Lucerne's 90-Night Cap and the Swiss Cities Copying It

A cap is easy to announce and harder to audit. The cities adopting one are also adopting an evidence problem — and that part lands on the host.

Last updated: October 19, 2026

Lucerne has limited short letting in its residential zones to 90 nights per calendar year since 1 January 2025. Stays of three months or more fall outside that count, and affected units need a registration number displayed on the listing, according to the city's published rules. Zurich and Interlaken have since adopted comparable measures, as reported. The number is the easy part. Proving it is the job.

Key Takeaways

• Ninety nights, per calendar year, per unit. The limit applies to non-exempt residential units in Lucerne, according to the city's rules.
• Long stays don't count. A stay of three months or more falls outside the night count, which makes stay length a planning decision.
• The number goes public. Affected units must register with the city and display the registration number on the listing.
• The cap is spreading. Zurich and Interlaken have adopted comparable measures, as reported, and Geneva and Vaud ran earlier versions.
• The audit is yours. Registration records the unit; only your booking record shows the nights.

What the cap counts, and for whom

The limit is 90 nights per calendar year for a unit, according to the city's published rules. It applies to short lets, which the rules define in a way that excludes long stays: a guest staying three months or more doesn't consume any of the 90 nights. Read that twice, because it changes what the number means. The cap isn't a cap on occupancy. It's a cap on turnover.

The rules also carve out two kinds of property. Units in tourism and agricultural zones sit outside the regime. So does home sharing in the host's main residence, provided the host doesn't generate what the rules call abusive profits from it. Everything else in a residential zone is in scope, including a second home that's let short-term.

That leaves a specific kind of owner holding the problem. Not the person renting a spare room in the flat they live in, and not the hotel in the tourism zone. The owner of an investment flat in a residential neighbourhood, let to visitors for a few nights at a time, is the one who has to count.

The count itself is where hosts get caught out, because a calendar year is not a rolling year. Ninety nights from January to December is the allowance, and it resets. A strong autumn can't borrow from the following spring, and a quiet spring doesn't earn credit for the autumn.

There's a gate above the ceiling, and it's narrow. Hosting beyond 90 nights requires a confirmation from the city in addition to the registration. The rules describe the test in terms of the unit's history: the space mustn't have been used as living space since 2010, or no living space can have been removed to create it since then, according to the city's published rules. For most flats in a residential building, that test is the answer to the question. Check the current text with the competent authority.

Why cities copy a working number

A 90-night cap has an administrative virtue that a percentage cap doesn't. It's explainable in one sentence, checkable against a booking record, and comparable between cities. That's why it travels.

It isn't new, either. Geneva applied a 90-day rule from 2018 and the canton of Vaud adopted something similar in 2022, as reported. Lucerne's version came out of a 2023 vote, with the city applying it from the start of 2025. Zurich and Interlaken have since adopted comparable measures, though the reporting doesn't set out identical thresholds or enforcement systems.

The interesting detail is what came with the rule in Zurich. The city approved five enforcement posts for three years, as reported. That's the part of a cap that doesn't fit in a headline: someone has to identify the qualifying units, process the registrations and work out whether a given listing is inside the limit. A cap without staff is a press release.

There's a second reason the number spreads, and it's arithmetic rather than principle. A cap is cheap to set because it doesn't spend public money directly. It moves the cost of proof onto the owner, who has to keep a record that survives a question. That's the trade every city makes when it picks a number.

The disagreement about whether the cap is proportionate is worth knowing, because it explains the tone of the debate you'll read. Lucerne's homeowners' association pointed to about 330 listings against more than 48,000 homes in the city when the measure was introduced — under 1% of the stock — and questioned the cost of enforcement, as reported. The tenants' association argued the restrictions arrived late. Both positions are on the record. Neither changes what a host has to do.

The registration step that comes first

Before the night count matters, the unit has to be in the register. Affected units are notified to the city through an online form and receive a registration number, according to the city's published rules, and that number has to appear on the listing.

The reason it matters is that the register and the platform record can be compared. Since 2026 the platform shares listing data with the city twice a year on request, including the listing identifier, host name, listing address, registration number and the number of nights stayed, according to the platform's own guidance for the city.

That's a different kind of check from a complaint-driven one. A register plus a night count is a filter. It doesn't need anyone to notice a party or a noisy weekend. It only needs two datasets that can be joined on a number.

Which makes the registration number more than a formality. A listing without one is visible as a listing without one. A number that belongs to a different unit is visible too. And a number attached to a unit whose nights exceed the ceiling produces the exact question the rule was written to ask.

Registration also sets the unit of account. The number attaches to an accommodation unit, not to an owner, so a host with three flats has three registrations and three counts. That's the structure to copy into your own records, whatever the city's form looks like.

Auditing your own nights

Start with the count, not the paperwork. Per unit, per calendar year, how many nights did the unit sell to guests staying under three months.

Separate the two populations early. Short stays count. Stays of three months or more don't. If you take a long let in the shoulder season, that's a different line in the record, and it's the line that buys back capacity later in the year.

Channels are where a count breaks. A unit sold on more than one channel has one night count, not one per platform. Assemble it from the bookings themselves, because the ceiling doesn't care where the guest booked. LOCALSBNB shows each connected channel's source rate and status in one calendar, so a night sold on one channel stops appearing as open on another. You can start at localsbnb.com and read the year as one calendar rather than four exports.

Read the number monthly, not in December. Occupancy alone won't tell you where you stand against a night ceiling, because occupancy is a percentage and the cap is a count. LOCALSBNB's Home dashboard reports occupancy, ADR and RevPAR for a date range, which is the right place to check what the year has earned; the count itself comes from the calendar. Two numbers, one screen, once a month.

Keep a copy of the count at each month end. Not because anyone has asked, but because a count reconstructed in December is an argument, and a count recorded in June is a record.

A night count is only useful if it answers a question you didn't anticipate. Two come up more often than the rest.

The first is which nights belong to which year. A stay that starts on 28 December and ends on 3 January is one booking and two calendar years. Decide the rule you apply — nights by date, not by booking — write it down, and apply it the same way every year.

The other is whether the listing carried the number. A registration that exists in a folder but not on the listing is, from the outside, a listing without a registration. Check the number on each channel after any listing edit, because a copied listing is where it goes missing.

FAQ

Does a three-month stay count against the cap?

No. Stays of three months or more fall outside the night count, according to the city's published rules. That makes the length of a stay a planning decision as much as a pricing one, and it's why the two populations belong on separate lines in your record.

Does the cap apply to a room in my own home?

It can be exempt, and the exemption has conditions. Home sharing in a host's main residence sits outside the cap where the host doesn't generate abusive profits from it, according to the rules. Whether a specific arrangement meets that test is a question for the city or a local adviser, not for a calendar.

What happens when a unit reaches 90 nights?

It stops taking short bookings for the rest of that calendar year, unless the unit has the separate confirmation the city requires for hosting beyond the limit. That confirmation depends on the unit's history, so it's worth checking before the year is planned rather than after the count is full.

The cap is a number a city can announce in a sentence, and the work it creates is a record only the host can keep: which nights, in which year, for how long, on which listing. Cities are adopting the number because it's legible. Hosts are left with the audit. Doing it monthly turns a year-end reconstruction into a habit, and localsbnb.com is where the calendar and the property figures behind that habit can sit together.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. Night limits, exemptions and registration duties differ by canton and city and change over time; check the current rules with the competent authority and take advice from a local professional before you act.