On 9 September 2026 the College of Commissioners adopted and put forward the Affordable Housing Act — a proposed regulation creating, for the first time, a common European framework for national, regional and municipal measures against housing pressure.
The title sounds more dramatic than the text. The Act does not ban short-term letting, does not cap rents and does not take powers away from member states. It does something narrower and more technical: it sets out what evidence is required, and within what limits, for a local authority to restrict the use of housing for anything other than a primary residence — and leaves entirely to that authority whether to act at all.
Current as of September 2026.
The proposal was presented by Dan Jørgensen, European Commissioner for Energy and Housing, alongside Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President for Competition.
The Commission's stated rationale is measurable: according to the latest Eurobarometer, 51% of city residents in the EU regard the lack of affordable housing as an urgent and immediate problem where they live. Jørgensen added rental figures — over the past ten years, he said, rents have risen by 59% in Berlin, 75% in Madrid and 103% in Lisbon — and noted that in some cities between 20% and 30% of homes stand vacant.
What matters for owners: this is a legislative proposal, not law in force. It now passes to the European Parliament and the Council under the ordinary legislative procedure and may be amended. As of today it changes none of your obligations.
This is the core of the Act. Until now, member states introducing restrictions found themselves in disputes over whether their measures were compatible with single market rules. The proposal supplies a common methodology — and with it, predictability in both directions.
The assessment runs through several steps:
The assessment must rest on concrete data, be geographically targeted, transparent and subject to periodic review.
If an area is identified as under pressure, the local authority may — if it chooses — restrict the use of housing for purposes other than a primary residence: short-term letting, long-term vacant property, second homes.
But any such measure must be:
One further condition deserves attention: before restricting anything, the authority must already apply and enforce the EU Short-Term Rental Regulation — including the registration-number requirement and the removal of non-compliant listings — and use the data collected under it to support its assessment. What that means in practice for an owner in Sofia or on the coast we covered in detail in our guide to Regulation (EU) 2024/1028. This article is its logical sequel: that one was about traceability, this one is about what may be done with the information gathered.
The proposal expressly protects legal certainty and legitimate expectations. Three points are worth remembering:
For investors and owners holding property across several markets this is, on balance, good news: until now the rules differed from city to city with no common framework against which to judge them.
The proposal is accompanied by a Recommendation on housing affordability and supply, encouraging authorities to speed up planning and permitting for new construction, renovation and repurposing, and to concentrate those efforts in Housing Acceleration Plans.
The Act itself forms part of the European Affordable Housing Plan of December 2025, alongside the new state aid rules for affordable housing and the European Strategy for Housing Construction.
The short answer: nothing concrete today. No new register, no new tax, no change to the documents you file.
The longer answer is that the framework is cut to a problem that looks different here. Bulgaria has one of the highest owner-occupancy rates in the EU — 86.1% in 2025 according to Eurostat. With a rental market that small in absolute terms, any movement looks large in percentage terms, and the pressure is concentrated in a few cities and a few occupational groups; we set out that picture in detail in our analysis of rents.
That is precisely why the proposal's emphasis on local data matters here: a national average would conceal both the tourist municipalities on the coast and in the mountains and individual districts within Sofia. Whether any Bulgarian municipality would reach the thresholds, and whether it would want to introduce measures at all, is a question nobody can answer honestly today. No official calculation under this methodology has been published for any Bulgarian locality, and the text itself has not been adopted.
Checking registration status for short-term lets, and reconciling declared capacity with what the listing shows, has long been part of our standard work on the properties we look after — not an add-on. To that we add this: we are following the proposal through Parliament and the Council, because if it enters into force in its present form, what will matter is not the text but whether a particular municipality has carried out the assessment, and on what timescale.
If you let short-term, hold a property empty for explicable reasons, or are considering a purchase with an investment purpose and want to know what actually lies ahead — call us or come into the office. We will look at the specific property and tell you which part of this touches you and which does not.
Current as of September 2026 and based on the European Commission's proposal of 9 September 2026 and the accompanying recommendation. The proposal is not law in force. This material is for information only and does not replace individual legal advice.
