Renting out a holiday home in Malta: the three-way decision

Short-letting earns the highest headline rate and the highest costs: changeover cleaning, management, void weeks, utilities you now pay, licensing, and wear that arrives by the suitcase. Long-letting earns less per week, costs almost nothing to run, and in Malta enjoys the simplest landlord tax anywhere: an optional flat 15% final tax on gross rent. Selling converts the asset to capital and ends both conversations.

The panel above shows the live long-let and sale medians for residential property across Malta, each with its sample size, computed from current listings. Those two arms rest on real asking data. The short-let arm deliberately does not: Darscover holds no occupancy or nightly-rate data for Malta, so any short-let revenue figure on this page would be an invention. Instead, the method below hands you the calculation with your own assumptions in it.

Estimate short-let revenue honestly in four lines. Take your nightly rate from what comparable properties near yours actually charge across the year, not August. Multiply by the occupancy you believe, stated as nights per year, and be suspicious of any figure you would not bet on. Subtract the running costs long-letting does not have: cleaning per changeover, management if you use a co-host, platform commission, licensing, utilities and consumables, and a maintenance line that reflects real guest wear. Compare what is left to the long-let figure above, which arrives with almost none of those deductions.

Run that comparison and one of two things happens: short-letting wins clearly, and you should read the licence page next, or it does not, and the boring option was the right one. Both outcomes are wins; the expensive mistake is running a short let at long-let economics without noticing for two years.

The long-let route is heavily standardised in Malta: a written lease registered with the Housing Authority within 10 days of commencement, the optional 15% final tax on gross rent, and an EPC for the premises. The landlord guide covers the whole checklist. What it earns you is predictability: a year of rent that arrives whether it rains in April or not.

Then do it properly: tourist accommodation in Malta requires a Malta Tourism Authority licence before hosting, and the licence page explains what that involves and cites the MTA for the detail. Beyond compliance, the operational decision is whether you run it yourself or hand it to a co-host or manager, which is a real trade of margin for time; the co-host page covers that market from both sides.

One more Maltese pattern worth knowing: searchers here look for stays 'direct from owner'. Listing your property where renters browse, under your own name rather than behind a platform fee, is both what Maltese demand wants and what keeps the margin at home.