How to Register a Homestay in Kerala: Diamond, Gold and Silver Rules

Kerala runs one of the oldest and most formal homestay schemes in India. It is also the one that disqualifies the largest share of the people who ask us about it, and it does so on a single condition that has nothing to do with the property itself.

The Department of Tourism classifies homestay units into three categories — Diamond, Gold and Silver — under a scheme first approved in 2006 and revised three times since. If you want the governing paper trail, it runs through GO (MS) No. 299/06/TSM dated 18 August 2006, GO (MS) No. 324/15/TSM dated 28 December 2015, GO (MS) No. 03/2020/Tourism dated 16 January 2020 and GO (Rt) No. 177/2022/Tourism dated 3 June 2022.

The condition that decides most cases

The department is explicit: “Classification will be given to only those units where the owner along with his/her family is physically residing.”

And, separately: “Leased or rented houses will not be considered for homestay classification.”

Read those together and the scheme's intent is plain. A Kerala homestay is a family home that takes paying guests. It is not a letting vehicle. If you are buying a house in Fort Kochi or Wayanad to run as an income property while you live in Bangalore or Dubai, you do not qualify for classification — not with a manager in place, not with a caretaker, not by visiting often. The owner and family live there or the unit is not classified.

This is the single most common reason an enquiry about Kerala ends. It is worth establishing before you look at a property, not after.

Size limits

The maximum that can be given over to tourist accommodation is six rooms. Beyond that the unit is no longer a homestay in the department's terms and falls under a different category of accommodation with its own licensing.

Widely republished summaries put the floor at one room and two beds and the ceiling at six rooms and twelve beds. The six-room ceiling is stated by the department; we have not been able to confirm the bed figures from the department's own text, so treat them as indicative and check the current checklist before you plan around them.

What classification involves

Applications go online to the Director, Department of Tourism. An Inspection Committee then examines the unit against a checklist, and the category awarded — Diamond, Gold or Silver — follows from how the facilities and services score against it. Approvals are issued district by district on the committees' recommendation; the April 2024 proceedings list units cleared across Kannur, Idukki, Kozhikode, Kottayam, Ernakulam, Alappuzha, Kollam, Thrissur, Kasaragod and Wayanad.

Two operating conditions come attached. Food has to be prepared and provided to guests on demand — the scheme assumes a working kitchen and someone in the house to cook, which follows from the residence condition. And the classification certificate must be displayed where guests can see it.

Fees and validity

Classification is valid for three years, after which the unit is reclassified rather than simply renewed.

On fees, the published figures do not agree, and we are not going to reconcile them for you with a guess. The department's own guidelines page states an application fee of Rs 3,750. A number of third-party sites instead list per-category fees of Rs 3,000 for Diamond, Rs 2,000 for Gold and Rs 1,000 for Silver, which appear to derive from an earlier version of the scheme. Confirm the current fee with the district tourism office before you pay anything, and be sceptical of any intermediary quoting a figure well above either.

How Kerala compares

Kerala's residence condition is stricter than its neighbours'. Karnataka's Atithi scheme, which we covered in rules and norms to operate a homestay in Karnataka, runs Gold and Silver tiers on an annual fee and has historically been more accommodating of owner-managed units. Uttarakhand's scheme, covered in our guide to registering an Uttarakhand homestay, was built explicitly to pull rural households into tourism income.

If your interest in Kerala is investment rather than living there, the honest answer is that the classified homestay route is closed to you, and the question becomes which other accommodation category you would be licensing under instead. That is a different application, a different fee schedule and a different set of building and fire requirements.

What we could not confirm

Three things, stated plainly rather than papered over. The bed-count limits above are not in the department's published text we could access. The exact current fee is contradicted between official and secondary sources. And the checklist thresholds that separate Diamond from Gold from Silver — one widely cited figure puts Diamond at 70 checklist items — are not something we have seen in the department's own document.

These are the kind of details that change with a single Government Order. Before you commit money, confirm them with the Department of Tourism directly. Nothing here is legal advice, and a district tourism officer will know the current position better than any article.