Mallorca cracks down on illegal holiday lets as fines reach millions

Owners who hoped an illegal holiday let would slip under the radar are watching their adverts vanish, with Mallorca’s island council pulling nearly 1,500 this year. The crackdown has produced fines worth €5.9 million, although getting that money paid is proving a much slower job.

Nearly 1,500 illegal listings taken down in nine months

Holidaymakers searching for a place to stay in Mallorca are finding fewer unlicensed flats and villas on the big booking sites, after the Consell de Mallorca, the island’s governing council, said it removed 1,472 illegal listings between January and September.

Airbnb accounted for 658 of them and Vrbo for 593, with another 204 on Booking.com and 17 on Rentalia. The numbers come from Talk and Code, the firm that monitors holiday rental adverts for the council, and each listing is counted only once, even if it popped back up.

The council revealed the figures at the World Travel Market in London on Wednesday November 4, where council president Llorenç Galmés promised ‘zero tolerance’ towards illegal tourist accommodation. The council says the UK is Mallorca’s second-biggest international market, and it puts the total removed from the main international platforms since August 2024 at more than 9,400.

Owners now get an order to take the listing down

Since January, the council has also been using a faster route called a DIA (declaration of illegality), which orders an owner to stop advertising without waiting for a long sanctions case to finish. It has opened 76 so far, and 69 ended with an immediate order to stop. Owners then have 10 days to remove the listing. If they don’t, coercive fines can follow and the case can be passed to the prosecutor’s office.

Inspectors are busy on the ground too, with the council’s summer campaign running until November 15 and inspections up 130 per cent on 2023, according to the council.

Fines worth €5.9 million, but not all of it ends up being paid

Between January and October, the council opened 198 sanctions cases, with proposed fines reaching €5.9 million. Add the 76 DIA orders and that’s the 274 enforcement cases it announced. 

That’s well below the more than €11.3 million proposed across 187 cases in 2025, though this year’s total only runs to October. Since a 2025 law, fines run from €50,000 to €500,000 depending on the offence, and the platforms themselves can now be held responsible too.

However, a fine on paper doesn’t always mean money in the bank. Council figures reported in April suggested only a small fraction of the more than €10 million fined across 2024 and 2025 had been collected, as cases can take months to close and penalties are sometimes cut once owners hand over paperwork.

Opposition disputes how many listings have really gone

Not everyone accepts the totals. In April, the opposition PSIB-PSOE party claimed only about 3,600 Airbnb listings had really disappeared since the council’s deal with the platform, rather than the roughly 8,000 the council had announced, and said adverts for suspected illegal flats could still be found in Palma.

For now, inspectors will keep working through to the end of the summer campaign on November 15, and any owner caught advertising without a licence can expect 10 days to take the listing down before further fines come into play.