Montenegro's tourist tax (boravišna taksa) is charged per person per night on anyone who stays in paid accommodation outside the municipality where they live. The national Tourist Tax Act sets a band and the rules; each municipality sets its own rate by a council decision published in the municipal series of the Official Gazette. That is why the question "how much is the tourist tax in Montenegro" has no single answer, and why most answers online are one municipality's figure repeated as if it applied everywhere.
We read the decisions themselves. The table below gives the rate in every municipality where we located the council decision in force, with the decision it comes from. It was checked against the Official Gazette on 28 September 2026.
The rate in each municipality
| Municipality | Rate per person per night | Decision in force | Official Gazette (municipal series) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budva | €1.00 | Decision on tourist tax, adopted 1 December 2015, applied from 1 January 2016 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/314000 |
| Kotor | €1.00 | Amendment adopted 15 May 2018, applied from 1 July 2018 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/310515 |
| Tivat | €1.00 | Amendment adopted 25 April 2019 (was €0.90 under the 2015 decision) | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/379366 |
| Herceg Novi | €1.00 | Amendment adopted 8 May 2019 (was €0.90 under the 2016 decision) | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/379063 |
| Bar | €1.00 | Decision adopted 20 December 2023, OP 61/2023 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/367861 |
| Ulcinj | €1.00 | Decision adopted 29 December 2023, OP 5/2024 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/365050 |
| Cetinje | €1.00 | Decision adopted 17 December 2025, OP 64/2025 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/389003 |
| Žabljak | €1.00 | Amendment adopted 29 February 2024, OP 14/2024 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/366868 |
| Plužine | €1.00 | Decision adopted 23 November 2023, OP 56/2023 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/368087 |
| Plav | €1.00 | Amendment adopted 1 December 2023, OP 58/2023 (was €0.60) | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/367814 |
| Andrijevica | €1.00 | Decision adopted 30 March 2021 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/311753 |
| Danilovgrad | €0.90 | Amendment adopted October 2024, OP 55/2024 (was €0.60) | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/374767 |
| Zeta | €0.90 | Decision adopted 4 August 2023, OP 37/2023 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/370713 |
| Tuzi | €0.90 | Decision adopted 21 November 2018 | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/378177 |
| Nikšić | €0.60 | Decision adopted 18 December 2015; the latest decision we located | sluzbenilist.me/propisi/347948 |
Not in the table. We did not locate a tourist tax decision for Podgorica in the Official Gazette's municipal series, and we did not read the rate for Kolašin, Rožaje, Mojkovac, Šavnik, Petnjica, Gusinje or Pljevlja. For those, the local tourist organisation, which receives the tax, will state the current rate. For Nikšić, a later decision may exist that we did not find; treat the €0.60 figure as the last one published that we could confirm.
The pattern is clear enough to act on. Every coastal municipality charges €1.00, the ceiling the Act allows, and the inland municipalities are moving to it: Plav, Danilovgrad and Cetinje all raised their rate between 2023 and 2025.
What the Act fixes, whatever the municipality
The Tourist Tax Act (Official Gazette of the Republic of Montenegro 11/04 and 13/04, Official Gazette of Montenegro 73/10 and 48/15) sets the frame each municipal decision works inside.
- The band. The municipality sets the rate between €0.10 and €1.00 per person per night (Article 7). A municipality cannot charge €1.50, whatever a booking platform shows.
- Who pays. A person who uses paid accommodation outside their place of residence, Montenegrin or foreign, on the same terms (Article 1 and the municipal decisions).
- Half rate. Guests aged 12 to 18 pay 50% (Article 3).
- Exempt. Children under 12; people with serious sensory or physical disabilities; people sent for spa or climate treatment by a medical commission; seasonal workers with registered residence in the resort; anyone staying in the same accommodation continuously for more than 30 days; organised school trips and school sports or cultural events; and foreign nationals exempt under international agreements (Article 3). The guest has to show proof of the ground, and a municipality may add further exemptions of its own.
