Lisbon City Council to close 40% of Local Accommodation
Lisbon City Council has ordered the cancelling of the licenses for 40% of Local Accommodation in Lisbon because they are “inactive”.
More precisely, it has ordered the cancelling of 6,765 licences out of 19,000 establishments registered in Lisbon because they failed to present a valid civil responsibility insurance document.
According to Dinheiro Vivo the Local Accommodation Association in Portugal (ALEP) stated that these licenses were inflating the total number and, in practice, did not correspond to accommodations in operation.
“Many owners maintained the registration but did not use the property for this purpose. In several cases, the properties were sold without the license being cancelled.
There were also applications submitted in recent years, following announcements of restrictions on activity, that were never actually used,” lists the association’s president, Eduardo Miranda, quoted by the newspaper.
The Lisbon municipality is therefore the first in the country to complete the process of cleaning up inactive local accommodation registrations.
Since March 2025, LA owners have been required to present civil liability insurance, which covers property and non-property damages caused to guests and neighbours.
This screening allows for determining the real number of active units in the country. ALEP expects that, of the 126,000 registrations that were active in 2025, only 90,000 accommodations will remain on the database.
