If you own a flat or a villa in Barcelona or the Maresme and you are weighing up holiday lets, price is not the first problem. The first problem is whether you can get a licence at all. In the city of Barcelona the answer has been no for a while, and in the rest of Catalonia it now depends very much on the town.
A HUT is the Catalan tourist-use dwelling licence, in full Habitatge d’Ús Turístic. You do not apply for it the way you apply for a passport. You register the property in the Catalan tourism registry, and once the file is accepted you are given a registration number, the NIRTC, that has to appear in every advert you publish. Renting to tourists without that number is the clearest way there is to attract a fine.
It also comes in two layers, and owners mix them up all the time. The regional layer is the tourism licence itself. The municipal layer is planning: whether the town hall allows tourist use in that building and on that street. Plenty of people hold a perfectly valid HUT and still cannot let legally, because the local plan does not permit it there. You need both.
Barcelona has been closing the door since the PEUAT plan came in back in 2017, which froze new tourist licences across most of the city. Then in 2024 the council went further and said it would not renew the licences it had already granted, aiming to wind down tourist flats in residential buildings by around 2028. For 2026 that means one thing: there is no realistic route to a new HUT inside Barcelona.
Outside the city it is town by town. Each Maresme municipality decides where, and whether, tourist use is allowed, and some are already saturated. Decree-Law 3/2023 gave existing authorisations a five-year transition and pushed municipalities to justify how much tourist housing they can actually carry. Before you buy anything on the coast, ask the town hall about the current position for that specific address. Not the neighbour’s, not the estate agent’s, the town hall’s.
To run a tourist let legally in Catalonia, this is roughly the stack you need in place:
A European layer arrives in 2026 as well. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 applies from 20 May 2026 and obliges platforms to display and verify registration numbers where a registration system exists. Spain’s own national short-term rental registry was knocked down by the Supreme Court, so the regional systems such as the Catalan HUT remain what actually anchors an operator. In practice, platforms will lean on the number you can prove.
Operating without registration is treated as a serious or very serious tourism infringement in Catalonia, and the fines run from around €3,001 up to €600,000 in the worst cases. Advertising without the NIRTC number, and failing to report guests, bring their own penalties. The fines are only part of it. Platforms take listings down, insurers can walk away from a claim once they see the let was illegal, and a comunidad that objects can make life impossible. None of that shows up in a glossy yield projection.
Owners usually fall back on one of two things. The first is a proper long-term vivienda lease, which is what a residential tenant wants and what the law protects. The second is a temporada lease, for a genuine, documented temporary need such as a work posting or a semester abroad. A real temporada let does not need a HUT. The trap is the fake temporada: a holiday let dressed up as a temporary contract. Inspectors know the difference, and so do the courts. If you cannot document the temporary purpose, do the long-term lease and sleep better.
In Barcelona, assume no new tourist licence in 2026. In the coastal towns of the Maresme, check the licence position before you commit, because it can decide whether the property is worth what you are paying. We see this often enough to say it plainly, and we would rather tell you that a flat cannot be a tourist let before you buy it than after.