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Wales

Buying a holiday lodge in Wales: the rules that are genuinely different

Wales has its own council tax premiums, its own letting thresholds, its own park home law and a new visitor levy. What actually applies to a lodge on a Welsh holiday park, and what does not, with the real 2026 site fees.

Published 2026-07-26 · updated 2026-07-26 · 11 min read · all figures sourced below

If you are looking at a lodge in Wales, most of what you read online was written about England and does not apply to you. Wales sets its own council tax premiums, its own letting thresholds, its own park home law, and from 2027 its own visitor levy. Three of those four are commonly explained wrongly by people selling lodges.

I live in Pembrokeshire, so this is the article I wanted when I started looking. Every figure below comes from the operator, the council or the legislation, and the sources are listed at the bottom.

The 300% council tax question

This is the first thing people ask, and the answer is better than they fear.

Welsh councils can charge a council tax premium of up to 300% on second homes. That power arrived in April 2023, raised from a previous maximum of 100% by regulations that substituted "300" for "100" in sections 12A and 12B of the Local Government Finance Act 1992. It is discretionary, so each council picks its own figure. Conwy has set 150% on second homes for 2026/27 and 2027/28. Ceredigion moved to 150% from 1 April 2025.

Those are frightening numbers if you think they apply to your lodge. In almost all cases they do not, and the reason is worth understanding properly.

A pitch occupied by a caravan is only domestic property, and so only in council tax at all, if that caravan is somebody's sole or main residence. That is section 66(3) of the Local Government Finance Act 1988. A holiday lodge is not your main residence, so the pitch is not a dwelling.

What happens instead is that your pitch is swallowed into the park's own business rates bill. The Non-Domestic Rating (Caravan Sites) Regulations 1990 say that where leisure caravan pitches are occupied by people other than the site operator, those pitches and the rest of the site "be treated as one hereditament and as occupied by that site operator". The Valuation Office Agency puts the same thing plainly: privately owned caravans sited at a holiday park are not valued separately, and the site operator is the rateable occupier.

Wales then belts and braces it. Class 5 of the Council Tax (Exceptions to Higher Amounts) (Wales) Regulations 2015 excepts from the premium "every dwelling which consists of a pitch occupied by a caravan or a mooring occupied by a boat". Conwy lists that exception on its own premiums page as "Class 5: occupied caravan pitches and boat moorings". Ceredigion says the same in its own words, excepting caravans not occupied by anyone as a sole or main residence.

So the practical position is that you pay no council tax and no premium on a holiday lodge pitch. You pay a share of the park's business rates instead, recharged to you through your site fee or as a separate line. That is also why your site fee rises when the park's rates rise.

One caution. There is no single Welsh Government page listing every authority's premium for 2026/27, and the councils publish their own. If your situation is unusual, for instance a unit on residential planning permission rather than a holiday licence, check with that council directly.

The 182 day rule is about cottages, not pitches

The other Welsh rule people misapply is the self-catering letting test.

Since 1 April 2023, a self-catering property in Wales has to be available to let for at least 252 days and actually let for at least 182 days in a twelve month period to be rated as a business rather than charged council tax. In England the equivalent figures are 140 and 70. Both are written into section 66 of the 1988 Act, and each is expressly limited to its own country, so neither leaks across the border.

Two changes landed on 1 April 2026 and are worth knowing if you own a Welsh cottage as well. Where several buildings at the same location are let as part of the same business, the 182 days can now be met as an average across them. And an allowance of up to 14 days a year for charitable donations of short breaks can count towards the letting total.

None of that decides anything about a lodge on a licensed holiday park, because your pitch never enters the council tax system in the first place. If a salesperson tells you that you need to hit 182 days to avoid a council tax premium on a park lodge, they have confused two different regimes.

The visitor levy is real, and lodges pay the higher rate

This one is new, it is Wales only, and it will reach holiday parks.

The Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 September 2025. It sets a lower rate of £0.75 and a higher rate of £1.30 per person per night, and councils may add more on top.

The rate split matters. Section 33 gives the lower rate only to camping pitches and to dormitories or shared rooms. Everything else is on the higher rate, which puts caravans and lodges in the £1.30 band. Under-18s are disregarded only where the lower rate applies, so children are not free in a lodge. A family of four on a week's stay is charged for four people.

Liability sits with the accommodation provider, meaning the park, not the visitor directly. Registration with the Welsh Revenue Authority becomes a duty from 1 October 2026 and applies Wales-wide, whether or not your council has adopted a levy. Cardiff is the first council to commit, from 1 April 2027. A council has to give twelve months' notice and can only start on 1 April or 1 October, so you get warning.

What is genuinely unresolved is whether you pay the levy when you stay in your own lodge. The statute charges a stay made under a contract, in the course of the provider's trade, where the accommodation is not the person's main residence. An owner occupying their own unit under a pitch licence does not fit that pattern cleanly, and there is an exclusion for stays over 31 nights where everyone has a year-round entitlement. I could not find a Welsh Government statement settling it either way, so treat this as an open question and ask any park you are buying from what their reading is. Do not accept a confident answer without seeing it in writing.

