Mid-Term Rentals (30 to 180 Days): The Strategy After Short-Term Bans

Published on: August 26, 2026

Last verified: 26 August 2026. Rental law, licensing and tax treatment vary by country, region and municipality, and several of the regimes described here changed within the last twelve months.

Quick answer:

• "Mid-term" is not a legal category anywhere. It is the gap between tourist accommodation and residential tenancy, and the contract decides which side you land on.
• Duration is not what determines the regime. In France, Italy and now Catalonia, the decisive factor is the tenant's documented reason for being there.
• The purpose-built contracts already exist: France's bail mobilité (1 to 10 months), Italy's contratto transitorio (1 to 18 months), Spain's arrendamiento de temporada, Germany's Wohnen auf Zeit.
• Get it wrong and the contract is reclassified as an ordinary residential tenancy, taking the tax advantages and the fixed end date with it.
• Expect roughly 1.3 to 1.8 times the long-let rent before costs, with vacancy, furnishing and included utilities as the variables that decide whether it works.

Every article about a city cracking down on short-term lets ends with the same sentence: owners are switching to mid-term rentals. Almost none of them explains what that actually means in law.

It matters, because "mid-term" is not a legal category anywhere. It is a marketing word for a gap between two regimes that are legal categories: tourist accommodation on one side, residential tenancy on the other. A let of 30 to 180 days sits between them, and which side of the line it lands on is decided by the contract you sign, the reason your tenant is there, and whether you can document it.

Get it right and you have a genuinely attractive asset: higher yield than a long let, no cleaning turnover every three nights, no tourist licence, and a tenant who leaves on a fixed date. Get it wrong and you have an unlicensed tourist rental, or worse, a protected residential tenancy you cannot end.

Why mid-term became the default answer

Three pressures converged.

Cities restricted short lets. Registration schemes, caps on nights, zoning limits, and outright bans in central districts have spread across Europe, and the tools got sharper. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 applies from 20 May 2026 and requires member states and platforms to operate interoperable registration and data-sharing systems, with platforms verifying registration numbers and reporting activity data monthly to national single digital entry points. The regulation does not create an EU-wide licence and does not ban short-term letting; it standardises registration, verification and data flow so that local rules become enforceable.

Demand appeared on the other side. Remote workers on three-month assignments, medical staff on rotation, visiting academics, families renovating, people relocating who need somewhere to live while they house-hunt. These are real, recurring needs that neither a hotel nor a twelve-month lease serves well.

And most legal systems already had a contract for it. That is the part owners miss. Mid-term is not a loophole somebody invented in 2024. France, Italy and Spain each have a purpose-built contract type for temporary occupation, with decades of case law behind it and specific conditions attached.

The three lines that define the category

Before the country detail, the structure. Almost every jurisdiction draws its boundaries using some combination of three tests.

The 30-day line. Below roughly 30 nights, you are usually in tourist accommodation: licence, registration number, tourist tax, guest reporting to police, and often a platform withholding tax. Above it, tourist rules frequently fall away and tenancy law takes over. This is why so many owners target 31 days as a minimum stay.

The purpose test. This is the one that decides most disputes. Is the tenant there for a documented temporary reason (a posting, a course, a treatment, a renovation), or are they simply living there? Several systems now presume that a let without a documented temporary purpose is an ordinary residential tenancy, whatever the paper says.

The main-residence test. If the property is the tenant's principal home during the stay, protective tenancy law is much more likely to apply, and you may lose the ability to end the arrangement on the date you planned.

Country mechanics

France: the bail mobilité

France created a dedicated contract in the 2018 ELAN law. The bail mobilité is a furnished let of one to ten months, not renewable, with three defining features:

• No deposit is permitted. The only guarantee available is the state-backed Visale scheme, which the tenant applies for and the landlord activates.
• The tenant must fall within a closed list of situations: higher education, professional training, apprenticeship, internship, civic service, temporary work assignment or professional transfer. The list is set by the ELAN law and cannot be extended by agreement between the parties, and the reason must be stated in the lease with supporting evidence provided at signature.
• The asymmetry is deliberate. The tenant can leave at any time on one month's notice; the landlord cannot terminate early and is committed to the full term.

The duration can be extended once by amendment, but never beyond ten months in total with the same tenant in the same property. If the tenant stays past that point, the contract is automatically requalified as a standard one-year furnished lease. A tenant who does not fit the list at all should be given a normal furnished lease, not a bail mobilité with the box ticked hopefully.

France also has a nine-month non-renewable student lease, which is a separate and simpler option where the tenant is a student.

