Our local council election is in a few weeks time. The likely winners are proposing a tourism bed tax. I think New York and some other places have a bed tax. I wonder how this affects Airbnb hosts.
Depends how the legislation is written. It might affect places with a certain number of rooms and up. Or maybe it will affect places with all kinds of STR rooms/spaces. Or rentals of a certain number of days. Legislation varies all over the place.
Are any of our forum members currently paying a bed tax via Air?
What Air does is allow you to enter your sales tax and bed tax into your listing. Air then computes the tax and pays it to the host, who then pays the local taxing authority. In my case, my city requires me to file and pay those taxes quarterly. I keep a spreadsheet with the details for each booking, 1) in case Air or my Internet connection are down and 2) to be able to easily track income and expenses, including Air host fees and taxes.
What Air does in our state is collect the taxes and they pay them to the state and local governments on our behalf.
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Yes. It’s not a problem at all. Until Airbnb started collecting the taxes and before we started using Airbnb we used to pay them ourselves directly. So Airbnb makes it a little easier.
We still pay directly for guests who haven’t booked through Airbnb. So either way is fine.
It varies. What Air does in my locality is collect and remit state sales tax but not local lodging tax. Air refers to it as collecting “lodging tax” in their notices to hosts so as to add to the confusion and make our local revenue office tear its (figurative) hair out.