Letting a Cyprus property on Airbnb or Booking is legal, but only after the property is entered on the Register of Self-Catering Accommodation kept by the Deputy Ministry of Tourism and the registration number appears in the listing. The fee is €222 and the licence runs for three years. Renting or advertising without one is a criminal offence carrying up to a year's imprisonment, a fine of up to €5,000, or both, plus a further €200 for every day the letting continues after conviction.
What counts as self-catering accommodation
The regime sits in Part IIIA of the Regulation of the Establishment and Operation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodations Law, Law 34(I)/2019, inserted by the amending Law 9(I)/2020. Section 16A covers a standalone furnished tourist villa, a house, or an apartment that qualifies as a "unit" under the Immovable Property (Tenure, Registration and Valuation) Law, where the building is not itself a hotel or a licensed tourist establishment.
Two limits in that definition catch people out. The property has to be let as a whole villa, residence or unit and not a part of one, so the spare room in the flat you live in cannot be registered, and therefore cannot lawfully be advertised. And a building whose building permit is for a hotel or tourist establishment is barred from the self-catering register outright; it needs an operating licence under a different part of the Law.
The Fifth Schedule sorts everything else into three categories. Furnished tourist villas have independent external access and their own plot and garden. Furnished tourist residences are terraced houses or houses in a complex, and the Schedule specifically excludes anything reached by a shared staircase from this category. Apartments form the third. None of the three are graded into star classes. Capacity is capped at ten people for a house with four or five bedrooms, and anything above three bedrooms needs a second full bathroom.
What registration actually takes
You apply online through the Deputy Ministry, pay the €222, and sign a solemn declaration confirming three things: that you are registered with the Tax Department (a tax identification code, and a VAT number where the legislation requires one), that the property meets the minimum technical and operational specifications, and that it carries insurance against all risks, against fire, and for public liability.
Two attachments go with it. The first page of the title deed, building permit or planning permit for the declared category, and a recent Electricity Authority bill. Where several units in a complex share one electricity account, the local authority has to confirm that the apartments or villas are autonomous.
The specifications themselves are not demanding: a living area, a sleeping area which may be combined with it as a studio, a kitchen or kitchenette with mechanical extraction, a bathroom, air conditioning that both heats and cools, hot and cold water throughout, drainage as the building permit allows, and one parking space per residence in a complex. The Deputy Ministry then has two months from the date the declaration is filed to approve the application or refuse it with reasons.
Approval produces a special label and a registration number, and the first licence lasts three years from the date of issue. Renewal is not automatic. The application and the renewal fee have to be in within the three months before the existing licence expires, and the Law requires the licence to be in force for the whole time the property is operating.
The number has to appear in the listing
Section 16A(2) is the provision that does the work. An owner, beneficial user or operator may advertise or let a self-catering property only if it is on the register and has a registration number, and that number must appear in the advertisement, in the promotion of the property, and in all related transactions. The same subsection bans the platform, as well as the owner, from listing a property that has not obtained a number.
Section 22(1)(b) then makes it an offence to operate a self-catering property without a registration licence, or after the licence has been revoked. That is the €5,000 and one-year provision, with €200 a day on top for continuing after conviction. On conviction the court can also order the operation to stop within a period not exceeding two months, and the district police can enforce that order by sealing the property. Breaking the seals carries up to two years or €5,000.
The Deputy Ministry does not have to go to court to act. Section 23 lets it impose an administrative fine of €2,000 for a breach of the Law, rising to €4,000 where the breach is repeated or continues. You get between three and twenty-one days to make written representations first, and the decision can be appealed to the Minister within twenty days and then to the Administrative Court. Section 21 allows an inspection at any time, on the Deputy Ministry's own initiative, to check that the licence exists and its terms are being kept.
Section 16A(3) adds revocation, available where the licence was obtained on false information, where an inspection finds a required certificate has not been renewed, where breaches are repeated, or where the operator is convicted of one of a listed set of offences running from theft and forgery to fraud and drug offences.
What changed on 20 May 2026
Regulation (EU) 2024/1028, adopted on 11 April 2024, has applied across the EU since 20 May 2026. It standardises host registration and requires platforms to check the registration number shown in a listing and to pass activity data to national authorities through a single digital entry point.
Cyprus brought it in with Law 184(I)/2025, which came into force on the same date and added a new Part IIIB. Section 16B obliges both the person managing a unit offered for short-term letting on a platform and the platform provider, wherever it is established, to comply with the Regulation, and makes the Deputy Ministry of Tourism the competent authority. Section 22A backs that up with penalties aimed at the platforms: up to two years' imprisonment or a fine of up to €20,000, and up to €1,000 for each day a repeated breach continues.
For a host, the practical change is that the number in your listing is now checked against the register at source rather than by occasional spot checks.
Tax: a registered short let is a business
The Tax Department settled the treatment in Circular 10/2023, issued on 13 September 2023. Where the property is registered (or ought to be registered) on the self-catering register, the owner is registered for VAT and charges 9% on the income, and the property is let short-term on a recurring basis and normally to different people, the income is trading income rather than passive rent.
That classification matters more than it sounds. Business income lets you deduct what the operation actually costs, cleaning, platform commission, utilities, insurance, repairs and capital allowances, instead of the flat 20% statutory deduction that applies to an ordinary tenancy under the rules covered in our guide to Cyprus rental laws. Special Defence Contribution on rents was abolished from 2026 in any event.
VAT registration becomes compulsory once taxable turnover passes €15,600 in any twelve-month period, and short-stay accommodation falls in the 9% reduced band rather than the standard 19%, as our guide to VAT in Cyprus sets out. Plenty of smaller hosts register voluntarily below the threshold, because the circular's second condition assumes a VAT registration. Income tax then runs on the normal scale, with nothing due on the first €22,000 and 35% above €72,000, and the General Healthcare System takes 2.65%. The Cyprus income tax calculator will model the bands.
How well any of this is enforced
Thinly, on the evidence. The Audit Office reported in 2026 that 8,464 self-catering properties were on the register as at 6 May 2026. In a sample of twenty listings taken from the platforms, six matched the register with a valid licence, ten showed no registration number at all, and in four the number displayed did not match the Deputy Ministry's records.
The same report tied those gaps to the block of flats that collapsed in Germasogeia on 11 April 2026. Three registered self-catering apartments were operating in it. The building had been declared unsafe by the local authority in March, but nobody told the Deputy Ministry, so the units stayed on the register and stayed bookable. The Deputy Ministry has said it will lean on Regulation 2024/1028 and bring forward a bill requiring certifications and on-site inspections, which means the framework described here is under review.
The demand is not going anywhere. Eurostat recorded 1,711,525 guest nights in Cyprus booked through Airbnb, Booking and Expedia in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 30.1% on the same quarter of 2024 and the second sharpest rise in the EU after Malta.
One last point of confusion worth clearing. Law 110(I)/2026 gives hotels and tourist accommodation operating without a licence until 31 December 2026 to obtain a certificate of operation. That transitional route is for buildings permitted as hotels, and does nothing for an unregistered self-catering flat.
Letting a Cyprus property short-term? Register before you advertise, not after the first booking. A property lawyer from our directory can check whether the building's permit allows registration at all and what the licence terms commit you to. Figures and provisions here reflect the law in force in August 2026 and are general information rather than advice on a particular property.