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Drip pricing and holiday lets: cleaning fees, levies and the price you have to show first

Sergej Sitki · founder of ReceptionGO and host
Published 29 October 2026 · 6 min read

General information, not legal or tax advice. Check your own case with your local council, HMRC or the relevant revenue authority, or an accountant.

Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 requires the total price of a holiday let, including mandatory fees, to be shown from the start. A cleaning fee, a booking fee or a compulsory levy added at the last step is drip pricing. If the exact total cannot be calculated yet, you must show how it will be calculated, as prominently as the headline price.

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A cottage at “£120 a night” that becomes £168 once cleaning, linen and a levy are added is the pricing pattern Parliament banned from 6 April 2025. The rule is not aimed only at airlines. The CMA’s price-transparency guidance uses holiday and hotel charges as the example, and a holiday let advertised to consumers is an invitation to purchase.

What has to be in the headline price

Partitioned pricing — “£120 plus £60 cleaning” with no total — is the same problem. The guest has to be able to compare your week with the cottage next door. A total does that. Two numbers they must add up themselves do not.

Levies in Scotland and Wales

Edinburgh’s levy is 5% of the accommodation charge excluding VAT, on the first five nights, for stays since 24 July 2026. A guest cannot decline it. It belongs in the price conversation before they book, not in a WhatsApp message after they arrive. Where you know the dates and the party, you can show the pounds. Where you do not, show the formula next to the nightly rate.

Wales is simpler to display and easier to get wrong by omission. The levy is £1.30 per person per night, or 75p for a campsite pitch or a hostel bed, in councils that have started it. Cardiff’s start is 1 April 2027. A family of four for a week is £36.40. That sum is large enough that leaving it off the advert is exactly the drip the Act describes. The rates and the register are in the Wales guide and the Scotland guide.

On a platform that has agreed with the council to collect the levy, do not collect it a second time. On a platform that has not, you still owe it, so build it into the rate or collect it with the balance. Charging it only after arrival, when the guest has already compared your price with someone else’s, is the breach.

Your own website is the page the CMA would open

Platforms have lawyers. A host’s own booking page often does not. If the page shows a nightly rate, then adds cleaning on the next screen, that is your commercial practice. Put the week’s total on the first screen the guest uses to decide. Optional extras can sit underneath, each with a price, unticked.

The same screen is where a cancellation term has to be readable. A cheap headline with a harsh cancellation rule buried in a PDF is a different section of the same Act — misleading omissions — and it is how deposits get disputed.

A five-minute check

1. Book your own property as far as the payment step on each site, in a private window.
2. Write down every amount that was not on the first price you saw.
3. Mark which of those the guest could have refused.
4. Move the rest into the headline, or print the calculation beside it.