Guide
Short-term rental tax basics, and what a permit does not cover
Updated
Tax and permission are two different systems and neither one tells you anything about the other. Hosts get caught in both directions: registered with the city and unregistered for lodging tax, or confident about the fifteen day rule and unaware they needed a permit for night one.
The federal rule for light use
IRS Topic 415 states that where you use a dwelling unit as a home and rent it for fewer than 15 days, you do not report any of the rental income and do not deduct any expenses as rental expenses.
It is one of the cleanest rules in the code and it is frequently misremembered as a general exemption. It is neither general nor an exemption from anything except federal income tax reporting on those receipts.
The residence test underneath it
The fewer-than-15-days rule applies to a dwelling used as a home, and there is a separate test for that: a unit is a residence if your personal use exceeds the greater of 14 days, or 10% of the total days you rent it to others at a fair rental price.
Those two numbers, 14 and 15, are easy to conflate and they do different jobs. One decides whether the unit is a residence; the other decides whether the light-use rule applies to it.
Above the threshold
Income and expenses are reported on Form 1040 or 1040-SR with Schedule E. Where the property serves both rental and personal purposes, expenses are divided in proportion to the days of each use.
That apportionment is the part that needs a record kept during the year rather than reconstructed after it, and it is worth setting up on day one because it is nearly impossible to rebuild honestly in April.
Lodging tax is a different system
Occupancy or lodging taxes are usually administered separately from the permit, often at both state and city level, and sometimes collected by the platform and sometimes not. The pages cited on this site do not cover them, and this page does not state a rate for anywhere.
Check it as its own item. Assuming the permit covered it, or that the platform is remitting it, is a common and expensive error, and the answer is specific to your jurisdiction and your platform.