If you take paid overnight bookings in Edinburgh — a spare room, a whole flat, a B&B, a guesthouse or a hotel — the Edinburgh Visitor Levy is a percentage charge added to the accommodation portion of a guest's stay, collected by the accommodation provider and eventually accounted for to the council. It is Scotland's first live implementation of a "tourist tax" power, and as of today Edinburgh is the only council with a confirmed, live scheme — every other Scottish council that might introduce one would show as "not yet confirmed" until it genuinely goes live.
This guide sticks strictly to the mechanics of the scheme as configured in our calculation engine. We don't editorialise on policy, and we don't restate legislation we haven't independently verified — where you need the underlying legal text or official council guidance, treat that as a separate lookup from this guide.
The scheme, in one paragraph
Edinburgh charges 5% of the eligible accommodation amount, applied to a maximum of the first 5 consecutive nights of any single stay, for nights from 24 July 2026 onward — liability is worked out night by night against the scheme's effective window, so a stay that started before that date and continues past it can have both non-chargeable and chargeable nights within the same booking (see how a calculation works). Bookings made and paid for before 1 October 2025 are exempt under a separate, transitional cutoff rule — the idea being that guests who booked and paid before the scheme was even confirmed shouldn't retroactively owe it. The levy applies to the accommodation charge only, calculated on the pre-VAT figure, not the VAT-inclusive price a guest might see on a booking confirmation. Platform fees and genuinely optional extras are excluded from that base — but a mandatory cleaning or changeover charge that's really part of the cost of staying can form part of it; see cleaning fees and the Visitor Levy for how that's classified.
Who's affected
Anyone taking bookings for overnight accommodation within the City of Edinburgh Council area, across every accommodation type our calculation engine recognises: short-term lets, serviced apartments, hotels, bed and breakfasts, guesthouses, hostels and campsites. There's no exemption in our engine for small operators or single-property hosts — the levy calculation runs identically whether you have one Airbnb listing or a portfolio of thirty.
Whether a given booking is actually liable depends on more than just "is the property in Edinburgh." Our calculation engine (see how the calculation actually works) also checks:
- The reservation status. Cancelled, no-show and refunded bookings are automatically exempt — there's no levy on a stay that didn't happen.
- Each night of the stay against the scheme's effective window. Liability is assessed night by night, not once for the booking as a whole. A stay entirely before 24 July 2026 is wholly exempt, and that's a legitimate "too early for the scheme" case, not a data problem — but a stay that straddles that date has its nights split: the nights before are exempt, the nights on or after are run through the rest of the calculation.
- The booking/payment date against the transitional cutoff. A booking made and paid before 1 October 2025 is exempt, again without being flagged as an error.
- Currency. The scheme is configured in GBP. A reservation recorded in a different currency is treated as needing review rather than silently calculated wrong.
The numbers, precisely
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Rate | 5% (0.0500) |
| Maximum chargeable nights | 5 consecutive nights per stay |
| Effective from | 24 July 2026 |
| Booking/payment cutoff | 1 October 2025 |
| Currency | GBP |
| Accommodation base | Pre-VAT |
| Excluded from the base | Platform fees, optional extras, and any cleaning charge classified as optional |
| Provider retention | 2% of the gross levy |
That last line — provider retention — is worth calling out because it's easy to miss: the accommodation provider keeps 2% of the gross levy amount as an administrative allowance, so what's actually owed to the council is 98% of the gross levy figure, not the full 5%. We call this the "estimated net amount due," and it's the number that matters when you're preparing a return.
A worked figure
For an 8-night stay with a total accommodation charge of £800: only the first 5 nights are chargeable under the cap, which pro-rates the eligible amount to £500.00. The gross levy is £500.00 × 5% = £25.00. Provider retention is 2% of that, £0.50, leaving an estimated net amount due of £24.50. The full step-by-step mechanics — including how pro-rating and per-night pricing interact — are in How to calculate the Edinburgh Visitor Levy.
What this guide deliberately doesn't cover
This guide describes how our product calculates the levy, sourced directly from the live scheme configuration our calculation engine uses. It is not a substitute for the council's own official guidance, and we haven't linked one here because we don't have a verified URL to cite — we'd rather leave a citation out than point you somewhere we haven't checked ourselves. If you need the primary legal source, that's a separate lookup.