Do the registration numbers on Airbnb listings exist in the official registries? Spain and New York around 20 May 2026

Since 20 May 2026, Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 requires every short-term rental listed on a platform in an area with a registration procedure to show its registration number. In May and June 2026 Spain's Supreme Court annulled the national registration number, so in Spain the number that can still be checked is the regional tourist-registry number. We parsed the licence field of 227,224 Airbnb listings in Inside Airbnb snapshots (CC BY 4.0) taken just before and just after 20 May, in Barcelona, Girona, València, Málaga, Sevilla, Madrid and New York City. We then matched every well-formed number against the open registries of Catalonia, the Comunitat Valenciana and Andalucía and against New York's Local Law 18 registry.

In June 2026, in the five Spanish areas with an open registry, 2,066 of 31,222 active listings that showed a well-formed tourist-dwelling number (6.6%, 95% CI 6.3–6.9%) showed one that we could not trace to any registered dwelling. A further 557 (1.8%, CI 1.6–1.9%) showed a registered dwelling of their municipality written in a recognisable wrong form:

• leading zeros dropped and the Catalan control digit appended;
• the Barcelona province code where the Girona one is registered;
• an extra digit (Málaga).

About 45 of those 557 would match these patterns by chance. Another 538 (1.7%) showed a number registered in a different municipality. Barcelona had the highest residual share: 642 of 6,080 (10.6%, CI 9.8–11.4%), plus 168 (2.8%) in a wrong form. 388 of the 642 are listings for a private room, while Catalan law requires tourist dwellings to be let whole. This is an observation about listing type and licence type, not about any host: the room type is the host's own description, and a room may be let under another kind of licence. The wrong-form category was defined after an independent review, when the rules had already been frozen. Under the frozen rules the not-found figures were 2,623 of 31,222 (8.4%) and, in Barcelona, 810 of 6,080 (13.3%). The rates did not change across 20 May (March: 1,736 of 27,230, 6.4%; 2,211, 8.1%, under the frozen rules).

What changed was the labelling. Across the six Spanish areas, the active listings whose only number was the national tourist number, the one the Supreme Court annulled, fell from 1,897 of 52,938 (3.6%) in March to 840 of 59,395 (1.4%) in June. "Exempt" statements in the regional field rose from 797 (1.5%) to 9,848 (16.6%), almost all of them "Exempt - seasonal rental". In Madrid the registry cannot be downloaded. There, 6,634 of 15,782 active listings (42.0%) show a national number of the "non-tourist" category and no regional number; 4,916 of them (74.1%) accept stays of 1–4 nights. In New York, 1,776 of 4,184 active short-stay listings (42.4%) show "Exempt". Of the listings that New York's registry file links to a registration, 1,866 of 1,871 show that same number.

A number missing from a registry is not proof that a listing is illegal. The entry may have been cancelled between the scrape and our copy of the registry; the number may be a registered one written in a form we do not recognise, or a typo; the series may be exempt; or Inside Airbnb may place a Girona-area listing in the wrong municipality. We publish aggregates only.