If you own a property in Marrakech and you have spent an evening trying to work out whether you can legally let it to travellers, you will have found confident answers that do not agree with each other. Some sources say a licence is straightforward. Others describe surface areas and bathroom ratios. One says a riad needs five bedrooms, another says three, most give no number at all and simply say it depends.
We ran into this ourselves. One of our clients owns a two-bedroom riad in the medina, and we could not get a reliable answer from anything published online. In the end we approached a Moroccan lawyer about that specific property, which is what we would now tell any owner to do. What follows draws on the published law itself, which is what we can point you to directly.
The two texts that govern this
Short-term letting to travellers in Morocco is governed by Law 80-14 on tourist establishments and other forms of tourist accommodation, promulgated by Dahir 1-15-108 of 4 August 2015, and by its implementing decree, Decree 2-23-441 of 13 July 2023, published in the Bulletin Officiel on 7 August 2023.
Both are published in full by the Ministry of Tourism, Handicrafts and the Social and Solidarity Economy. They are linked at the end of this page. If you are being advised by anyone about your property, it is reasonable to ask which article of which text they are relying on.
Your property is placed in a category, and the categories matter
The decree recognises nine types of tourist accommodation establishment: hotels, hotel-clubs, hotel residences, maisons d'hôtes, riads, kasbahs, gîtes, pensions and campsites.
Riads are their own category. They are not a sub-type of maison d'hôtes, which is how a great deal of the published commentary describes them. This matters, because the requirements that apply to your property follow from the category it is placed in, and the two categories are not governed by the same set of standards.
Separately from those nine, the law provides for other forms of tourist accommodation: bivouacs, hébergement chez l'habitant (letting rooms within your own residence), and hébergement alternatif. These are treated differently again.
You need an operating authorisation before you let
An operating authorisation is issued by the governor, on the prior opinion of the Regional Unified Investment Commission. The Regional Investment Centre acts as the single point of contact for investors handling these applications, which in practice is where a Marrakech owner starts.
This is the requirement most often missed, and it is not a formality that follows the first booking. It comes first.
Classification is a scored inspection, not a rubber stamp
The standards themselves were set by joint order 985-24 of the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Tourism, dated 24 December 2024 and published in the Bulletin Officiel on 27 May 2025. It repealed the old December 2003 order that had governed classification for two decades, so any advice built on the previous standards is now out of date.
The way the order works is worth understanding, because it is more demanding than most owners expect. Requirements are split into two kinds. Obligatory standards are marked "A". Complementary standards are marked "B" and each carries a point score. An establishment must satisfy 100% of the obligatory standards and at least 70% of the total points available on the complementary ones. Standards that flow from a facility the property does not have are excluded from the total.
The requirements are granular. In the luxury hotel section alone the order specifies minimum mattress thickness, minimum bed dimensions, the depth of shelving in the luggage room, water arrival times at the taps and the acceptable temperature range in the rooms. Every category has its own annex written to that level of detail.
Compliance is checked by a visit from a regional classification commission, supplemented by a mystery visit carried out by an independent external body.
You must declare your guests
Operators of tourist accommodation must file guest data electronically. The procedures and the model individual accommodation form are set by Decree 2-15-865 of 9 June 2016, with the registration arrangements for the teledeclaration system set by joint order 3171-16 of 10 February 2017.
What the texts do not settle
This is the part we think owners are least well served on, so we want to be plain about it.
- For hébergement chez l'habitant, the maximum number of rooms that may be marketed is not fixed in the decree. The decree leaves it to a joint decision of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Tourism.
- The standards for hébergement alternatif are likewise left to a joint decision of those two ministries rather than being set out in the decree itself.
- Whether a particular small property qualifies under a particular category is determined against the annex of standards written for that category, assessed on the property. It is not a question you can settle from the top-level text, and we have not found a published source that answers it reliably for medina properties.
We are not going to give you a bedroom number, because we cannot show you where it is written. If a source gives you one, ask them the same question we would ask: which article, which annex, which order.
The riad belonging to one of our clients has two bedrooms and sits in Bab Yacout, inside the medina. On the advice we received, it could not be registered for short-term tourist letting as it stood, and the hébergement alternatif route was not, in practice, being applied to medina properties.
That was advice on one property from one lawyer. We are not presenting it as a general rule, and it should not be read as one. We mention it because it is the reason we now raise registration with every owner before anything else, and because an owner who finds this out after committing to a refurbishment has a much worse problem than one who finds out first.
One thing from that conversation stuck with us: the exposure is not the same for everyone involved. What we were told suggested the owner's risk sits mainly on the financial side — fines, back taxes, that kind of thing. Whoever is actually operating the property day to day, without authorisation, was described as carrying something heavier and more personal, up to and including criminal liability, particularly if something goes wrong on site while it is unlicensed. That is not a citable legal conclusion, just what we took from one conversation, but it is worth understanding before you decide who runs your property and how it is set up.
What we would suggest doing
- Work out which of the nine categories your property would fall into, or whether it belongs under one of the other forms of accommodation. The answer changes everything downstream.
- Read the annex of order 985-24 that applies to that category before you spend money on the property. It is long, but it tells you what an inspection will look for.
- Approach the Regional Investment Centre in Marrakech about the operating authorisation early, not once you are ready to publish a listing.
- Get advice from a Moroccan lawyer on your specific property, before you commit money to it. A consultation costs a fraction of a refurbishment.
None of the above is legal advice, and we are not lawyers. It is a summary of published texts, with links so you can check every claim on this page against the source. Regulations change; this page was last reviewed on the date given at the top.
Every text cited on this page is published by the Ministry of Tourism and downloadable from its legal texts page, in French.
- Ministry of Tourism, Handicrafts and the Social and Solidarity Economy — Tourist accommodation: legal texts. Law 80-14, Decree 2-23-441, Decree 2-15-865 on guest teledeclaration, and joint order 3171-16 are all listed here for download.
- Joint order 985-24 of 24 December 2024 fixing classification standards (PDF, French). The annexes setting the A and B standards for each category begin on page 627 of Bulletin Officiel no. 7407 bis.