FOR SHORT-TERM RENTAL HOSTS FILING THEIR OWN OCCUPANCY TAX
Airbnb and Vrbo each hold occupancy-tax collection agreements with some taxing authorities and not others, set per state, county, and city. On the stay loaded below — $250 a night, four nights, a $150 cleaning fee, taxed $126.50 in total — the platform collects the $69.00 state layer in full and none of the $57.50 county layer. That $57.50 is not withheld anywhere. It is the host’s own filing, on every stay, whether or not the payout statement says so.
Put your own stay and your own rates in. Everything runs in this browser; nothing is uploaded.
This calculator vs. tracking occupancy tax in a spreadsheet — the layer a hand-built sheet is most likely to drop.
How to find which tax layers your platform already collects — four places to check before you guess.
How much occupancy tax will you have to self-file this year? — the annual planning total a platform's payout summary never shows.
You must remit directly, this stay
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Press “Work the tax” to see the split.
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Sometimes, and rarely all of it. Airbnb and Vrbo each hold collection agreements with some taxing authorities and not others, and those agreements are set per state, county, and city — not per platform. A common pattern is a state sales tax the platform collects and remits automatically, sitting next to a county tourist-development tax it does not, because no agreement covers that county. On the worked example below, $126.50 in total occupancy tax, the platform collects the $69.00 state layer in full and none of the $57.50 county layer, leaving that $57.50 for the host to track and file directly.
The platform’s own tax help pages, searched by the specific state, county, and city the listing sits in — not by the state alone, since collection agreements are set per authority and a state-level page will not mention a county that is not covered. Some hosts also see it on their payout statement as a line item withheld. When in doubt, ask the county or city tax collector’s office directly whether they have a voluntary collection agreement with the platform for short-term rentals; that office is the authority the money is owed to either way.
Most jurisdictions tax the full amount a guest pays for the right to occupy the space, which is usually the nightly rate times nights plus the cleaning fee — not the nightly rate alone. On the worked example, $250 a night for four nights plus a $150 cleaning fee makes a $1,150.00 taxable base, and every tax layer below is a percentage of that figure. A jurisdiction that does not tax the cleaning fee is the exception rather than the rule; check the specific authority’s own guidance and enter $0 there if so.
The ones published by each taxing authority the listing’s address sits inside — state department of revenue, county tax collector, city finance office, and any special district that levies one. This calculator ships no rate table on purpose: rates vary by every layer of jurisdiction, they change, and a table baked into a free tool would be stale in the one place that is expensive to be wrong — a filed remittance. Enter each authority’s current rate and the arithmetic is yours to check.
Some cities and counties charge a fixed dollar amount per night on top of, or instead of, a percentage tax — a tourism assessment or a lodging fee that does not scale with the room rate. It is kept separate from the percentage layers because it is computed differently: nights times a flat rate, not a share of the taxable base. Leave it at zero if the listing’s jurisdiction does not charge one.
No. There is no account and the page makes no network requests — it runs entirely in your browser. Your nightly rate, fees, tax layers, and the figures worked out from them are never sent anywhere and never appear in a usage count. The optional counter records only which features were used and the day, stored on your own device, and it switches itself off for browsers sending Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
Yes. Your tax layers and the other fields are saved to this browser automatically, so they are still here on your next visit. The copy-link button puts the same figures into the page’s own address after the #, which is never sent to a server or logged anywhere, so sending it to a co-host or bookkeeper uploads nothing.
No to both. It is arithmetic on figures you type, using rates you supply. It is not tax advice and it files nothing — it makes no determination about which authorities tax a specific listing, what a platform’s current collection agreements cover, or what you owe. Verify every figure against each taxing authority’s own guidance, your platform’s tax pages for that specific address, and a qualified tax professional before you rely on it.