A leased studio in Gibraltar advertised at £1,100 a month is not a studio that costs £1,100 a month. Add the meter, the agency fee and a bed to sleep in, and the first year lands closer to £17,600, and that is before the deposit leaves your account. A serviced studio at the same headline rate costs £13,200 for the year with the electricity already in it. That gap is the whole subject of this post. Almost every relocation guide compares the monthly numbers, which is the one comparison that tells you nothing, because the monthly numbers are the only costs the two options share. What separates them is the cash that leaves your account before you have slept a night, and the length of time you are locked in afterwards. There are three honest ways to live in Gibraltar while you work out whether you are staying: a hotel room, a serviced apartment on a monthly rate, or a private lease. The table below prices them on what actually leaves your account, not on the advertised figure. Every number in it is either a published tariff, a rate we charge ourselves, or a range that letting agents were advertising in September 2026, and it says which is which. |Comparison|Hotel room|Serviced apartment|Private lease| |Headline price|From about £120 a night|From about £1,100 a month for a studio|£1,000 to £1,800 a month for a studio or one bed| |Cash before you move in|One night|One month|Deposit of one to two months, plus the first month in advance, plus an agency fee where one is charged| |Electricity and water|Included|Included|Yours, on the GEA and AquaGib domestic tariffs| |Furniture|None needed|None needed|Yours, unless the flat is let furnished| |Minimum commitment|One night|One month|Twelve months, sometimes six| |Register of Property Occupation|The operator's job|The operator's job|Yours, within three months of moving in| |Where it wins|Stays under about ten nights|One month to about a year|Multi year stays, once you know which street you want| One caveat on those rent figures. The Gibraltar statistics office publishes employment and price data but no residential rent index we could find, so there is no official number to quote and anyone who gives you one to the pound is guessing. The £1,000 to £1,800 range is what agents were advertising for studios and one beds across the territory in September 2026. Central and marina stock sits at the top of it, older blocks and Upper Town at the bottom. Gibraltar bills electricity and water separately, and both carry fixed charges that you pay whether you are in the flat or in Malaga for a fortnight. They are small individually and they are not small together. |Fixed charge|Published rate|Cost per month before any use| |Gibraltar Electricity Authority standing charge|£5.80 a month|£5.80| |Electricity weekly meter levy|£1.00 a week|About £4.33| |AquaGib domestic standing charge|£3.48 a month|£3.48| |Water weekly meter levy|£1.00 a week|About £4.33| |Total standing cost|Two meters, four charges|About £17.94| Then you start using things. The [Gibraltar Electricity Authority domestic tariff](https://www.gea.gi/customer-support/electricity-tariffs-and-charges) that took effect in August 2026 is £0.119 per unit with a flexible cost adjustment of £0.058 on top, so the real price of a kilowatt hour is £0.177. A studio getting through 200 units a month pays £35.40 for them. [AquaGib's domestic tariff](https://www.aquagib.gi/customer-service/tariffs-charges/) charges £0.289 per 100 litres for the first 4,500 litres in a calendar month and £0.719 per 100 litres after that, so filling that first allowance costs £13.01 and every bath beyond it costs two and a half times as much per litre. Add it up and a modest studio runs about £66 a month in electricity and water, before broadband, which you contract separately and which we are not going to quote a figure for because packages differ too much to be useful. Call it £70 to £90 a month on top of the rent. That is not ruinous. It is also not zero, and it is the number that quietly closes the gap between a lease and an all inclusive monthly rate. Here is a detail you will not find on a relocation blog, because you only see it if you pay the bills for a building. AquaGib's hotel tariff is £0.565 per 100 litres, almost double the £0.289 domestic primary rate. Every operator in Gibraltar buys water at roughly twice what a household pays for the first 4,500 litres. That is why laundry is priced the way it is in every hotel on the Rock, and it is one of the reasons a kitchen and a washing machine in the room change the economics of a long stay so sharply. The deposit is the big one. Expect one to two months of rent, plus the first month in advance, so a £1,400 flat can want £4,200 in one transfer. Gibraltar has no statutory tenancy deposit protection scheme of the kind England and Wales run, so your money is not sitting in a government backed pot with a dispute service attached. Real estate agents here do need a business licence, and the Office of Fair