Everyone in this business talks about “the 30-day rule” like it’s one number. It’s two, and they’re set by different people. Your city decides what counts as a short-term rental. Your state decides when you stop collecting hotel tax. Nobody makes those agree, and in some places they’re months apart.

In North Carolina, where I operate, a sixty-day mid-term rental booking is well clear of any short-term rental rule and still fully taxable. In Texas the two numbers land on the same day. In New York City they’re five months apart.

Here’s both numbers for the twenty largest US cities.

City	State	Short-term if	Tax stops at
New York City	NY	< 30 CD	90 CD state / 180 CD city
Los Angeles	CA	≤ 30 CD	> 30 CD
Chicago	IL	≤ 31 CD	30 CD
Houston	TX	< 30 CD	30 CD
Phoenix	AZ	≤ 30 CD	30 CD
Philadelphia	PA	≤ 30 CD	30 CD
San Antonio	TX	< 30 CD	30 CD
San Diego	CA	< 1 month	> 30 CD
Dallas	TX	< 30 CD	30 CD
Austin	TX	< 30 CD	30 CD
Fort Worth	TX	≤ 29 CD	30 CD
Columbus	OH	< 30 CD	30 CD
Charlotte	NC	No definition	90 CD
San Francisco	CA	< 30 CD	> 30 CD
Seattle	WA	< 30 nights	30 CD
Oklahoma City	OK	≤ 30 CD	30 CD — city tax only
Jacksonville	FL	No definition	> 6 months
San Jose	CA	—	> 30 CD
Indianapolis	IN	—	30 CD
Denver	CO	—	30 CD

How to read it: CD = consecutive days by the same guest. < = fewer than. ≤ = that many or fewer. > = more than. — = not yet verified.

“Short-term if” is your city’s rule — it decides whether permits, caps and registration apply. “Tax stops at” is your state’s rule — it decides when you stop collecting hotel tax. Bolded rows are the ones that don’t behave like the rest.

Last checked: 9 September 2026. City definitions come from each city’s own ordinance or development code; tax thresholds from state revenue departments and statutes. Three cities show a dash because their code portals wouldn’t give me a straight answer, and I’d rather leave a gap than copy a number off a blog. Know one of them? Tell me and I’ll fill it in.

The Rows That Should Worry You

New York City runs two clocks. State sales tax on the room comes off at 90 continuous days. The city’s own hotel occupancy tax doesn’t stop until 180. That’s the longest runway in the country, and it means a five-month corporate booking in Manhattan is still paying city hotel tax on the last day.

Florida is six months. Not thirty days, not ninety — half a year of continuous residence before the transient rental tax comes off, under Fla. Stat. § 212.03. If you’re modelling a Jacksonville or Orlando property on a 30-day assumption, your tax line is wrong by five months.

Oklahoma City’s exemption is partial. The 30-day rule takes off the city lodging tax and nothing else — Oklahoma’s state sales tax on lodging has no length-of-stay carve-out at all. A six-month guest there is still paying sales tax on the room every month.

Fort Worth is 29 days. Chicago is 31. If you’ve set one blanket 30-day minimum across properties in different metros, you’re on the wrong side of the line somewhere.

And Charlotte doesn’t define short-term rentals at all. I went through my own city’s Unified Development Ordinance expecting a threshold and there isn’t one — no use category, no day count, no permit. Those provisions were dropped before the UDO was adopted. So here the only number that binds me is the state’s, and North Carolina doesn’t release you until 90 continuous days.

The Written Lease Trap

This is the part that costs people real money, and it’s barely written about anywhere.

In several states, whether the exemption applies from day one or only from the threshold forward depends on paperwork you signed before the guest checked in.

• Arizona doesn’t backdate at all. Rent someone two weeks, then extend them past thirty days, and those first two weeks stay taxable. The state’s own guidance spells this out.
• Los Angeles wants a signed, dated agreement at check-in. Without one, even a guest who genuinely stays past thirty days gets the first thirty taxed anyway.
• Washington gives day-one treatment only with an advance contract. No contract, and non-transient status starts on day thirty, going forward.
• Colorado requires a legally enforceable written agreement for at least thirty consecutive days. It’s the strictest wording I found.
• Florida’s six-month exemption hinges on a bona fide written lease. With one, exempt from day one. Without one, you’re collecting for six months.