- Where it goes. The tax is revenue of the local tourist organisation, not of the state budget (Article 8).
The 30-day rule is the one that matters to people who rent for a season. The Act words it by the person, not by the night: someone who stays in the same accommodation continuously for more than 30 days does not pay. Two consecutive fortnights in two different places do not qualify, and an owner who relies on the exemption should keep the proof of the continuous stay with the guest record.
Who collects it: the owner, not the guest
The guest owes the tax, but the Act puts the work on the accommodation provider. The provider must collect the tax together with the price of the stay (Article 4), show it as a separate line on the invoice or state the ground for exemption, keep a record of it, and report the number of guests and the tax collected to the tax authority by the 15th of each month for the previous month (Article 5). The money is paid over within five days after each fifteen-day period of the month (Article 6), and guests' arrivals and departures are reported to the local tourist organisation within 24 hours (Article 7b). A provider who does not collect the tax owes it out of their own pocket (Article 4).
Owners who let rooms or apartments in their own household can instead pay the tax as an annual lump sum, calculated per bed on the basis of 45 nights and reduced by a coefficient between 1.0 and 0.5 depending on category (Article 7). For a small coastal apartment this is often simpler than per-night accounting, and it is fixed in advance, so it does not rise with occupancy.
The fines are set in Article 11: €500 to €10,000 for a legal person that fails to collect the tax, itemise it, keep the record or report, and €250 to €1,500 for an individual provider. The more common cost in practice is the unpaid tax itself, assessed after an inspection against the arrivals the platform has already recorded.
If you let through Airbnb or Booking, the platform may show a tourist tax line to the guest, but the legal duty to register the guests and pay the municipality stays with you. We cover the licence, the registration and the income tax side in our guide to short-term rental rules in Montenegro and to how rental income is taxed.
What a guest actually pays
A family of two adults and two children aged 10 and 14, staying seven nights in Kotor, owes €1.00 × 2 adults × 7 nights plus €0.50 × 1 child × 7 nights, which is €17.50; the ten-year-old is exempt. The same stay in Nikšić, at €0.60, would be €10.50. The sums are small for guests. For an owner with a year of bookings, collecting nothing is not small.
Whose side we are on, and how we are paid
Every other professional around a Montenegrin transaction is paid out of the transaction. The agent's commission depends on the sale completing. The developer's sales team belongs to the developer. The notary owes duties to the act, not to you. That is not a scandal; it is simply how those roles are funded, and it decides what each of them is able to tell you.
We take no commission from sellers, developers, agents or brokers. None, in any form, on any file. The fee you pay us is our only income from your matter, and it does not increase if you sign. That single fact is the whole difference: because our position does not move when the deal moves, "do not buy this one" costs us nothing to say.
What that looks like in the file, rather than in a slogan: we obtain the register extracts ourselves instead of accepting the copies handed over by the seller or the agent; we read the contract against your position rather than against completion; we put in writing when the answer is that the matter should not proceed; and where a defect can be cured, we tell you what it costs in time before you commit money.
One boundary we state plainly. We are lawyers, not licensed investment advisers. We do not give personal investment advice on financial instruments and we do not tell you whether an asset will make money. What we protect is your legal position: the title, the contract, the registration, the status, and the deadlines that decide all four. That is the service the fee buys, and paying for it directly is precisely what allows it to be given without regard to whether you sign.
Before you rely on a rate
A municipal rate changes by a council vote and is published in the municipal series of the Official Gazette, not announced to owners. If you are buying a property to let, or setting up a company to run lettings, the tourist tax is one of four municipal charges that come with it, together with the annual property tax, the communal fee and the tourism licence. We check all four for the specific address before you sign. Property matters sit with our real estate practice, and the annual tax each municipality charges owners is set out in our table of property tax rates by municipality.
