What a week's cycling in Mallorca costs — four lines decide it, and only one of them is a number this page will print

Four lines, and this page will only print one of them

Every costing of a cycling week on this island is really four numbers: the bed, the bike, the seat and the tax. Almost everything else is rounding.

Three of those four move constantly — by the town, by the month, by the hour you happen to book — and this site does not cache them. A hire rate written down in March is fiction by May, and a page that quotes one has no way of learning it went wrong. So the bed, the bike and the seat are linked here to be checked on the day, and never quoted.

The fourth is different in kind, and it is the reason this page exists. The impost sobre estades turístiques — the ecotasa — is not a seller’s price. It is a tax, set by the Balearic parliament, charged per person and per night, collected at the property rather than by the booking site, and fixed until the law changes. It is the smallest of the four lines and the only one that can be stated exactly. It is also the one almost nobody budgets for, because it is not in the total you compared.

The tax, in full

The rate depends on what kind of place you sleep in, and on which side of two fixed dates you sleep there. High season is 1 May to 31 October. Low season is 1 November to 30 April.

Two things about that table that the table cannot say.

The published rates are before VAT. The Govern’s own page prints «+10% IVA (no incluido)» underneath both halves, so what actually appears on your bill is 10% more than the figure above. A one- to three-star hotel in low season is €0.50 on the table and €0.55 on the invoice.

Under-16s are exempt. Not discounted — exempt. Stays by under-16s are exempt entirely.

The 1 May cliff, and the six days that make it a cycling problem

Crossing into high season multiplies the tax by 4. Not by a few per cent — by four, and by exactly four for every category on the island, from the five-star hotel down to the campsite. That uniformity is why it can be written as one number at all.

For most visitors to Mallorca this is uninteresting, because most visitors come in summer and pay the high rate without ever seeing the low one. For a cyclist it is the single most consequential date on the tax calendar, because the cycling season and the tax season disagree with each other.

The riding here is at its best in the spring, and the spring is entirely inside the cheap half. February, March and April — the training-camp months, the months the island’s hotels open for — are all low season. The tax year does not turn until 30 April.

The Mallorca 312 is ridden on 24 April 2027. That is 6 days before the low-season band ends. Ride the island’s biggest event, stay the week around it, and every night is taxed at the low rate. Come back for the same hotel a fortnight later and the same room, unchanged, carries four times the tax.

The ninth night

The relief almost nobody claims deliberately, because it applies itself:

from the ninth day in the same establishment, the tax is reduced by half.

So a fortnight is not twice a week. Two adults in a three-star hotel for fourteen nights pay €12.10 in low season, against €15.40 for two separate weeks — because nights nine to fourteen are charged at half.

The catch is in the wording, and it is worth knowing before you book a split trip. The relief is written against one establishment. Ride a week from Alcúdia and a week from Sóller — a genuinely good way to see this island — and the counter restarts. The same fourteen nights then cost €15.40, because neither half ever reaches a ninth night.

Source Govern de les Illes Balears · checked 18 September 2026Rates, season dates and reliefs read from the Govern's own tax calculator. The tax is created by Llei 2/2016, de 30 de març, together with Decret 35/2016, de 23 de juny.A partir del novè dia de l'estada en un mateix establiment, l'impost es redueix un 50%.

The increase you have probably read about, which is not being charged

The Balearic tourist tax has been announced as going up twice, and it has gone up neither time.

Both have been reported widely, sometimes in the present tense, and travel-industry pages have quoted summer figures well above the ones in the table on this page. Neither has been enacted. The Govern’s own calculator, read the same day as everything else here, still publishes the two-season table above — and a tariff is the rare kind of fact you can check rather than argue about.

The part that matters for a cycling trip, and that none of the coverage says: both versions raise the summer. The four-tier proposal’s raised band and the pact’s flat two euros are June, July and August in each case. The months this island is actually worth riding in — February to April, and again in October — are untouched by every increase anyone has so far proposed. If the law does move, it moves somewhere a rider mostly is not.

This page will change when the law does, and not when the coverage does.

Source Govern de les Illes Balears · checked 18 September 2026Two announcements eighteen months apart, neither enacted, and the tariff in RATES re-read on the same date as this record still carries the two-season table. Consumer reporting through 2026 has described the raised summer band in the present tense; the Govern’s own calculator does not carry it. Both versions raise the summer only — the four-tier proposal’s raised band and the pact’s +€2 are June, July and August in each case — so neither would change what a late-April week pays even if enacted tomorrow. That is why this record can sit under a cycling page without hedging the numbers above it.El Govern negociarà ara aquestes mesures amb els diferents grups parlamentaris per obtenir els suports necessaris per a la seva aprovació.

The three lines this page refuses to quote, and where to read them today

Each one below is a live link rather than a figure, because each one will have moved by the time you book it. What the sections do give you is the thing a price alone never does: which way the number moves here, and what decides it.

The bed

The largest line, and the one that moves most. What decides it here is the town as much as the month: a February bed inland and an October bed on the coast at Port de Sóller are not the same purchase at all, and the cycling towns fill early around the 312. Check beds in Alcúdia or in Sóller for your own dates. Which town to point that at is its own question, and the base-town guide answers it properly.

The bike

The second-largest line and the only one that is a real decision rather than a price: fly your own, or hire one here. Flying it costs carriage each way plus a box and the chance it arrives a day after you do; hiring costs a week’s rate and gives up the fit you know. This island has enough hire density that the choice is genuinely open. Compare hire rates for your dates — and before you do, the hire guide surveys what the operators actually publish about cassettes, delivery and sizes, which is the part that decides the choice rather than the rate.

The seat, and the ground

Fares move by the hour and vary more between riders than anything else here. The transfer from Palma to your bed is smaller than people fear and is made once: book a transfer that takes a bike box if you are arriving with one, and read the arrival guide first — what carries a bike and what quietly does not is the whole of that decision.