Who Remits What

“Airbnb handles it” is the most expensive sentence in this business, and the reason it survives is that it is partly true.

Something genuinely is being collected. You can see it on the payout breakdown. It is completely reasonable to conclude the tax question is closed. It is not.

Collecting is not remitting

Money sitting in your account that belongs to the county is a liability, and it grows penalty and interest while it sits there. The question is never “was tax collected” — it is which tax, by whom, for which county, and did it actually get sent.

The matrix, roughly

Read that table as a prompt to make three phone calls, not as a statement of fact about your county. The only authoritative answer comes from your own tax collector, about your own county, this year.

Direct bookings are always yours

No platform means nobody in the chain to collect or remit anything. Every penny of all three taxes is yours to charge the guest and send on.

Cool. Moving on to the filing that costs nothing and saves everything.

The zero return

Once you are registered, you file every period. Every one. Including the months you had no bookings. Including the months the platform remitted everything on your behalf.

A zero return filed is not the same as no return filed. Missing filings generate penalties even when the tax due is genuinely zero, and they keep generating them quietly until somebody notices — which is usually the agency, not you.

The fifteen-minute habit

• Call your county tax collector. Ask: which platforms do you have active collection agreements with, for which taxes?
• Register for a state sales tax certificate and a county tourist tax account before your first booking.
• File every period, even the empty ones.
• Diarise that first phone call to repeat every January, because the answer changes.

Also defined: Department of Revenue · Tourist Development Tax