Madrid Restricted Tourist Apartments. Landlords Are Pivoting — But the Legal Picture Is Murkier Than It Looks.

Madrid City Hall spent two years writing Plan Reside, got it approved in August 2025, and promptly watched 2,600 Airbnb listings disappear. Bureaucracy working exactly as intended. Case closed.

Except: open Airbnb right now and search Malasaña or Lavapiés. You'll find around 21,000 furnished flats. Look a little closer and you'll spot something new on a lot of them: minimum stay: 30 nights.

That is not a coincidence. It's the pivot. Whether it's a legal one is the more interesting question.

Plan Reside came into force on 4 September 2025. The core rule, plainly: in Madrid's historic centre — roughly everything inside the M-30 — tourist apartments in mixed residential buildings are finished. To operate legally as a vivienda de uso turístico (VUT, the official category for tourist flats), your property now needs to be in a building used exclusively for tourist accommodation. No permanent residents sharing the entrance. No normal neighbours. Effectively, you need to own a boutique hotel, not a flat.

Outside the centre, VUTs can still exist, but only if they have a completely independent street entrance — not the same door as the building's residents — and only if the homeowners' association has approved it by a three-fifths supermajority. Getting 60% of a Spanish comunidad de propietarios to agree on anything is, let's say, ambitious.

The result was immediate. Between July and November 2025, over 2,600 listings vanished. Spain's Ministry of Consumer Affairs fined Airbnb €64 million in December 2025 for hosting more than 65,000 unlicensed properties. When Airbnb tried to get the payment frozen while it appealed, Madrid's High Court said no — pay now, argue later. The crackdown landed.

And yet. 21,000 listings. So what is everyone doing?

Here's what a lot of landlords have done: changed the minimum stay to 30 nights, relabelled the listing as a contrato de temporada (seasonal rental contract), and carried on. Same flat. Same photos. Different legal box ticked.

It is a real move, and it is widespread. The logic is that Spanish tourist rental regulation — the VUT framework — applies to tourist accommodation, not to seasonal rentals, which fall under ordinary tenancy law. Change the category, escape the regulation.

The problem is that this is more legally fragile than the 30-night crowd would like to believe. The distinction between a tourist rental and a seasonal rental under Spanish law is not based on duration. It's based on purpose and cause: a seasonal rental is one where the tenant isn't using the property as their habitual permanent residence, and the stay has a defined temporary purpose. There is no magic night threshold. A landlord who slaps a 30-night minimum on a listing and changes nothing else — not the services, not the contract structure, not the registration — is not automatically in safe harbour. The Comunidad de Madrid's own consumer guidance says explicitly that seasonal rentals have no minimum or maximum duration; what matters is the nature of the arrangement.

We're not in a position to tell you definitively which listings are solid and which are in grey territory. Neither are the courts — that clarity is still coming. What we can say is: the "it's fine, it's 30 nights" framing many landlords are using is an oversimplification, and one that regulators will eventually test.

Here's the good news: if you need a furnished flat in Madrid for a month or more, the supply exists. The mid-term rental market — 1 to 6 months, furnished, usually bills included — has genuinely grown as a category in Madrid. Spotahome, Homelike, and HousingAnywhere are all doing more business here precisely because of this shift. A furnished one-bed in Malasaña that used to list at €90/night as a tourist flat will often show up on Spotahome at €1,400–1,600/month on a seasonal contract — lower total cost for a month's stay, with a proper contract and fixed dates. For expats doing a trial month before signing a proper lease, or waiting on empadronamiento or NIE paperwork, this is actually a better fit than the tourist-stay market ever was.

What you're trading away is consumer protections. Seasonal rental contracts operate under tenancy law, not tourist accommodation rules. Expect deposits of one to two months' rent — not a card hold. Cancellation terms are in the contract, not set by platform policy. And if something goes wrong, Airbnb's dispute resolution works very differently for a seasonal contract than for a standard tourist booking. Before you sign anything, check three things: does the listing carry a valid NRUA registration number? Does the contract actually describe a contrato de temporada with a defined purpose, or is it just a tourist rate with a longer minimum stay grafted on? And is there a written contract at all — because if the answer is no, walk away.

One more thing: moving to a seasonal contract doesn't get a host off the hook for registration. Under RD 1312/2024, all short-duration rentals — seasonal contracts included — must be registered in Spain's National Register of Urban Accommodation (NRUA), with enforcement running from July 2025. The hosts who have moved off platforms to run bookings through WhatsApp and private groups aren't any more legal for it. They're just harder to find.

Enforcement outside the centre remains the open question. In Carabanchel, Vallecas, and Usera, some VUTs without the required independent entrance are still operating and unchecked. That does not make them legal. It means the city has not reached every listing yet.

The seasonal-rental pivot is the bigger story. If Madrid decides that some 30-night listings are tourist flats in disguise, the next fight will not be about Airbnb alone. It will be about furnished mid-term rentals, platform enforcement, and how much flexibility the city is willing to preserve for people who genuinely need somewhere to land for a month or two.

For now, the practical advice is boring but useful: ask for the registration number, read the contract, check the deposit terms, and be suspicious of any landlord who says the legal distinction is simple. In Madrid housing, the simple answer is usually the one that costs someone else money.