Rent out your property in Malta: list your rental free

On Darscover, landlords list free: no agency fee and no listing fee. You describe the property, add photos, the rent and your phone number, and tenants contact you directly to arrange viewings.

Long let or short let, the listing works the same way; the rules do not. A long let runs under the Private Residential Leases Act and must be registered; a short let to tourists needs a Malta Tourism Authority licence first. Both are covered below.

The table below is the Darscover Rent Index: the median asking rent a month in each locality with at least 10 live rental listings, and the middle half of the market, from the 25th to the 75th percentile. These are asking rents, not agreed rents, so treat them as where the market starts, not where it ends.

Price within the range for your area and size and the enquiries come quickly; price above it and the listing sits. A month empty costs more than the gap you were holding out for.

The two are different businesses under different laws. A long let (a private residential lease) runs under the Private Residential Leases Act: a minimum one-year term for a standard residence, mandatory registration, and rules on deposits and termination notice. A short let to tourists needs a Malta Tourism Authority licence for holiday premises and behaves like hospitality: higher gross income, real operating effort, and management firms taking a share of revenue if you outsource it.

Decide on numbers, not hunches: a realistic long-let rent for your locality against a realistic short-let occupancy after fees. The rental yield calculator does the arithmetic either way.

The sequence below keeps you legal and rentable from day one.

Every private residential lease must be registered with the Housing Authority within 10 days of its start. An unregistered lease is null: you cannot enforce it, and the exposure runs one way, against the landlord. Administrative penalties for non-compliance run from €2,500 to €10,000.

Registration is done online, needs the signed contract, the EPC and the deposit details, and must be renewed or updated as leases renew and tenants change. Treat the 10-day clock as part of the handover: keys, inventory and registration, in the same week.

Rental income from residential lets can be taxed at a flat 15% final withholding rate on the gross rent, declared annually on the dedicated form. The alternative is declaring rent with your other income at normal progressive rates, which occasionally wins for landlords with a low total income, but the 15% final option is the simple default most Maltese landlords choose.

Flat and final means no deductions: the 15% applies to gross rent, not profit. Price your rent accordingly, and keep the EPC, the registration and the receipts filed; simple tax does not mean no paperwork.

Letting to tourists without a Malta Tourism Authority licence is an offence, and fines can exceed €10,000. The licence attaches to the premises, has its own standards, and platforms increasingly ask for the licence number. If you are weighing short-let income against long-let simplicity, put the licence, the cleaning, the utilities and a management fee of 10% to 25% of revenue into the comparison before the gross numbers decide for you.