These 10 States Collect the Most in STR Taxes

06.12.2023 - 04:35 / skift.com / Srividya Kalyanaraman

I have covered short-term rentals at Skift for a little over six months now, and in reporting on regulations around the world with its when will the hammer come down conjecture, I figured my time would be well-spent trying to understand some of the incentive behind the intention to regulate.

And so, I did what most journalists do — follow the money — and reached out to Nick Del Pego, CEO of Deckard Technologies to get some tax data. San Diego-based Deckard Technologies partners with local communities and counties to provide them with data and analytics to identify and tax short-term rentals.

Below are the company’s estimates on total residential short-term rental tax revenue for counties in the U.S. with major short-term rental markets, including estimates on collectable residential short-term rental taxes.

Computing this data did not come without challenges: In some jurisdictions it’s fairly straightforward as there is one tax rate for the county. In other jurisdictions, such as San Diego, for instance, there are 19 different taxing authorities, and so the rate Deckard Technologies uses is an average across the area. 

Here are a few caveats from Deckard Technologies to interpreting this data: “We have been inclusive of the various tax rates levied (many jurisdictions have local, state, occupancy and sales taxes that combine to the rate in the below table). Also, we’ve calculated the potential collectible combined accommodations tax, but we wouldn’t expect the actual collected tax to equal this amount as some amount of transactions will go unreported or underreported,” Del Pego wrote. “Lastly, we do not have information on what the jurisdictions actually collected — very few of the jurisdictions publish this information and gathering it would be achievable, but only through a lot of freedom of information requests to each of the many taxing authorities involved.”

But even so, these are an unsurprising list of very large and popular vacation destinations that all have substantive tax rates. The dominant ones are Hawaii, Florida and California. The lone outlier was Sevier County, Tennessee, which is home to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the busiest in the world, with an estimated 13 million visitors in 2022. 

Expedia terminated its supplier relationship with Hopper Wednesday, meaning Expedia/Vrbo-sourced vacation rentals will no longer be available to Hopper and its distribution partners, including Capital One. The same goes for the hotel inventory that Expedia has supplied to Hopper over the last five or so years, as well.

Hopper responded to the news, saying it has a diverse array of vacation rental providers. Property manager Evolve is one of Hopper’s suppliers with around 24,000 homes.