘extended stays’ that sit awkwardly between a short break and an assured shorthold tenancy. None of this is necessarily unlawful, but each route makes the 90-night figure harder to verify.

Enforcement by Complaint, Not by Register

Borough planning departments are candid about the constraint. Enforcement is resource-intensive: an officer must establish the use, gather evidence of nights let, assess whether planning permission is required, and then pursue action that can take months. In 2026, the pattern of cases remains uneven. Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Camden record comparatively high numbers of short-let enforcement inquiries, reflecting both visitor demand and officer capacity. Several outer London boroughs, including Croydon, Barnet and Havering, report far fewer cases, even as short-let listings have grown in those areas.

That gap matters because short lets are no longer an inner-London phenomenon. The supply pressure has moved outward along transport corridors, into terraced streets and new-build blocks where a single flat removed from the long-term market can be felt by a family seeking a settled home. A borough with a small enforcement team and a large private rented sector may not see the cumulative effect until neighbours complain about key safes, late-night arrivals or bins left on the pavement.

Where the Supply Goes Missing

The relationship between short lets and long-term rental supply is not mechanical. Some hosts let a spare room; some use short lets to cover a void between tenancies; some are resident hosts who rely on visitor income to stay in their home. Those cases are part of the housing picture, not apart from it. The affordability question is one of concentration. When entire flats in a block or street are used predominantly for short stays, the long-term rental stock shrinks, and the rents for what remains can rise.

A private renter in Hackney, who asked not to be named, described viewing a two-bedroom flat that had previously been listed on a short-let platform. ‘The agent said it was available for a year, but the furniture and the key safe were still there,’ she said. ‘It felt like we were borrowing someone else’s business.’ A host in Croydon, by contrast, said the 90-night limit was ‘a suggestion rather than a rule’ and that short lets helped cover mortgage costs after a change in circumstances. Both accounts can be true. The difficulty for policy is that the first places pressure on affordability, while the second attracts sympathy and political caution.

The Community Ledger

Short lets also leave a community ledger that is harder to quantify than rent levels. Neighbours report disrupted entrances, unclear waste arrangements and a reduced sense of who lives on the street. In buildings with a high turnover of visitors, residents may find it harder to organise a tenants’ association or raise routine management issues. These effects are not unique to London, but they are sharpened by the capital’s density and by the premium that visitor accommodation can command.

The community impact is not evenly spread. In some outer London neighbourhoods, short lets support local shops and provide income for resident hosts. In others, the conversion of family homes into de facto hotels changes the character of a street without any planning decision being made in public. That is the planning gap the 90-night rule was meant to close. In 2026, it closes it only where someone complains.

What Would Make the Rule Real

The case for a compulsory short-let register is not new, but the enforcement data make it more urgent. A register would not stop every loophole, but it would give boroughs a baseline: which properties are let short-term, for how many nights, and through which platforms. Combined with a duty on platforms to share booking data and a clearer planning definition for entire-home short lets, it would shift enforcement from complaint-led guesswork to routine monitoring.

None of this would remove the need for judgment. London needs visitor accommodation, and it needs resident hosts who can make a modest income. But it also needs a rental supply that is visible and accountable. The 90-night cap was designed as a boundary between those needs. In 2026, the boundary is being drawn on a calendar that few outside the host’s own dashboard can see. Until that changes, the short-let debate will keep counting nights while missing homes.