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Tourist licence in the Balearic Islands (ETV)
In the Balearic Islands, your dwelling can only be marketed to tourists once it is registered as an estancia turística (tourist stay - ETV and variants) with the island council's register, and the number must appear in all advertising. Marketing an unregistered stay is a serious or very serious offence, with fines reaching 400,000 euros.
The island councils are in charge, not just the regional government
The Balearics devolved tourism rules to the consells insulars, the island councils. So the rules change per island. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera each run their own register and their own zoning. A dwelling you can market freely in a Menorcan town can sit in a non-eligible zone twenty kilometres away, on the Mallorcan coast.
Zoning matters as much as the number. Since Law 6/2017, town halls and island councils draw the eligible zones, and the pool of tourist places is finite. Buying a property "with a licence" in a zone that has since been declassified means buying a right that may not survive the next revision.
What does the number look like?
Most of the register uses ETV followed by digits and a slash - ETV/2071, for example. Variants mark the modality: ETVPL for multi-family buildings, ETV60 for sixty-day marketing. As of September 2026 our mirror covers the Mallorca and Menorca registers. Ibiza and Formentera publish through other channels and show as pending in the coverage table.
The registration number must appear in every advert, on every channel. Platforms verify it. Since 2018, Balearic law fines the platform itself for publishing without one - which is why Airbnb and Booking remove first and ask questions later.
What does getting it wrong cost?
Law 8/2012 treats marketing an unregistered stay as a serious offence, fined at 4,001 to 40,000 euros. The very serious band, 40,001 to 400,000 euros, covers aggravated cases and large-scale advertising. The Balearics pioneered fining the platforms directly, with penalties against portals above 300,000 euros per case.
For an agency, the risk is not theoretical. The law sanctions whoever markets the stay, not only the owner. An expired number, an island-level deregistration nobody mentioned, or a listing outside an eligible zone shows up in the register first. Whoever checks it nightly finds out before the inspector does.
Check a licence number
Free, no sign-up, nothing stored. Try ETV/012345.
Sources
- Law 8/2012 of 19 July on tourism in the Balearic Islands — marketing of tourist stays and the sanctions regime
- Law 6/2017 of 31 July (zoning and the places pool)
- Island registers - Consell de Mallorca / Consell Insular de Menorca — mirror source
Verified against the sources above on 2026-09-01. LicenceDesk is operational guidance, not legal advice.
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