Before You Put Your Budva Apartment on Airbnb: The Plaque, the 12-Hour Rule and 7.5 Percent

What do you need to let a Budva apartment to tourists legally? A clean building (no unpermitted-construction ban in section G of the title extract), registration with the municipality at least eight days before the first guest and entry in the Central Tourist Register; rooms, tourist apartments and houses also need a star category, while a flat let to tourists is exempt from categorisation. The tourist tax, up to €1.00 per person per night in Budva, is collected with the price, and VAT registration becomes compulsory once turnover passes €30,000 in twelve months.

The first question a foreign buyer asks about a Budva apartment is "what does it earn in summer"; the second question is not "how do I do this legally". The second question gets asked in June, when the first guest is at the door, and by then it is a question that takes two to three weeks to answer. So this article is built not as a summary of the rules but as the calendar of one season: what is done in which month, which document takes how many days, which line costs how much.

The sources are Montenegro's tourism and hospitality law, the tourist tax law, the Law on Foreigners, the income tax law and RoNa Legal's Budva files. The figures belong to the 2026 season; municipalities set the tourist tax by their own decisions and can change it, so next season may differ.

Before the season: February and March

The first job is the building itself. Article 33 of the 2025 legalisation law bars both the sale of a building put up without a permit and any economic activity in it, and the ban is entered in section G of the title extract. A February 2026 amendment softened this for flats whose section G already carries one of the listed notes, such as "no use permit": business activity is tolerated for 36 months from the law's entry into force in August 2025, and a unit marked "no use permit" can still be sold if it was built in line with its building permit. The window is temporary. Once it closes, the cadastre enters the ban for buildings still without a legalisation decision, so the note in section G is the first thing to read, before the sea view. The buyer's checklist is in our title and debt check, and what an unlegalised building costs its owner is set out in RoNa Legal's note on legalizacija buyer risk.

If the building is clean, the municipality is next. Letting to tourists as a private host starts with a registration filed with the municipal authority at least eight days before the first guest; the municipality decides on entry in the Central Tourist Register (Centralni turistički registar) within eight days, and inspectors check the unit within 15 days of that decision. Rooms, tourist apartments and houses also need a star category: the request goes to the same authority within five days of the register decision, a commission rules within 15 days of a complete file, and the decision is valid for three years. A flat let to tourists (stan za iznajmljivanje turistima) is exempt from categorisation under Article 84 of the tourism law, but it still needs the register entry and has to meet the minimum technical standards. A private host can let at most ten rooms or 20 beds in total; above that, the law requires a registered hospitality business. Taking paying guests before the register decision counts as letting without a licence.

One more February job: settle how you will report guests. The deadlines, set out below, run in hours rather than days, and a host who first looks for the registration channel in June spends the opening week at the tourist organisation's counter.

April and May: listing and price

The law asks more of a listing than most owners expect. Under Article 101 of the tourism law the host shows the unit's type and category in any advertising, displays the same sign at the entrance, posts the prices and the tourist tax, and keeps the register decision in the unit. When setting the price, treat the tourist tax as a separate line. The statute sets it between 0.10 and 1.00 euro per person per night and leaves the figure to each municipality; Budva's tourist organisation quotes up to 1.00 euro, and a municipality can let private hosts pay a yearly lump sum per bed instead. Children under 12 and guests staying more than 30 days in a row are exempt, and 12 to 18 year olds pay half. The host collects the tax with the room price and pays it over within five days of the end of each 15-day period. VAT registration becomes compulsory once turnover in the last twelve months passes 30,000 euros; above that line accommodation is charged at the reduced rate of 15 percent, which has applied to accommodation since 1 January 2025. We see owners with two apartments approaching that threshold in a good season; one sitting with the accountant in April saves a surprise in September.

For the yield arithmetic, put the tourist tax, the platform commission, cleaning and income tax into the formula before comparing it with any "net yield" in a brochure. The tax part is worked through in the October section below.

June to September: every guest is a notification

The rule is simple and tiring, and it comes from two laws. Under the Law on Foreigners, a host registers each foreign guest with the police within 12 hours of arrival, directly or through the local tourist organisation, which has to pass the registration on within 12 hours, and deregisters the guest on departure. The 24 hours you may have read about is the deadline for a foreigner registering their own stay, not for a host. Under the tourist tax law, every guest, local or foreign, is reported to the local tourist organisation within 24 hours of arrival.

The fines sit in three different laws. The ranges below are the statutory minimum and maximum:

A sole trader (preduzetnik) sits between the two: 250 to 5,000 euros for the tourist tax breaches and 300 to 1,500 euros for an unregistered foreign guest. A repeat breach within twelve months can bring a ban on operating for up to six months. Six months in the middle of the season is the whole year's income.

Building management is a separate matter. Decisions of the owners' assembly (skupština etažnih vlasnika) bind everyone in the building; how far restrictions on short-term letting can lawfully go is a contested area, and the rules of the building you are buying into should be read before, not after, the purchase. Asking for the building's rules at the purchase stage is cheaper than litigating with a neighbour.

October close: filing in two countries

Income tax is Montenegro's most generous line. Rent is taxed at 15 percent, but Article 35 of the personal income tax law lets a host who lets rooms, apartments, houses or flats to tourists deduct 50 percent of the income as standard costs without receipts, provided the tourist tax has been paid; the effective rate is 7.5 percent. The deduction rises to 70 percent, an effective 4.5 percent, for a host who has a letting contract with a travel agency or the local tourist organisation and reaches an average occupancy of at least 60 days a year. On top comes the municipal surtax (prirez), a percentage of the tax amount set by each municipality. On 10,000 euros of seasonal income the arithmetic is roughly 750 euros of income tax before surtax. Long-term letting gets a 30 percent standard deduction and an effective 10.5 percent; the two models are compared with worked examples in Renting out property in Montenegro: tax and legal rules.

The home-country side gets forgotten. An owner who remains tax resident elsewhere reports the Montenegrin rent in their own return; where a tax treaty applies, the home country generally credits the Montenegrin tax and any difference is paid at home. The credit requires the payment certificate from the Montenegrin tax office; owners who do not ask for it in October are chasing it in spring while filling in the home return.

A word on CRS, the automatic exchange of bank account data. Montenegro signed the multilateral agreement in March 2022 and committed to start exchanging in 2023, but the OECD's December 2025 peer review still rated its framework "not in place". That is a delay, not a loophole: the duty to declare the rent at home does not depend on whether a bank reports it.

November: one decision for next season

When the season ends, one question remains: continue as an individual, or form a DOO? For an investor beyond two or three apartments, crossing the VAT threshold, or considering a move into the hotel category one day, a company structure starts to make sense; for one holiday flat, the company's accounting and payroll eat the income. The threshold depends on the file, and the decision has to be made in November, because the register entry and the category decision are issued in the name of whoever lets the unit.

Properties in the apartments for sale on Fijaka whose listing mentions "turistička kategorizacija" have been through this calendar once already; look at the date of the decision, and remember that a new owner files in their own name. For owners who want the calendar run from one desk, from the register to the home-country filing, RoNa Legal's Budva office reads the building's section G and the building's rules at the first meeting; a file that arrives in February is always cheaper than one that arrives in June with a guest at the door.

Information only; not legal or tax advice. Tourist tax and fine amounts can change by municipal decision or statute; confirm the current tariff before the season.