What is a VFT licence, and how do you check a property has one

If you are renting a holiday apartment in Andalusia, whether as a guest or an owner, one thing matters more than any other detail: the property’s VFT number. It is the difference between a legal holiday rental and an illegal one.

This is what it is, how a property gets one, and how to check for yourself in under a minute.

VFT means vivienda con fines turísticos — a dwelling for tourism purposes. It is the Andalusian category for a private home rented to holidaymakers for short stays, as distinct from a hotel, an aparthotel or a rural property.

The category was created by the Junta de Andalucía to bring private holiday lets into a formal register. A property in the category is entered in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía, and the register issues a code. That code is the licence in practical terms.

What the code looks like

An Andalusian registration code begins VFT, followed by the province and a number. For the province of Málaga, which covers the whole Costa del Sol, the code takes the form VFT/MA/ and then a serial number.

Registration is not simply a form. The property has to meet the standards set for the category before it can be let, and those standards cover the physical condition of the home.

In practice that means habitability certification, rooms ventilated to the exterior, cooling and heating appropriate to the season, a first-aid kit, tourist information for the area, and official complaint forms available to guests. Every stay must begin with the property cleaned and the linen changed.

The owner also has to hold the property legally — which is where the second layer comes in, and where most of the difficulty now sits.

A regional registration is necessary but no longer sufficient. Two other authorities have a say: your town hall, and your community of owners. The second of those changed fundamentally in 2025.

Since 3 April 2025, when the reform to article 17.12 of the ley de propiedad horizontal introduced by Ley Orgánica 1/2025 came into force, devoting a home to tourist use in a building under horizontal property requires the community’s express prior approval. That means a favourable vote of three fifths of the owners, who must also represent three fifths of the participation quotas.

The direction of this matters. It is no longer enough that the statutes do not prohibit holiday letting. Permission has to be actively granted, and a community that simply never votes is a community that has effectively said no.

Communities may also, by the same three-fifths majority, increase the share of common expenses charged to tourist properties by up to twenty per cent. Separately, some municipalities have suspended new tourism licences altogether in areas under housing pressure.

For most of 2025 an owner needed a second, national registration on top of the Andalusian one. That requirement no longer stands, and the story is worth knowing because a great deal of advice online has not caught up.

Real Decreto 1312/2024 created a Registro Único de Arrendamientos and a Ventanilla Única Digital, implementing European Regulation 2024/1028. It issued each property a Número de Registro Único de Alquiler, the NRUA, and from 1 July 2025 that number was required in order to advertise on digital booking platforms.

In May 2026 the Supreme Court annulled it. In rulings 620/2026 and 629/2026, the Sala de lo Contencioso-Administrativo held that the State lacked the competence to create an exhaustive national register that overlapped the registers the autonomous communities already run. The court found the scheme went beyond what could be justified as basic legislation or economic coordination under the Constitution.

The parts of the scheme that survive are the data-sharing ones: the digital single window continues to operate, platforms still transmit booking data to the authorities, and the statistical obligations under the European regulation remain. What disappeared is the national number as a separate licence to advertise.

As a guest: look for the VFT code on the listing. It should be visible in the description or the property details. If there is no code anywhere and the host cannot produce one, treat that as the answer.

As a buyer: the code alone is not enough. Ask for the registration entry, then ask separately for the community statutes and the minutes of recent owners’ meetings, to see whether a vote on holiday rentals has been taken or is being discussed. A property with a licence in a building that has just voted against new ones is in a strong position. A property without one, in the same building, may never get there.

As an existing owner: confirm your registration is current and that the details on it still match the property. Registrations refer to a specific dwelling with a specific capacity.

Separately from the licence, Spain requires travellers staying in tourist accommodation to be registered with the authorities. The data is submitted electronically, and the obligation sits with whoever operates the property.

For an owner letting one apartment, this is the part that quietly becomes a chore, because it applies to every booking, every time. For a managed property it should be invisible — we register guests digitally before they arrive, so that arrival itself is just a door opening.