Italy: the contratto transitorio

The Italian instrument is the contratto di locazione ad uso transitorio under Law 431/1998 and the ministerial decree of 16 January 2017. It runs from one to eighteen months, does not renew automatically, and ends without either party giving notice.

The requirements are strict and the penalty for missing them is severe:

• The temporary need, of either the landlord or the tenant, must be stated in the contract and documented where the term exceeds 30 days.
• In municipalities designated as high housing-pressure areas, the standard-form contract and, in many cases, the canone concordato framework with union certification apply.
• The contract must be registered with the tax authority, generally within 30 days.

If the temporary purpose is missing or unsupported, the contract is reclassified as an ordinary 4+4 residential tenancy, and the tax advantages fall away with it. That is a materially worse outcome than the one you were trying to avoid.

On tax, the flat-rate cedolare secca regime is available at 21 percent, reduced to 10 percent for canone concordato contracts in eligible municipalities. Separately, Italy's short-let regime (contracts up to 30 days under the 2017 decree) has its own rules: no registration requirement, a national identification code (CIN) for the property, and withholding by intermediating platforms. The two regimes are not interchangeable above 30 days.

Spain: alquiler de temporada, and why it is changing fast

Spain's arrendamiento de temporada sits under the Urban Leases Act as a lease for a use other than permanent housing. Historically that meant it escaped the five-to-seven-year mandatory extension and the rent-control rules that apply to a residential lease. Between 2023 and 2025 that gap was used at scale, particularly in Barcelona.

Two developments have reshaped the picture, and anyone writing a Spanish mid-term strategy on 2023 assumptions is now working from an outdated map.

Catalonia closed the gap. Law 11/2025, in force from 1 January 2026, redefines seasonal letting and extends rent-containment limits to temporary and room lets in designated stressed-market zones. A temporary contract without a documented justified cause such as work, study or medical treatment is no longer automatically treated as temporary; it is equated with a habitual-residence contract, and lets with a purely holiday or leisure purpose remain outside the caps. Duration alone no longer excludes a let from the index: signing for six, nine or eleven months does not by itself keep you outside the cap if the use is residential. The early data suggests the measure bit. Seasonal contracts in Catalan stressed zones fell about 34 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2026, from 3,310 to 2,184.

The national registration layer was struck down. Spain implemented the EU regulation through Royal Decree 1312/2024, creating a single rental register and a digital single window that took effect on 1 July 2025. In judgment 620/2026 of 19 May 2026, the Supreme Court partially annulled that decree, holding that the State lacked competence for the single-register procedure and for the requirement to register in the Property Register in order to obtain a number. The single digital window and the data-exchange obligations survive; what falls away is the exhaustive national register layered on top of the existing regional registers. In practice this pushes the operative registration number back to the regional tourist codes (VFT in Andalusia, HUT in Catalonia, VUT, VV, ETV and their equivalents), which were never in doubt.

The lesson for an investor is less about any single rule than about the volatility. Spain also enacted an emergency rental decree in March 2026 which Congress then repealed at the end of April. Build a Spanish mid-term model that survives a rule change, not one that depends on the current gap staying open.

Germany

German law recognises Wohnen auf Zeit, letting for temporary use, which is carved out of several tenant-protection provisions. As in France and Italy, the exemption turns on a genuine temporary purpose that exists at the start of the tenancy and is recorded in the contract. Simply labelling a lease "temporary" does not achieve it.

Netherlands

The Dutch position tightened rather than loosened. Reforms effective from July 2024 largely ended the routine use of fixed-term residential contracts, with a narrow set of exceptions, while the Affordable Rent Act extended the points-based rent-setting system further up the market. Short-stay and corporate housing operate under separate municipal permissions. This is a market where the mid-term play is a licensing question first and a contract question second.

Portugal

Portugal separates alojamento local (registered short-stay tourist accommodation, with its own registration number and a suspended-then-reinstated licensing framework) from non-permanent residential lets under the tenancy code. As elsewhere, the decisive question is documented purpose rather than headline duration.

United Kingdom, United States and the Gulf

England and Wales have no equivalent bespoke contract. Most mid-term lets run either as a licence for genuinely non-exclusive occupation, or as an assured shorthold tenancy with the reform package's changes to how tenancies end, which is a materially different world from the fixed-end-date certainty of a bail mobilité. In the United States, mid-term is largely governed by state and local landlord-tenant law, with the key variable being the point at which a guest becomes a tenant with eviction protections, which can be as short as 28 or 30 days in some jurisdictions. In Dubai, tenancy registration through Ejari and the standard annual-contract convention make sub-annual lets a specialised segment rather than a default.

What actually makes the numbers work

Mid-term is not short-term with fewer changeovers. The economics differ in specific ways.

