Letting your flat as a holiday rental: the occupancy and returns to really expect

You have a flat sitting empty, or one that earns little as a long-term let, and you are wondering whether switching it to holiday rental is worth it. The honest answer starts with the number almost nobody puts in front of you: occupancy. In December 2025, Spain's tourist apartments had 33.7% of the places they offered occupied, according to the Tourist Accommodation Occupancy Survey from the INE (Spain's National Statistics Institute); in June that year they reached 41.2%. A holiday flat is not let 365 days a year, and that is half the sum.

The other half is what you charge when it is occupied and what it costs you to get it ready between one guest and the next. That combination (nights sold, price per night and running costs) is what decides whether a holiday let earns you more than a long-term let or less. There is no magic percentage that works for every flat, and anyone who promises you one without asking about yours is selling you smoke.

With that clear, letting a flat to tourists has three parts: getting the property legal, listing it and setting prices, and managing each stay. We go through them in order, with data on what actually happens in a working portfolio.

How full does a holiday flat really get?

Tourist occupancy is highly seasonal, and that is the biggest difference from a traditional let, where you get paid twelve months a year. The INE figures for 2025 make it plain: 41.2% of places occupied in June against 33.7% in December. And those are national averages; in coastal destinations such as the Canary Islands summer shoots up, while an inland capital lives off bank holiday weekends, trade fairs and business travel.

Our portfolio shows the same pulse. Bookings cluster from March to September (between 229 and 285 bookings a month, measured over more than 2,000 stays) and drop to their lowest in November, December and January, when some months don't reach thirty. If you do your sums with August's income multiplied by twelve, you are in for a disappointment. The right sum spreads the year out: strong months that carry the load and weak months you have to work with longer stays, low-season rates or mid-stay guests.

The average stay matters too, because every check-in and check-out costs a clean and a gap in the calendar. The INE puts it at around 5 overnight stays per traveller in tourist apartments (5.0 in December, 4.7 in June), and in our homes it moves in that same band, between 4.3 and 5.7 nights depending on the month. A flat with four-night stays turns over more often (and spends more on cleaning and management) than one with seven-night stays, even if both show the same occupancy on the calendar. If occupancy is your weak spot, we have a separate guide on how to avoid occupancy problems that goes into the detail.

How much can you earn? Returns depend on occupancy, not on the nightly price

This is where you need to tread carefully, because there is no official statistic on holiday-let returns comparable to the one for residential lets. What there is, as a starting point, is the figure for traditional lets: the average gross return on buying a home to let closed 2025 at 6.7% in Spain, according to idealista. In Madrid it falls to 4.7% and in Barcelona it sits at 5.6%. A holiday let can beat that return, but not automatically: it depends on occupancy keeping up and on the extra costs not eating the difference.

These are the four factors that move your number within the range, and they are worth looking at before you sign anything:

1. The real occupancy of your location, not the national average. A well-located flat in a destination with a long season fills many more nights than one in a city with a single peak a year.
2. The nightly price and how it is adjusted by date. Charging the same in August as in February leaves money on the table in summer and scares off bookings in winter. The price moves almost daily.
3. The costs a traditional let doesn't have: cleaning between stays, utilities you pay, restocking, more frequent maintenance and the commission charged by the platforms or the management company.
4. Tax and your region's rules, which can change the numbers and even decide whether you can operate at all.

That is why, before promising you anything, what makes sense is to run the numbers for your specific flat: its area, its size and the season it has. You can request a valuation of your home with no commitment and see the range that comes out for you, not the one in a brochure. If you would rather first understand what a management company charges and what you should demand of it, we break it down in this guide on how much a company charges to manage your rental.

What do you need before publishing the listing?

The first thing isn't the nice photo: it's the licence. Spain has no single rule, and what applies in Andalusia doesn't apply in Asturias or the Valencian Community. Each autonomous community (Spain's regions) has its own register and its own requirements, and on top of that the national framework shifted in 2026, when the Tribunal Supremo (Spain's Supreme Court) struck down the single registration procedure for encroaching on regional powers. Put another way: the map of what applies to you is still changing, so any figure you read should carry a date and a region, or don't trust it.

The practical step is to check your region's rules before you spend a euro getting the flat ready. We have gathered the requirements by region in our guide to tourist licences by autonomous community, which we update when something moves. And if the holiday route is closed in your case (because of local council rules, because of the comunidad de propietarios (owners' association) or because you don't want to ask for permission), there is a legal alternative: mid-term rental. In fact, 13 of the homes we manage today are on mid-term lets, not holiday lets, for exactly that reason.

With the licence in hand, what remains is dressing the listing: real photos that look like the flat, an honest description and starting prices by date. A listing that promises more than there is gets paid for dearly in the first review.

Do you manage it yourself or hand it over?

This is the question that really decides your returns and your peace of mind, because a holiday flat is a job, not income that turns up on its own. With an average stay of about five nights, a well-occupied flat changes guests six or seven times a month. Every changeover means messages at any hour, a clean, a key handover, an incident that may land on a Sunday. Multiply that by the busy months and you understand why many people who started on their own end up handing it over.

The difference between doing it well and doing it so-so shows in the reviews, and reviews aren't decoration: they decide how often you appear and how much you can charge. In the homes we manage, the average guest rating is 8.76 out of 10 on Airbnb (across 2,315 reviews) and 7.81 on Booking (across 1,502). That's more than 3,800 opinions, and each one pushes (or holds back) the next bookings. Getting and keeping that rating is a trade in itself; if you want to handle it yourself, here are five ways to get good reviews that work.

Handing it over has a cost (a management company charges a percentage of what the home earns), and it only adds up if what it takes off your hands is worth more than that commission. For an owner with one flat and little time, or for someone with several whose operation doesn't scale, it usually does. For someone who enjoys managing and lives nearby, maybe not. The answer comes back to the same one as the whole article: it depends on your case, and the honest thing is to run the numbers before deciding. If you want us to do it with you, we manage homes in 17 cities and we'll tell you what to expect from yours with no sales call behind it.