Holiday lets in Cornwall, where a second home now pays double council tax

This is not legal or tax advice, and Upbridge does not file anything for you: no registrations and no tax returns.

The council expects the premium to raise about £28.1 million in 2026/27, according to a Freedom of Information answer reported by The Post in May 2026. The Telegraph wrote in April 2025 that owners who let a home for 70 nights a year can qualify for business rates, often cheaper than council tax, and that Cornish MPs want that loophole closed.

Some owners are selling. LandSale told Property Investor Today in August 2026 that higher council tax seems to have pushed more holiday let owners to put their homes on the market, although sales in Cornwall grew only 3.7% from 2024 to 2025, against 4.4% across England. If you manage cottages for other people, that's a client who may leave at the end of a season, and a good reason to keep each owner's records easy to hand over.

The season itself is short and crowded. A report for Visit Cornwall counted 19.3 million day and staying trips in 2019 and named overcrowding in July and August as a problem. Families who find those weeks too expensive tend to come at the Whit half-term or in October, and the same report expected more trips in September and October. For a cleaning team, that means the summer peak still sets the year, while the half-term weeks and the autumn bring more changeovers than they used to.

Newquay is the county's airport. Its summer 2025 schedule served 20 destinations, with Gatwick and Stansted all year round and three Skybus flights a day to the Isles of Scilly, so some of your guests will land at Newquay rather than drive the whole way down.

Council tax, business rates and the 70 nights are between you, the owner and an accountant. Our part is the changeover: each checkout on your calendar, whether it comes from Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify, Uplisting or iCal, becomes a cleaning with a photo checklist per room, and every stay leaves a dated record of who cleaned and when.

Before July, inventory per property shows what's running low in each cottage, because it's deducted after every stay. For a guest driving down narrow lanes after dark, we build the guest guide with the directions, where to park and how to get in, and they open it on their phone.

Cottages here can be a long drive apart, so the order of the day matters as much as the number of cleanings. The account for cleaning companies shows every owner's checkouts on one calendar, so you can group them by village before the season starts, and each client stays yours.