What 60 European tourist taxes cost for a four-night stay

A four-night stay for two costs €75 in tourist tax in Amsterdam, €32 in Lisbon and nothing in London. Those three numbers come from the same imaginary booking, repeated in 60 European cities, and the gap between them is bigger than most people budget for.

I analyze money for Waymark, which mostly means reading the clause that sits under the headline price. Tourist taxes are a good example. Each one is small, they are charged at the desk or at checkout, and nobody compares them while choosing a city. I live in Berlin, so the 7.5% there is the rate I know best, and it is the one visitors ask me about. I wanted to know how it looks next to everyone else's. For the rules city by city, start with our tourist tax guide. This is the comparison.

For every city in the sample I read the municipal ordinance or the tax authority's page, copied the rate wording into a sheet and wrote down the date I read it. I did that between 7 and 26 September 2026. I did not use hotel sites, aggregators or other travel guides for any rate.

The reference stay is the same everywhere: two adults, four nights, one double room in a mid-range hotel. Where a city taxes by star rating I used the three-star rate. Where it taxes a percentage of the room price I used €150 a night before VAT, so €600 for the stay. Where the tax is per person per night, that is eight person-nights. Where a rate is in another currency I converted at the rate on the day I read it and rounded to the nearest euro.

The sample is 60 cities. Seven charge no overnight tax at all, 36 charge a flat amount per person per night (sometimes by star), 13 charge a percentage of the room price and four charge per room. The sheet has one row per city and ten columns: country, source, date read, who collects, method, rate, star bands, cap on nights, exemptions and notes. I counted the stay as taxed from the first night. The shortest cap on taxed nights I found was five, in Edinburgh, so none bites at four nights.

Samuel Adeyemi, who reviews our data stories, re-derived a random 12 of the 60 from the sources and found one mismatch: a per-room charge that I had entered as per person. I fixed it and re-ran the median, which did not move. The raw sheet is available on request.

Nine cities cover the range and the three main methods. The table shows the tax for the reference stay, and what share of the €600 room bill it takes.

Rates are what I read on the dates above, rounded. City taxes change often, so check the city's own page before you rely on a figure.

Across all 60 cities the median stay cost €32, which is what Lisbon charges, so Lisbon sits in the middle of the pack. The mean was €33. A quarter of the cities charged €16 or less and a quarter charged €48 or more. Amsterdam was the dearest at €75, and no other city in the sample reached €65. The cheapest city that charges anything came to €6.40 for the stay, which is €0.80 a person a night.

The overall picture is less dramatic than the top and bottom suggest. For the same €600 room bill, the median tax is about 5%. Most people planning a trip across four or five cities will pay between €100 and €200 in tourist tax over the whole journey, and that is a line in the budget and rarely a reason to change the route.

The method matters more than the headline rate. Percentage cities averaged €42 for the stay, flat-rate cities €38 and per-room cities €14. The averages are close. The spread inside each group is not: the percentage group runs from €24 to €75, and the flat group from €6.40 to €62.

A percentage tax follows the room price. Double the room to €300 a night and Amsterdam goes from €75 to €150, Berlin from €45 to €90 and Edinburgh from €30 to €60. A flat tax does not move. Lisbon is €32 whether the room is €90 or €400, and Rome stays at €48 in a three-star. If you are choosing between a basic room and a splurge, the percentage cities punish the splurge and the flat cities barely notice it.

Flat taxes by star rating work the other way round, because the star rating is a proxy for price. In Rome, at the rates I recorded, the same four nights cost about €48 in a three-star and about €80 in a five-star. A five-star in Amsterdam at €400 a night would pay €200 for the stay. Check the percentage cities first if you are booking up the scale.

Per-room charges are the smallest group and the cheapest on average. They look generous until you travel alone, because one person in a double room pays the same as two. For a solo traveler, a per-person city is cheaper than the table suggests and a per-room city is dearer.

In March I did a card-fee test in Lisbon and Porto, six nights in total. Both hotels printed the city tax as its own line on the final invoice, and the Lisbon one collected it at checkout instead of including it in the price I had booked. That is typical of what I saw in the sources: the tax is often shown as payable at the property, and booking sites differ on whether the headline price includes it. Read the price breakdown before you pay.

For a trip plan I use two rules. In a city that charges a percentage, multiply the rate by the room bill before VAT: 12.5% in Amsterdam, 7.5% in Berlin, 5% in Edinburgh. In a flat-rate city, multiply the nightly amount by the number of paying adults and the number of nights. Everything else is detail, and the detail rarely moves a total by more than €20.

Two cautions. Caps favor longer stays in one place: Barcelona and Lisbon stop taxing after seven nights and Edinburgh after five, so the average per night falls on a ten-night stay and stays flat if you split the ten nights across cities. And apartments are often taxed differently from hotels. In Barcelona a tourist apartment sits in a higher band than a standard hotel, €9.50 against €7 per person per night. I did not price apartments for the sheet, because the rules for rentals vary too much between cities to compare fairly.

Nothing in the cities I read depends on your passport. The tax applies to residents and visitors alike, and exemptions turn on age, purpose and sometimes length of stay.

Children are the biggest exemption. Of the 53 cities that charge anything, 49 exempt children under an age that runs from 2 to 18, with a median cut-off of 14. In the cities I recorded, Rome exempts children under 10, Lisbon under 13, Catalonia (including Barcelona) under 17 and Prague under 18. A family of four with children aged 8 and 11 pays for three people in Rome, 50% more than the two adults alone, and in Barcelona the children add nothing.

The other common exemptions are medical stays, patients' companions, people staying for work contracts and long stays beyond about a month. Each city writes its own list and several of them require paperwork at check-in. I do not give figures for those, because I did not read the claim forms and I would be guessing.

The Venice access fee is outside this sample, because it is a day-visitor charge and not an overnight tax. Overnight guests in Venice pay the tourist tax through their host and were exempt from the access fee in 2026, though they still needed an exemption code. The fee was a 2026 trial and ended on 26 July. Our guide to the Venice access fee has the details.

The sample is 60 cities chosen because our readers ask about them. It leans toward capitals and popular tourist cities and says little about small towns, ski villages and islands, where tourist taxes are often higher than in the large city nearby. A mid-range hotel at €150 is also my assumption. In a city where the usual room is €90, the percentage cities fall and the flat cities do not.

One more thing the table leaves out is anything a booking site or hotel adds on top of the tax, such as a service fee. The amounts above are the tax alone, so the total on your invoice can differ, and the price breakdown is where to check.

Rates change every year. In the twelve months before I read the sources, at least six of the 60 cities changed their rates or began charging, including Barcelona on 1 April 2026, Vienna on 1 July 2026 and Edinburgh on 24 July 2026. Vienna's own page lists a further rise to 8% from 1 July 2027. Any table like this one is a snapshot, and I would trust its shape over its euros. I plan to rerun it each September.

The sentence I would quote: for a four-night stay for two, the median European city adds about €32 in tourist tax, which is 5% on a €600 room, and the amount you pay depends more on whether the city charges by percentage than on which city it is. Check the method before you check the rate.