The Edinburgh Visitor Levy scheme is configured with a maximum of 5 chargeable nights per stay. Whatever the actual length of a booking, the levy is never calculated on more than 5 nights' worth of accommodation value. This guide covers exactly how that cap is applied by our calculation engine, and the two cases — under the cap, and over it — that produce genuinely different arithmetic.
The rule itself
In calculation step 6 of the engine (see How to calculate the Edinburgh Visitor Levy for the full sequence), eligible nights are derived as:
eligible_nights = min(total_nights, maximum_chargeable_nights)
For Edinburgh, maximum_chargeable_nights is 5. A 3-night stay has 3 eligible nights. A 5-night stay has 5. A 20-night stay still only has 5.
Stays under or at the cap
If the total length of stay is 5 nights or fewer, the cap doesn't change anything — every night is chargeable, and (assuming no per-night breakdown scenario applies) the full accommodation amount is the eligible amount. No pro-rating happens at all.
Example: a 3-night stay with a total accommodation charge of £600.00 (pre-VAT). All 3 nights are within the cap, so the full £600.00 is eligible. Gross levy: £600.00 × 5% = £30.00. Provider retention: £30.00 × 2% = £0.60. Estimated net amount due: £29.40.
Stays over the cap
Once a stay exceeds 5 nights, only the first 5 nights are chargeable, and how the eligible amount (not just nights) is derived depends on what pricing data is available:
- A full per-night price breakdown is available. The engine sums the actual price of the first 5 eligible nights directly (
calculation_method: standard) — no estimation involved, because the real per-night figures are known. - Only a single total accommodation amount is available. The engine pro-rates:
eligible_amount = accommodation_amount × (eligible_nights ÷ total_nights), rounded (calculation_method: prorated). This is the far more common case for CSV imports from Airbnb or Booking.com, which typically only give you one accommodation total per booking rather than a nightly breakdown.
Example (the real product figure): an 8-night stay with a total accommodation charge of £800.00 and no per-night breakdown. Eligible nights: min(8, 5) = 5. Eligible amount: 800.00 × (5 ÷ 8) = £500.00. Gross levy: £500.00 × 5% = £25.00. Provider retention: £0.50. Estimated net amount due: £24.50.
Why pro-rating exists at all
Pro-rating is a deliberate fallback, not a workaround. The scheme's actual rule is "the first 5 nights are chargeable" — which, if you had a genuine per-night price for every night of the stay, would mean summing exactly those first 5 nights' real prices. Most booking exports don't give you that level of detail; they give you one accommodation total for the whole stay. Pro-rating estimates what those first 5 nights were worth by assuming the nightly rate was roughly even across the stay, which is a reasonable approximation for the overwhelming majority of bookings, but is explicitly labelled (calculation_method: prorated) so it's never confused with a precise, itemised figure.
What the cap doesn't affect
The night cap changes the number of nights (and therefore the base amount) the levy is calculated on — it doesn't change the rate, the currency check, the booking cutoff rule, or any of the other exemption logic. A stay that's exempt for an unrelated reason (say, every night of it falls before the scheme's effective date) is exempt regardless of how many nights it runs. A stay that only partly falls before the effective date isn't wholly exempt, though — see the effective-date split for how that's handled.