An occupancy tax is what a guest pays a state, county or city for a short stay, charged on top of the room rate. You add it to their bill and send it on to that office on the schedule it sets. There is no federal occupancy tax in the United States, so the rate and the rules change from one county to the next, and the property is almost always the one that has to collect.
The tax goes by a different name almost everywhere. Californians call it transient occupancy tax, Texas calls it hotel occupancy tax, and in other places you will see it billed as lodging tax, room tax or bed tax. In most places a guest pays two of them at once, a state rate and a local one. The Texas Comptroller sets the state rate at 6 percent of the cost of a room, on rooms costing $15 or more a day, and cities and counties levy their own on top. Hostaway's glossary puts the usual combined range at 3 percent to 18 percent of the nightly charge. A few places bill a flat amount instead of a percentage: New York City adds a unit fee of $1.50 per unit per day, and the fee itself is exempt from state and local sales tax.
Who collects the tax on each kind of booking
On a booking taken on your own website you are the collector. The Texas Comptroller's hotel tax FAQ says an owner collects and remits the state tax for rentals made on their own site, or through a platform that has not agreed to collect for them. If a platform has agreed to collect the state tax, it is responsible for that tax on the bookings it sold you, and you are responsible for everything else. The Comptroller still tells owners to contact their city and county about the local tax.
Each channel states its own policy in public, and they do not agree with one another.
| Channel | What its own documentation says |
|---|---|
| Your own website | Texas: the owner collects and remits for rentals made on their own site |
| Airbnb | Hosts instruct and authorize it to collect and remit where it facilitates collection, and it may collect regional taxes but not local ones |
| Booking.com | It withholds and remits in a named list of states when the guest paid by its own virtual card, and runs split remittance elsewhere, part of the booking theirs and part yours |
| Vrbo | You cannot opt out where the law or an agreement makes it collect, and you are responsible wherever it is not liable |
| Expedia | Its 10-K for the 2025 financial year says that in most places it does not collect or remit tax on the portion of the payment it keeps |
I checked on September 2026 that every one of these pages still says this, and I would do the same with your own channel before relying on any of it.
Each platform also publishes a map of where it collects. Booking.com's US remittance page names both groups, 14 states where it withholds the whole amount and 9 more where it splits the job with you. Airbnb keeps a page listing the areas where its tax collection is available and tells hosts to click through each one to see which taxes it handles there. Vrbo's page sets out what it collects and where you cannot opt out.
States wrote those collection laws for homes and apartments, and they often exclude commercial lodging. Washington's Department of Revenue leaves out of its marketplace facilitator definition any business selling lodging in a hotel or similar facility for under 30 days, so long as the lodging is not a home, apartment, cabin or other residential dwelling. Where the platform is not a facilitator, the state says the seller is solely liable for the tax nobody collected. So if you rent rooms in a hotel, an inn or a B&B, the law that was meant to put this on the platform may not apply to your bookings at all, and the unpaid tax stays yours.
In Canada what matters is whether you are registered for GST/HST yourself. The Canada Revenue Agency has the platform charge GST/HST on stays it sells for hosts who are not registered, while a host who is registered keeps charging it on every channel. There is a provincial layer under that. British Columbia charges 8 percent PST on short-term accommodation, plus up to 3 percent municipal and regional district tax in the areas that have adopted it, and the province is blunt about where the risk lands: an accommodation provider stays jointly and severally liable for PST and MRDT that a marketplace facilitator fails to collect and remit on their bookings.
Is the tax already inside the money the platform sent you
Each city and each channel has its own answer, and two of your own listings can come out differently. The payout figure looks the same either way. Airbnb's help center says that whether or not it collects taxes automatically, your total payout as a host does not change, minus the service fees. If you want the shape of what the platforms take out before any of this, the commission math has the deductions in order.
The place to look is the software that holds your calendar and your rates. Guesty labels a listing's Airbnb tax status Stacked when Airbnb is already collecting and remitting some tax on it, and warns that a tax you add in Guesty and sync across goes on top of that, with you responsible for the extra. Even where a platform has an agreement with the tax authority, your own filing can carry on. Sonoma County tells owners that Vrbo remits their transient occupancy tax under a voluntary agreement and that they still file a return every quarter, with documentation for all rental activity in the period.
How to check one booking. Pick one booking per channel per city that a guest has actually paid for. Put the payout next to the tax line on your own invoice and see whether they agree to the cent. Agreement means that channel is remitting for you there. A gap is money you still owe.
Registering with the state, and then again with the city
You have to register with the state and with the city or county as well, and the local one is the registration owners most often miss. In Texas the Comptroller does not issue printed hotel tax permits at all: a business that reports the tax sends a completed Form AP-102, the hotel occupancy tax questionnaire, to its local field office. Your city and county are a separate errand with separate paperwork, and the Comptroller's own FAQ sends owners to both of them for the local portion rather than answering for them. Ask both, even if you are sure which side of the line you sit on, because an address outside the city limits usually still sits inside a county that levies its own tax. The office that wants to hear from you has a different name in every place: in San Jose it sits inside the city's finance department, while in Sonoma County it is the Auditor-Controller Treasurer-Tax Collector.