Gross rent per month is lower than short-let, higher than long-let. The usual working range in mainland European cities is somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 times the equivalent long-let rent, before costs. Anyone promising short-let yields with long-let effort is selling something.

Vacancy is the real variable. Mid-term demand is lumpy and seasonal, tied to academic terms, hospital rotations and corporate assignment cycles. Two 90-day lets with a six-week gap between them is a very different annual figure from two back-to-back lets. Model on realistic occupancy, not on 12 months divided by average stay length.

Furnishing is a fixed cost with a short life. Fully furnished to a standard a relocating professional will accept, including linen, kitchen equipment, decent wifi and a workspace, is a real capital item that depreciates faster than you expect.

Utilities are usually included, which transfers energy-price risk to you. In a cold winter with a tenant who works from home, that is not a rounding error.

Your demand channel is not the same. Corporate housing agents, relocation companies, university housing offices, hospital HR departments and specialist mid-term platforms are where this inventory actually lets. Listing on a short-let platform with a 31-night minimum is the least efficient version of the strategy.

The compliance checklist

Before you let anything for 30 to 180 days:

• Confirm what your building allows. Condominium and homeowners' association rules frequently restrict short and medium lets independently of what municipal law permits.
• Check your municipality, not just your country. In Spain and Italy in particular, the binding rules are regional and municipal.
• Use the right contract type, in the correct statutory form where one exists, and register it where registration is required.
• Collect and keep the evidence of temporary purpose at signature: enrolment letter, assignment letter, employment contract, hospital appointment. This file is your defence if the classification is ever challenged.
• Check your insurance. Standard landlord policies often exclude both short lets and periods of vacancy, and mid-term involves both.
• Check your mortgage. Residential lending conditions frequently restrict letting, and the restriction may be drafted by duration.
• Get the tax regime right up front, including whether a flat-rate option is available and whether it must be elected at registration.
• Report guests where required. Guest-registration duties to police or interior ministries often apply regardless of duration and are enforced separately from tourist licensing.

The mistake to avoid

The single most common error is treating the length of the stay as the thing that determines the legal regime. In France, Italy and now Catalonia, the determinative factor is the documented reason the tenant is there. A 90-day let to someone who is simply living in your flat because they could not find a long-term one is, increasingly, a residential tenancy with all that follows.

Mid-term letting works well when it serves the need it was designed for. It works badly as a costume worn by an ordinary tenancy, and regulators across Europe have spent the last two years getting better at spotting the difference.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a tourist licence for a 60-day let?
Usually not, because most tourist-accommodation regimes apply below a threshold of around 30 nights. But this is set locally and there are exceptions, so verify against your specific municipality rather than the national headline.

Can I just set a 31-night minimum on a short-let platform and be compliant?
It removes you from most tourist-licensing regimes, but it puts you into tenancy law, which brings its own contract-form, registration and termination rules. It is a change of regime, not an exemption from regulation.

What happens if my mid-term tenant refuses to leave?
That depends entirely on which regime the contract falls into. Under a properly constituted French bail mobilité or Italian contratto transitorio, the term ends on its date without notice. Under a contract that has been requalified as an ordinary residential tenancy, you are in the standard eviction process for that country, which can take many months.

Is mid-term letting taxed differently?
Often, yes. Italy's cedolare secca, France's furnished-letting BIC treatment and Spain's deductions for residential letting all turn on how the arrangement is classified. The classification decides the tax, so settle the classification first.

Will the EU rules from May 2026 affect mid-term lets?
Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 applies from 20 May 2026 and standardises registration and data sharing for short-term accommodation offered through online platforms; it does not decide where short-term rentals are legal and does not replace local licensing, zoning or tourist-tax rules. Its practical effect on mid-term is indirect: better data makes local restrictions on short lets easier to enforce, which strengthens the case for moving up the duration curve, and it makes the boundary between the two regimes more consequential.

Keep reading on JanusHermes

Settle the classification before anything else, because it decides the contract form, the licensing question and the tax treatment in one go. Then collect the evidence of temporary purpose at signature rather than trying to reconstruct it later. JanusHermes lists property from local agencies in 11 languages, with the local agency's own contact details on every listing.

Related reading: Short-Term Rental Investment, Holiday-Let Licensing Country by Country, Airbnb-Hostile Cities and Short-Term Rental Bans, Tenant Rights and Eviction Laws for International Landlords, Non-Resident Rental Income Tax, DAC7 Rental Income Reporting and Net After-Tax Rental Yield by Country.

This article is general information for property owners, not legal or tax advice. Rental law, licensing and tax treatment vary by country, region and municipality, and several of the regimes described here changed within the last twelve months. Confirm your position with a qualified local lawyer or accountant before letting.