Palm Beach County Tourist Development Tax (TDT) Must Be Paid By You

[Brian1613]

When you sign up for Airbnb, it tells you that they collect taxes in Florida. Well, sort of. ONE COUNTY, Palm Beach County, does not participate.

When you read this: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2580/palm-beach-county-fl , it is still currently telling you to go to the County website to find out the rules.   They don’t really post them, either. 

You must collect the Palm Beach County Tourist Development Tax (TDT), and file it, manually, yourself.  If you haven’t, taking Airbnb at the “We pay Florida Taxes, thing,” you will be fined for each late report, and still owe the 6% TDT.

Further, Airbnb does not collect the TDT. Here is how you can collect it yourself, though, through their system:

1. In your Hosting Dashboard on a WEB BROWSER, go to the listing under the Listing tab;
2. Under “Pricing” in the listing, scroll down to “Standard Fees and Charges”;
3. Click on Community Fee;
4. Set the calculation to %
5. Enter 6, per reservation
6. Save

That will then collect the money needed to pay the local 6% tax.

Otherwise, the 6% comes out of your profits!

I just went back and caught up.  It can be a bit expensive, with fines.  

Why is Palm Beach the only county that does this?  Can’t tell you. I asked. Got no answer. I would suspect that they like the fines. Otherwise, they would get 100% of the tax money through Airbnb.

[Robert6603]

The issue with going the community fee route, is that Airbnb includes that fee when they charge the 6% state sales tax. They take nightly fee, cleaning fee, and the community fee and charge 6% to remit to the state of Florida. That means guests will be paying us a 'fee' for taxes and then getting taxed on top of that tax. We need an option to add tax manually the correct way. For now you just need to add it to your nightly rate amount. 

[Stefanie465]

So are you not going the route of requesting the amount from the guest after they book, which is what Air BnB support has advised? However, we are worried this will result in cancellation or it looks like we are just trying to get more money. So you are just increasing your nightly rate by 6%?