UK short-term rentals

• In July 2025, the supply of short term rental properties across the UK continued to increase month on month and exceed 2024 levels. However, the volume of nights reserved remained lower than what was seen in 2024, leading to lower occupancy rates.
• Growth in supply was seen across all UK regions in July, whereas reserved nights were down year on year, with the greatest declines seen in South East England.
• Top UK cities reserved in July 2024 were London, Edinburgh and Manchester, with Birmingham, York, and Norwich gaining rankings month on month.
• In the latest month, GCC markets led the growth in reviews left for short term rental properties, with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and also Hong Kong seeing the most significant boosts year on year.

Lighthouse (formerly Transparent Intelligence) tracks over 35 million vacation rental listings worldwide and maintains a proprietary database of hundreds of thousands of reservations tracked by month. Listings on the four major short-term rental platforms are tracked: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and Tripadvisor. Listings data is deduplicated when the same property is advertised on more than one platform. 

The UK Government defines a short-term rental property as ‘a dwelling, or part of a dwelling, provided by a host to a guest, for use as accommodation other than the guest’s only or principal residence, in return for payment, in the course of a trade or business carried on by the host’. 

Historical data is available back to 2019, with future performance also available for up to one year in the future. We have limited future performance data shown in reports to three months in the future in order to ensure reliability, based on guidance from Lighthouse.

For further insights into accommodation in England, explore the results of the England Occupancy Survey (EOS) which measures bedroom and bedspace occupancy across the accommodation sector.