A second Welsh Act, the Development of Tourism and Regulation of Visitor Accommodation (Wales) Act 2026, received Royal Assent on 27 April 2026 and brings in licensing and fitness standards for visitor accommodation. It is worth watching if you plan to sublet.

Your rights sit under Welsh law, not the 1983 Act

If you have read anything about park home owners' rights, it almost certainly cited the Mobile Homes Act 1983. That is the England route and it does not govern a Welsh park.

In Wales the relevant statute is the Mobile Homes (Wales) Act 2013. Section 2(1) defines a "regulated site" as land in Wales where a mobile home is stationed for human habitation, other than a site excluded by Schedule 1 or "a holiday site". Section 2(3) then defines a holiday site as one where the planning permission or site licence "is expressed to be granted for holiday use only" or "requires that there are times of the year when no mobile home may be stationed on the site for human habitation".

Read that second limb carefully, because it catches more parks than the first. A closed season alone is enough to make a park a holiday site, even without a holiday-use-only condition. Carmarthenshire County Council states that holiday caravan sites in its area are normally licensed for use for eight to 10 months of the year, and says directly that the Mobile Homes (Wales) Act 2013 does not apply to holiday caravans.

So a Welsh holiday lodge owner gets no statutory pitch fee review, exactly as in England, but by a different route. Our guide to site fees and your rights covers what does protect you, which is consumer law and the wording of your own contract.

There is a Holiday Caravan Sites (Wales) Bill in the Senedd as an introduced Member's Bill, covering licence duration, a residence test and holiday caravan agreements. It is a Bill, not law, and nobody should buy on the assumption it will pass.

What Welsh parks actually charge

Two useful things about the Welsh market: Parkdean publishes per-park site fees, which most operators do not, and Park Leisure publishes none at all.

Parkdean's five Welsh ownership parks, with 2026 site fees as published:

Park Where 2026 site fees from Holiday homes from
Brynowen Borth, Ceredigion SY24 5LS £3,995 £34,995
Carmarthen Bay Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire SA17 5HQ £3,995 £27,995
Pendine Sands Pendine, Carmarthenshire SA33 4NZ £3,995 £27,995
Trecco Bay Porthcawl, Bridgend CF36 5NG £4,495 £27,995
Ty Mawr Towyn, Conwy LL22 9HG £4,995 £34,995

Park Leisure, which is a trading name of Park Holidays UK Limited, has just two Welsh parks, both in the north, and both open all year. Brynteg at Llanrug, Gwynedd starts at £49,995, and its luxury lodges run from £229,995 to £369,995. Plas Coch on Anglesey starts at £79,995 and describes itself as a 12-month park, open 365 days. Neither publishes a site fee figure anywhere, which is worth pressing them on before you commit. Their pitch fee offers are advertised as fixed or free for a period, which tells you nothing about the underlying rate.

Haven sells ownership at nine Welsh parks, including Kiln Park at Tenby, where new units start at £39,995 and used at £24,186. A warning on Haven's published costs: the widely quoted site fee range of £4,770 to over £10,000 is footnoted to a single English park, Golden Sands in Lincolnshire, in January 2026. It is not a Welsh figure and should not be treated as one.

Independents are where the cheapest fees are, and also the least consistent information:

  • Bryn Vyrnwy at Llansantffraid in Powys publishes a static caravan fee of £2,436 including VAT for 1 April 2026 to 1 April 2027, with gas and electricity metered on top. That is the lowest published Welsh fee I found. Note the park states its season as mid-March to mid-November on its fees page and mid-March to early November on its about page.
  • Pentre Mawr at Pensarn near Abergele charges £4,195 including VAT, plus a separate rates charge of £754.52 for the 2025/26 rating year. The 2026/27 rates figure is not published. The season is stated clearly, nine months from 1 March to 30 November, and first-year site fees are advertised as free with a purchase, so the £4,195 is a year-two number.
  • Silver Bay at Rhoscolyn on Anglesey is a 12-month park. Its site fees page says "from just £6,361 per year", but the same operator's FAQ page says fees start from £6,679, and its fractional ownership page quotes different figures again. Get the number for your specific pitch in writing.

What to ask a Welsh park

  1. What is the annual site fee for this pitch, in writing, and what were the last five years of increases?
  2. Is the rates recharge inside the site fee or billed separately, and what was it last year?
  3. What does the site licence say about the season, and is that condition likely to change?
  4. What is your position on the visitor levy for owners staying in their own unit, and can I have it in writing?
  5. Is this park a holiday site under section 2(3) of the Mobile Homes (Wales) Act 2013? The answer is almost certainly yes, and a park that does not know is a park to be careful with.

Run the fee and the rates recharge together through our ownership cost calculator before you go any further. On the published Welsh numbers the annual gap between the cheapest and dearest fee is over £3,900 a year, which compounds into a large sum across a licence.

Sources