Highland Council opened a 12-week statutory consultation on 7 September 2026 on a proposed visitor levy — and unlike Edinburgh's scheme, which is a straight percentage on accommodation price, this one is a tiered fixed amount that names campsites and caravan parks specifically.

The proposed rates: £5 per room or pitch, per night, for hotels, guest houses, B&Bs and short-term lets, and £2 per night for hostels, campsites and caravan parks. It would apply across the whole Highland Council area, for nine months of the year — every month except December, January and February.

What happens next

The consultation runs to early December, and councillors are due to decide on 10 December 2026 whether to proceed with a scheme at all. Nothing is confirmed. If it goes ahead, the earliest a levy could actually be charged is still some way off — Scotland's law requires at least 18 months' notice between a council confirming a scheme and it taking effect.

That gap matters for planning purposes, but it doesn't mean there's nothing to do now. The consultation is open to operators as well as visitors, and a council weighing a fixed £2 rate for a touring pitch against a £5 rate for a hotel room has clearly already thought about affordability for lower-spend stays — worth making sure it keeps thinking about that as the responses come in, rather than assuming campsites are a rounding error in a hotel-shaped policy.

Where this sits against the rest of the UK

This is now the third live or proposed visitor-charging regime touching UK campsites in 2026, and each nation is doing it differently:

  • Scotland — live and proposed. Edinburgh's visitor levy has been charging since 24 July 2026, a straight percentage of accommodation price. Highland's proposal above is a different design — a flat per-night amount, tiered by accommodation type — and several other Scottish councils have consultations of their own running through late 2026.
  • Wales — a registration duty, not a levy, for now. From October 2026 every paid overnight stay in Wales, including touring and tent pitches, has to be registered with the Welsh Revenue Authority, free, by 31 March 2027. The levy itself — 75p per person per night for a campsite or touring pitch — can't be switched on by any Welsh council before April 2027, and only where it chooses to. Full detail on the Welsh registration duty here.
  • England — powers granted, nothing decided. Mayors gained the power to levy an overnight stay tax from 10 September 2026, with explicit flexibility to exempt campsites area by area. No mayoral authority has confirmed a scheme yet. Full detail on the English levy power here.

The practical takeaway is the same one this file has made before: a per-night charge that reads as trivial to a hotel operator setting room rates is a much bigger proportion of a £25 touring pitch — and every nation currently has a live decision point where that argument can still be made. Highland's consultation is open now.

One detail worth knowing if you run a registered site: Highland Council's £2 levy can only reach motorhomes and campervans parked at a designated site — current Scottish legislation gives councils no power to charge a vehicle parked off-site, on a verge or a layby. Highland is using this same consultation to ask the Scottish Government for the power to close that gap, after years of pressure over unauthorised overnight parking, littering and fires along routes like the North Coast 500. Until that changes, a registered park's guests would be the only ones paying the levy at all — worth raising with your own council or trade body if you want the charge to land evenly rather than only on sites that already play by the rules.