UK Short-Term Rentals Are Having a Strong 2026 — Here’s What the Data Shows

Amid all the regulatory headlines, it’s easy to miss the actual performance numbers: UK short-term rentals just posted a new revenue peak. April 2026 average daily rates and average revenue both came in higher than the same month in 2025 and 2024, with growth continuing month-on-month and year-on-year across almost every UK region.

The staycation isn’t fading — it’s holding steady

British residents made 105.6 million overnight staycation trips within Great Britain in 2024 — 308 million nights, £32.9 billion spent, according to ONS data via the House of Commons Library. Demand for a well-run UK holiday let hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, rising overseas travel costs and a renewed appetite for domestic breaks are keeping short breaks close to home genuinely attractive, and most forecasts point to steady growth in the UK staycation market over the coming years.

The “holiday lets are taking over” myth doesn’t hold up

One of the most common arguments against short-term letting is that it’s swallowing the UK’s housing stock. PASC UK’s own 2025 report, built on analysis from Frontier Economics, puts the real number at 0.6% — around 147,000 dedicated holiday lets out of 26.9 million homes across England and Wales. A tiny footprint — while still contributing £6.6 billion in economic value and supporting roughly 139,000 jobs. The sector isn’t displacing housing at any meaningful scale; it’s a small, high-value niche that happens to attract outsized attention.

Growth is spreading beyond the obvious cities

Industry analysis points to an interesting shift underway: growth isn’t concentrated in London or Edinburgh anymore. Commuter towns around major cities, secondary coastal areas, and countryside locations with strong transport links are reportedly seeing rising occupancy and more consistent demand, often with far less competition than saturated city centres. This pattern is drawn from sector commentary rather than an official dataset, so treat it as a plausible trend worth watching, not a confirmed statistic — but it does line up with the broader, well-documented shift toward hybrid working and wider domestic travel habits.

What this means in practice

None of this cancels out the compliance changes landlords are also navigating right now — both things are true at once. But it does mean the underlying demand for short-term letting is real, current, and in most regions, still climbing. A property in the right location, run properly, isn’t fighting a shrinking market. It’s competing in a growing one — which raises the actual question worth asking: not whether the market’s still there, but whether your specific operation is built to capture the share of it that’s available to you.

This article covers general market trends and is not financial or investment advice. Location-specific viability should always be checked against local data before any decision is made.

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