Filing is usually monthly. Texas wants the return and the money by the 20th of the month after the one you collected in, with a quarterly option if you qualify for it. Filing late costs a $50 penalty on every report that arrives after the due date, then 5 percent of the tax if you pay within 30 days, 10 percent if you pay later than that, and interest once you are 61 days past due. Your city keeps its own calendar on top of that, so put both in the same diary. San Jose has its October return and payment due on November 30, 2026.
Is the cleaning fee taxable
In many cities the cleaning fee is taxed along with the room. The clearest published example I know sits on Airbnb's Texas page: the City of Austin hotel occupancy tax is 11 percent of the listing price including any cleaning fees, for reservations of 29 nights and shorter. If you quote a stay in your head as room plus cleaning plus tax, check whether your city taxes the cleaning line too, then check which lines your booking engine is applying the tax to. A cleaning fee taxed on your site and handled differently on a platform is one reason a direct quote can come out higher than the same stay on a platform.
How you display the tax is governed by a separate federal rule. The FTC's rule on unfair or deceptive fees has covered short-term lodging since May 12, 2025, your own website included. Any price you display has to show the total price more prominently than the other numbers, with every mandatory fee inside it, and a cleaning fee is a mandatory fee. Taxes may sit outside that headline figure, but you have to show them before you ask the guest to pay.
What to do if you have not been collecting
Call the state and tell them before an auditor finds it. Most states run some version of a voluntary disclosure program, and the terms there are better than the ones you get once an audit has started. Texas waives the statutory penalties and the interest, except for interest on tax you did collect and never sent in, and limits its review to the reports due in the four years before you first made contact, with no limit at all on tax you collected and kept. A business qualifies only while the Comptroller has not already contacted it about a liability and has not sent notice of an audit or examination, so the moment that letter lands this route is closed.
When your city changes the rate, your booking system does not
San Jose is the example running right now. Its total transient occupancy tax rises from 10 percent to 12 percent on October 1, 2026, after Measure A passed in the June election with 67.05 percent of the vote, and the city's own forms are not updated until November 1. You owe the rate in force on the night of the stay, and your system charges the rate that sat in its settings on the day of the booking. Guesty says so in writing: taxes are not applied retroactively, and only apply to new reservations after the tax is created or edited.
I co-own MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna, and our own city moved its rate last summer. We entered the new figure, on the right date, in the right field. The system went on billing the old one. Nobody noticed until we reconciled a batch of invoices and found 38 Vienna stays short by about €435.63 in total, which was money we owed the city and had never taken from a guest. Our field was set correctly and the vendor's calculation was wrong, so the settings screen showed the new rate while the invoices went out at the old one.
If you undercharge, the city is still owed the difference and you pay it yourself. Test yours on the day the new rate starts, with a booking for a stay that runs past the changeover, and read the tax line on the finished invoice.
Who is exempt, and what you keep on file
On a platform booking you may not get to apply an exemption at all. Airbnb's Texas page says that where it collects on a host's behalf, a host who believes an exemption applies waives it by accepting the reservation. On your own site the decision is yours. The exemption starts once a guest has stayed long enough: in Texas that means 30 consecutive days, and any interruption in the stay voids it.
| Who | What applies | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Long-stay guests in Texas | Permanent residents at 30 consecutive days or more, and any interruption voids it | Texas Comptroller FAQ |
| Long-stay guests in New York | 90 consecutive days for the state tax, 180 for the New York City local tax | NY Tax Bulletin ST-331 |
| Nonprofit staff in Texas | Exempt from the state tax on official business, still paying local hotel taxes | Texas publication 96-224 |
| Anyone else claiming one in Texas | Form 12-302, handed to the property with proof, except for a permanent resident | Texas publication 96-224 |
| Nobody, on the New York City unit fee | $1.50 per unit per day on top of sales tax, and not itself subject to sales tax | NY Tax Bulletin ST-331 |
What to check this week
The whole job takes about an hour:
- List your channels down one side of a page and your cities across the top, then write yes, no or partly in every box.
- Take one paid booking from each box and set the payout beside your own tax line.
- Ask your city or county in writing about the local portion, even where a platform handles the state part. Keep the reply.
- Find the next rate change in each city you operate in and diary it, with a reminder a week before it starts.
Build the grid yourself, because no channel can see what the others remit on your behalf. The invoicing side of this is also the question to put to any system you are shopping for, and what a small property actually needs from its software covers the rest of that list. If you would rather walk your grid through with somebody who has built one, book a call.
