Stayed in a Liverpool hotel lately? You may have spotted £2 a night added to the bill. Run a guesthouse or a serviced flat here? You have been paying it since 1 June 2025.
That £2 is not a council tourist tax. It is also not the "visitor levy" you keep seeing in the news. They are two different charges, run by two different organisations, under two different sets of rules. Liverpool City Council is asking for your views until Sunday 13 September 2026 on what should happen if the second one lands on top of the first.
Here is the difference in plain terms, what is decided, what is not, and how to have your say.
The short version
- Liverpool has a £2 per room, per night hotel charge. It started on 1 June 2025.
- The hotel owes that money. Most pass it on to you by adding it to your bill.
- It is worked out from how full Liverpool's hotels were on average, not how full yours was.
- A separate charge for the whole city region is being planned, using new powers given to mayors on 25 November 2025.
- No price has been set for that new one. The £2 belongs to the old charge. Do not assume the new one will match it.
- The council's question right now is narrow: how to stop you being charged twice for the same night.
- You have until Sunday 13 September 2026 to reply. Booking a trip around then? Our guide to what's on in Liverpool in September 2026 lists what is running.
The £2 on your bill, explained
First, what a BID is, because the whole thing rests on it.
A Business Improvement District, or BID, is a group of businesses in one area who vote to pay into a shared pot. They agree a plan for how it gets spent. It is money from businesses, spent on things businesses want. It does not go into the council's budget for bins or schools.
Liverpool has three: one for shops and leisure, one for culture and offices, and one for places you sleep. Only the third one shows up on your hotel bill.
That third one used to charge hotels based on what their building was worth. In spring 2025 the hotels voted to switch to a flat fee per night instead. The vote ran from 27 March to 24 April 2025. It passed, 26 to 18, with one spoiled paper.
These votes have to pass twice over. Once on the number of businesses voting yes, and once on how much their buildings are worth. This one passed both. The yes side's buildings were worth £7,141,250, against £4,768,300 on the no side. The new £2 charge started on 1 June 2025.
How the £2 is worked out
The council's rules for the charge set out the sum. In plain terms, a hotel takes:
- the number of rooms it has,
- times the nights in the month,
- times how full Liverpool's hotels were on average that month,
- times £2.
The third line is the one that stings if you run a small place. It is the Liverpool average, worked out by a firm called STR that tracks how full hotels are. It is not your average.
So a quiet month in a quiet street is still charged as if you were as busy as the city centre.
One myth worth killing while we are here. You will see it said that only hotels worth £45,000 or more pay this. That is wrong, and we checked the council's own rules to be sure. The £45,000 cut-off belongs to the other two BIDs, the ones for shops and offices. The hotel charge has no such cut-off. It is counted per room, per night.
Who really owes the £2
You usually pay it. But you are not the one on the hook for it.
Liverpool BID Company calls it "a fee of £2 per room or unit per night added to the final bill for guests". That is what you see at checkout.
Underneath, the bill goes to the hotel. The hotel can then get that money back from you by adding it on. If the bill goes unpaid, the hotel is chased for it, not the guest. That is why it is wrong to say the council charges every visitor £2 a night. The council does not charge it, and you are not the one who owes it.
If the split between the council, the mayor and the BID companies is getting muddy, our guide to who runs Liverpool and who decides what lays it out.
Where your £2 goes
Liverpool BID Company holds the money and spends it on pulling visitors in. None of it pays for bins, roads or social care.
In March 2026 it announced a pot of almost £10 million built up from the charge. Nearly £7m of that is earmarked for big events, £1m for advertising the city, and the rest for other visitor spending. The thinking is simple enough: use the money from people staying the night to book the kind of events that make more people stay the night.
Your council tax does a completely different job. Our guide to where Liverpool council tax goes covers that side.
The new charge works a different way
On 25 November 2025 the Government said England's mayors could start charging for overnight stays. The announcement covered hotels, holiday lets, B&Bs and guesthouses. It set no price.
The Government then asked the public how it should work. That ran from 26 November 2025 to 18 February 2026. It asked which places would be included, how the price would be set, who would pay it, and what the money could be used for.
Here is the difference that matters. The old charge was made by hotels, voting among themselves. The new one would be set by an elected mayor, using powers handed down by Parliament. Different people, different rules, different way of arguing about it.
What the mayor wants to do
Mayor Steve Rotheram has pushed for this since 2017 and led a group of English mayors lobbying for it. The Combined Authority's reply to the announcement makes clear he intends to use it.
His own estimate is the clearest figure anyone has put on it. "Our visitor economy is worth more than £6bn a year and supports over 55,000 local jobs," he said. "A modest levy could raise up to £17m annually, money that would stay local."
The Combined Authority says the cash could only be spent on a set list: big cultural and sporting events, things visitors and locals both use, advertising the region abroad, training and helping businesses grow. It counts more than 60 million visits a year and puts the visitor trade at £6.25 billion.
Then comes the catch. None of it has been designed yet. Talks with hotels and tourism groups were only starting when the announcement went out. The price, who is let off, how it gets collected and which places count are all still blank.
