Starting May 20, 2026, the short-term rental market in Bulgaria will face stricter regulations: new EU-wide rules will require mandatory registration of properties and data sharing between platforms and the government, which could lead to the mass removal of illegal listings from Airbnb and Booking.com. The source of these changes is EU Regulation 2024/1028 on the collection and exchange of data regarding short-term rentals, which takes effect on May 20, 2026. Its goal is to increase transparency in the sector, simplify the identification of landlords, and provide national authorities with a tool to monitor compliance with local requirements.
According to Boris Pavlov, chairman of the Bulgarian Association of Tourism Real Estate and Innovation, about half of the current short-term rental listings in Bulgaria may disappear from platforms if owners do not register properly. This primarily concerns the shadow market segment, which has operated without full administrative and tax legalization.
Bulgarian law already requires that short-term rentals be registered as tourist accommodations rather than as ordinary private rentals. To do this, as industry guidelines indicate, municipal registration, submission of guest data via the ESTI system, and payment of tourist tax are typically required. New EU regulations are tightening controls specifically at the level of digital platforms, which will be required to work only with properly registered properties.
For the real estate and tourism markets, this has a dual effect. On the one hand, part of the supply may indeed leave the platforms in the coming months, which will support prices in the legal segment and strengthen the position of professional operators. On the other hand, stricter market filtering should increase the sector’s transparency, tax collection, and the predictability of rules for investors.
Against this backdrop, Bulgaria is entering a phase of a more formalized short-term rental market, where the key advantage will be not simply the availability of a property, but its full compliance with local and European regulations.
