Outside of the AL regime, the legislation permits the rental of homes for tourists for stays of less than a year. Here we will we provide a legal explanation of how this unique leasing system for tourists operates. Property owners can rent out their homes for a variety of lengths of time, with a one-year minimum. However, there is also a unique law that permits you to rent homes for shorter periods of time than a year, especially for holiday makers.
In reality, this allows homeowners to rent out their homes to visitors outside of the permitted Local Accommodation (AL) framework. However, there are regulations as well, and the rental agreement must specify everything.
The Civil Code's article 1,095 must be understood in order for you to comprehend how everything operates. First and foremost, the length of the lease must be specified in a specific section in the contract and, per the law, cannot be less than one year or more than thirty years. For instance, this is true for both permanent and own-home rentals. There are, however, certain exceptions. "The law permits the parties to decide on leases with terms shorter than the legally mandated minimum, that is, terms of less than one year, in certain circumstances, particularly when it comes to non-permanent housing or for special transitory purposes."
According to the expert, these are the unique transitional uses of residential rent that are permitted by law:
Professional, educational, and training initiatives tailored to the tenant (usually student rentals, which are timed according to the duration of the corresponding school years);
Leases for tourism, which are freely agreed upon by the parties and may consequently have shorter length periods
This exceptional reason for transience must also be "expressly indicated in the contractual clause in which the end of the contract is determined, on penalty of the contract being considered necessarily extended to 1 year," according to the same article 1,095. Similarly, a warehouse cannot be used for tourism, for instance, and a particular purpose can never override the property's designated use.
What are the distinctions between local lodging and renting out residences to tourists?
With the passage of Law 82/2023, on December 29th, which authorised the State Budget for 2024, the legislators also decided to preserve the legislative framework of Local Accommodation (AL) in the specific instance of rentals for tourists. In particular, the landlord is limited to one year tourist rental agreement.
The experts go on to say that the new wording of this article "limits the conclusion of these contracts, determining that, during a calendar year, in relation to each autonomous fraction or building, the parties can only enter into a single contract for a special transitory purpose for tourist reasons, thus allowing a single tourist rental for 'season', between January 1st and December 31st."
In order to avoid the AL regime, "properties that only once a year intend to attribute to their use a tourist purpose" are protected. To do this, they must "sign a written lease agreement with this express indication in the clauses, under penalty of the contract becomes a rental for permanent housing, with a minimum duration of one year."
However, according to the Sérvulo consultant, the law "does not impose any limit on annual uses of this same contract, which appears to allow a single user to be able, if they wish, to enter into a rental contract for special tourist purposes, to use the property as many times as they want during the same calendar year, as long as this use is specified in a single rental contract." For instance, renting a holiday home every weekend and in August violates the legal sieve.
However, the landlord must already register the property as Local Accommodation under Decree-Law no. 128/2014, of August 29, and in compliance with the legally established criteria and standards and respective limitations if he wishes to make the use of the property for tourist purposes recurring, that is, if he wants to proceed with at least two rental contracts for tourists in the same year.
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