YOU are so incorrect!
In June 2022 I had a guest leave after the first night of a 30-day stay, based on some paranoid delusional rant that he texted me about at 3AM about being afraid that the state would take his general contractor's license away from him if they found out he was staying in an unpermitted building. In fact, the place was fully permitted as residential living space and passed all inspections with flying colors – something anyone on the planet, let alone a contractor, could have discovered in minutes simply by entering our address into the county's permit search engine. And when I did a search on him and the name of his renovation business on his truck, I found out that he wasn't, had never been, and still isn't a general contractor, and even if he had been, the licensing board later told me that they do NOT expect contractors to research the legality of their personal accommodations.
ANYWAY, I called Airbnb right away and told them the situation, and authorized a full refund (as I would have had he simply told me is actual situation), but AirBnB insisted on keeping the full amount of his refund on my account as gross earnings, reported it on my earnings statement for 2022, and they reported it as gross earnings to the IRS. I had all of this verified twice by Airbnb.
Since I must report gross earnings on line 3 of Schedule E, then my only choice was to report the same figure that Airbnb reported to IRS in 2022. And it wasn't till the 2022 refund appeared on my 2023 earnings statement that I discovered all of this. Up until then, I assumed that my earnings statements reflected rental income earned in a given year and that any refunds for days not rented would not appear as gross income.
And to make matters worse, they reported FOUR of my other 2022 rental periods (29 days worth) as being 2023 earnings, even though those rental periods did not extend into 2023, which is really screwing up my 2023 tax filing, because we deliberately ceased our rental activities in 2023 before the 30-day annual limit, because now that I'm collecting pension we don't need the extra dough and we wanted to get our homestead exemption back in place. But instead of getting an earnings summary that says we had a gross income of $2400 for 20 days of rentals, we got an earning summary that says we had a gross income of about $4500 for 49 days of rentals, and a 2023 payout of only about $640 that reflects 20 days rented in 2023, 29 days rented in 2022, and the large refund issued in 2022. As far as I've been able to determine from the massive pile of gibberish they threw at me when I complained, they only thing they report to the IRS is number of stays, number of nights rented, and gross earnings. As far as I can tell from IRS, there is no specific place I can deduct refunds from gross income, so I have to report it as some kind of expense, which could raise flags at the IRS.
Airbnb's refunds and reporting practices are totally bizarre and unjustifiable. The IRS asks hosts to report stays and days rented within the calendar year, so I don't see how Airbnb can justify telling the IRS that rental income earned within that calendar year was earned in a subsequent calendar year.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.