Tourist tax 2026: Europe's most expensive cities, and the 26 where you pay nothing

We checked the tourist tax in one hundred European cities, one by one, on the page of the council or the body that collects it, between 15 and 21 September 2026. The full result is in the city-by-city table; this is the short read: who charges most, who charges nothing, and what changed this year.

The figure we compare is the highest tax a city applies to one person for one night in a hotel, usually the 5-star rate. Where the tax is per room we halved it; where it is a percentage we put it in a separate table with an explicit example, because the comparison depends on what the room costs.

The ten most expensive cities

Paris stays on top with the €15.93 of its palace hotels, but the figure that really matters is the 4-star one: €8.45 each, every night, adults only. Barcelona raised its ceiling to €13.20 on 1 April 2026 and Milan took 4- and 5-star hotels to €10 in its Olympic year. Five of the first nine cities are Italian, and tenth place is a group of ten cities at €5, all of them Italian.

The cities that tax a percentage

Seven cities have no fixed rate but a percentage of the room price. To compare them we took a €150 double room for two adults: the figure is what each of them pays. With a dearer room the tax rises in the same proportion, which is why Amsterdam, fourth on a €150 room, becomes the most expensive city in Europe above €255.

The 26 cities where you pay nothing

A quarter of the hundred cities have no tourist tax in 2026. The biggest block is Spain: of the fourteen Spanish cities in our dossiers only Barcelona and Menorca charge one; in Madrid, Valencia, Seville, Córdoba, Granada, Málaga, Nerja, Toledo, Bilbao, San Sebastián, Lanzarote and Tenerife you pay nothing.

Then the whole north: Oslo, Bergen, Tromsø, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki. Poland's big cities, Krakow, Warsaw and Wroclaw, where the law reserves the tax for climatic resorts. London and Dublin, which still have no law allowing one. Munich, where Bavaria bans it. Tallinn. And Lagos in the Algarve, where seven councils out of sixteen apply it, but not that one.

What changed in 2026

2026 is the year the tourist tax reached the United Kingdom: Edinburgh applies it from 24 July, 5% of the accommodation price for the first five nights. Vienna went from 3.2% to 5% on 1 July and will reach 8% in 2027. Brussels rose to €5 per room on 1 January, Innsbruck from €3 to €4 on 1 May, Valletta from €0.50 to €1.50 on 1 July, Brașov quadrupled to 12 lei. Going the other way, Istanbul halved its national tax from 2% to 1%.

In Italy the rates changed in Milan, Naples (from 1 May), Cagliari and Lecce (from 1 April), Catania (from 1 February), Turin, Alghero and Genoa (from 1 August for B&Bs and holiday homes). And Barcelona from 1 April.

Who arrives in 2027 and 2028

The list of tax-free cities will get shorter soon. In 2027 come Bergen and Tromsø with Norway's 3%, Bilbao with the Bizkaia tax (€0.50 to €7) and San Sebastián with Gipuzkoa's (€1.25 to €6.50); Riga doubles to €2, Salzburg rises to €4.15 and Bruges to €5 from 2028. The Danish government proposed a 20-krone nightly tax for Copenhagen on 15 September 2026, Dublin got the government's go-ahead in June, and for London the law giving mayors a levy will not arrive before 2028.

How we counted

The hundred cities are those of the VoyAVer dossiers. For each one we read the resolution, the page of the council, the tax agency or the tourist board, between 15 and 21 September 2026; where only a secondary source exists, the full table says so. The ranking uses the highest rate applied to one person for one night in a hotel; per-room taxes are halved; percentages are calculated on a €150 double for two adults. Landing fees and day-visitor access fees, like Venice's, are a different thing and are not here.

The data can be reused with attribution, and it is also in a CSV file with the hundred rows and their links (in Italian). If a figure looks wrong, the full table links to every city's official page: that is where it is worth looking.