If you take money for overnight stays anywhere in Wales, you have a legal deadline coming: from 1 October 2026 you must register your accommodation with the Welsh Revenue Authority. Not your council. Not just if you are in a levy area. Everyone, everywhere in Wales, including the farm field that opens for six weeks in the summer and the two pods at the bottom of the garden.

This is the part of the Welsh visitor levy story that gets lost, because the headlines are all about 75p a night. Registration is a separate duty with its own deadline and its own penalties, and it applies whether or not your council ever charges a levy at all.

Where the register comes from

The Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 September 2025. It does two jobs. The first is a compulsory national register of everyone providing paid visitor accommodation in Wales. The second is a visitor levy that individual councils can choose to introduce, at the earliest from April 2027.

The register comes first deliberately. Welsh Government wanted a complete picture of who is letting what before any charge starts, partly for the levy and partly because nobody has ever had a reliable list of Welsh visitor accommodation. Some of it will read as overdue tidying up. Some of it will feel like being counted for the first time.

Who has to register

The test is simple: do you take payment for people to stay overnight? If yes, you register. The scope explicitly includes:

It applies whether you let for a single night a year, a few weekends, one season, or all year round. There is no minimum size and no hobby exemption. A five pitch site running on the same model as a Certificated Location is in scope exactly like a 200 pitch holiday park.

If you run more than one site, you register yourself and then each premises you operate.

What you need to hand

Registration is free and most people finish in under 15 minutes. You will be asked for:

None of that is difficult, but two answers are worth thinking about before you type them. Accommodation type matters because it decides which levy rate applies later: campsite pitches and shared rooms sit at 75p per person per night, everything else at £1.30. And maximum guests is the number you can genuinely accommodate, so work it out from your pitches and units rather than guessing on the spot.

The timetable

So the sequence for most Welsh sites is: register this autumn, carry on as normal, and then find out whether your own council decides to charge. Do not wait for the second question to answer the first.

The penalties, and why they matter more than the levy

There are financial penalties for failing to register, and separate penalties for late filing and late payment once a levy applies. The registration penalty is the one most likely to catch small sites out, precisely because it applies in areas with no levy at all. It is easy to read "the levy starts in 2027" and conclude that nothing happens until then.

Put a note in your diary for the first week of October. It is a fifteen minute job that removes an entire category of risk.

Get your numbers ready while you are at it

Registration itself does not require any booking data. What comes next does. The Welsh levy is charged per person per night, with under 18s exempt from the 75p campsite rate, and returns are filed either annually or quarterly depending on the size of your bill.

That means from the day a levy starts in your area you will need to be able to answer, for any three month period:

A paper diary cannot answer that in February for the previous August. CampSuite™ can, because the party details are attached to the booking from the moment it is taken. When your council does introduce a levy, you set the 75p rate once and it is charged per adult per night, with under 18s left out automatically, and the levy report totals the chargeable nights for your return. If your guest numbers currently live in your head or in a column of scribbled initials, the run up to the register is a sensible moment to fix that.

A worked example

Say you run a 20 pitch touring site in a council that adopts the levy. Average two adults a pitch, a 200 night season, 60% occupancy. That is roughly 2,400 chargeable adult nights, so about £1,800 of levy across the season. Over £1,000, which puts you in the quarterly filing bracket rather than annual. Every one of those 2,400 nights has to be evidenced if anyone asks.

None of that is frightening. It is just record keeping, and it is far easier to start doing it now than to reconstruct it later.

What to do this month

The bottom line

Registration is compulsory, free, quick and separate from the levy. Ignore it because your council is not charging anything and you can still end up with a penalty. Get it done in October and the only thing left to think about is whether your booking records are good enough to survive a per person tax, which they should be anyway.

If yours are still on paper, try CampSuite free. Every booking carries the dates, the nights, the pitch and the party, and the visitor levy handling is already built in and ready for the Welsh rates, so when a levy does arrive in your area the return is a report rather than a weekend. It is free for up to 100 pitches, so most Welsh camping fields and touring parks pay nothing at all.

This article is general information for campsite owners, not tax or legal advice. The Welsh Revenue Authority publishes the definitive guidance and some detail sits in regulations still to come. Last updated 27 July 2026.