The tax on a €10,000 hotel night: €24 in Barcelona, €3,350 in Amsterdam

Europe’s cities spent 2026 raising the price of a night’s sleep. Barcelona put its tourist tax up in April, Edinburgh introduced the first city-wide visitor levy in Britain in July, and the Netherlands more than doubled the VAT on hotel rooms in January.

The stated aim, nearly everywhere, is to make tourism pay its way and to cool crowded centres. What these taxes cost the very richest travellers, though, depends almost entirely on how they are designed. A fixed charge per guest and a percentage of the bill produce wildly different results once the room costs as much as a car.

A suite, six ways

Take a suite that costs 10,000 a night before tax, in whatever the local currency is, occupied by two adults. In Barcelona a five-star hotel has, since April, charged €12 per person per night: €7 in regional tax and a €5 municipal surcharge. The couple pays €24.

In Paris the tariff for hotels classified as palaces, the city’s top category, is €15.93 per adult in 2026, including the regional surcharges. The couple pays €31.86.

Kyoto, which in March introduced the highest accommodation tax in Japan, charges ¥10,000 per person per night on rooms costing ¥100,000 or more. The couple pays ¥20,000, roughly $135.

Then the percentage systems. Edinburgh’s levy, which applies to stays from 24 July, is 5 per cent of the accommodation cost before VAT, for the first five nights. On a £10,000 night that is £500.

New York charges a city hotel occupancy tax of 5.875 per cent plus $2 a room, a state fee of $1.50, and sales tax of 8.875 per cent. On a $10,000 room the total comes to about $1,479.

Amsterdam charges the most. Its tourist tax is 12.5 per cent of the room price, the highest rate in Europe, and from 1 January the Dutch VAT on hotel accommodation rose from 9 per cent to 21 per cent. On a €10,000 night, that is €1,250 of tourist tax and €2,100 of VAT: €3,350 in all.

Flat fees favour the top

The per-person systems are simpler to collect and easier to explain. They are also regressive at the top of the market. Barcelona’s €12 is 2.4 per cent of a €500 room and 0.12 per cent of a €10,000 one. Kyoto’s ¥10,000 is a tenth of the price of a ¥100,000 room and a third of one per cent of the ¥3mn suite at the new Imperial Hotel in Gion.

That is partly deliberate. Tourist taxes are meant to pay for crowded streets, cleaning and public transport, and each extra guest adds roughly the same burden whatever the room cost. Cities that depend on luxury hotels are also wary of driving away their best customers.

The percentage systems take the opposite view: that a tax on accommodation should behave like a tax on spending. Amsterdam has gone furthest and has said it may raise its rate again from 2027 if overnight stays do not fall below 20mn a year.

Where the money comes from

For the travellers who book suites, none of these amounts decides where they stay. A guest paying €10,000 a night in Amsterdam is unlikely to move to Rotterdam over the tax. But the designs reveal who the cities think should pay. In Barcelona and Paris, a guest in the finest suite in town pays at most about a dozen euros a night more than one in a modest hotel. Amsterdam asks the billionaire for about as much as a backpacker’s whole holiday.

As more cities follow Edinburgh in adopting levies, the choice between the two models is becoming one of the quieter questions in European tourism policy. So far, most have chosen the one that the people at the top of the bill can afford not to notice.

Sources

• CMS: Amsterdam tightens the screw on tourism, a further update (24 Apr 2026)
• City of Amsterdam: tourist tax
• City of Edinburgh Council: about the Edinburgh visitor levy
• NYC311: hotel room occupancy tax
• Ville de Paris: tourist tax tariffs in force in 2026
• Hosteltur: Barcelona’s tourist tax in 2026
• City of Kyoto: accommodation tax changes from 1 March 2026

Cover image: Jorge Láscar from Australia, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Cropped.