North Carolina is friendlier here — the exemption is retroactive, so once a stay hits 90 continuous days the tax collected across the whole stay gets refunded or credited back. But break the chain at day 88 and it never applied at all.

The practical version: get the intended length in writing, signed, before they move in. It costs you nothing and in five of these states it’s the difference between exempt and not.

The Easy Answer, and Where It Stops Working

If all of that sounds like a lot to track, there’s a shortcut I’d genuinely recommend: take the booking through Airbnb. In most jurisdictions they calculate, collect and remit occupancy tax for you. You don’t file anything, you don’t work out which of these thresholds applies, and you don’t eat the difference if you guessed wrong.

For most hosts in most cities that solves the tax half of this post entirely. Two things it doesn’t solve.

How much it covers depends on your state, and the difference is bigger than you’d think. Two examples I looked into:

• North Carolina — fully covered. Airbnb collects state sales tax and local occupancy tax in all 100 counties. Better still, under G.S. 105-164.4F the tax obligation sits with the “retailer” — the party collecting the payment. That’s Airbnb, not you. In my state, a booking through the platform genuinely takes it off your plate.
• Texas — only half covered. Airbnb has remitted the 6% state hotel tax since 2017, and hosts can’t opt out. But the Comptroller is explicit that many cities and counties levy their own local hotel tax, and for that you remain personally responsible. If you assumed the platform had all of it, you’ve been under-remitting.

Worth knowing how the exemption actually gets applied, too. In Texas, Airbnb treats everything at 29 days or under as taxable, then refunds the guest directly if an exemption turns out to apply. So it’s handled after the fact rather than by not charging in the first place — which matters if a guest asks you why they were charged.

The lesson isn’t “don’t use Airbnb.” It’s that “the platform handles taxes” is a statement about a specific jurisdiction, not a general fact. Look up what they actually collect where your property is before you close your tax account.

And it does nothing for evictions. This is the part worth being clear about, because it’s where people assume the platform is protecting them and it isn’t.

Tenancy is created by occupancy and state law. Not by which website took the payment. A guest who stays past your state’s threshold becomes a tenant whether they booked on Airbnb, Furnished Finder, or a napkin.

Airbnb says this themselves. Their own guidance warns that guests staying a month or longer may establish rights as a tenant, names California, Illinois and New York as places where that happens at thirty consecutive days, and tells hosts they may not be able to remove someone without going through the court eviction process. They recommend you talk to a landlord-tenant attorney. On a guest who won’t leave, the commitment is that they’ll “work with you to try and help resolve the problem” — which is support, not removal.

So the split is clean: the platform handles the money, you handle the legal status. Airbnb can refund a guest, delist a listing, and remit your taxes. It cannot give you back possession of your house. That takes a filing, a judge, and weeks you didn’t plan for.

Which is a good reason to run a real lease alongside the booking, even when the booking came through a platform that doesn’t require one.

The Half Nobody Mentions

Whichever number applies, crossing thirty days does one thing consistently: your guest generally stops being a hotel guest and becomes a tenant. Not in spirit — in law. Roughly half of states run some version of the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, and it arrives with the stay.

• You can’t just remove someone. No lockouts, no putting their things on the porch. You file in court and wait for a judge — weeks to months.
• You have to give notice before entering — typically 24 to 48 hours for anything that isn’t an emergency.
• Security deposits get rules — caps, return deadlines, penalties for missing them.
• Habitability becomes a legal obligation, not a review-score problem.

Getting a self-help eviction wrong is expensive. Wrongful eviction claims can carry damages plus the other side’s attorney fees — a much worse outcome than the bad month you were trying to end.

It’s Not a Loophole

People frame thirty days as a way to slip past regulation. That framing is how you end up unprepared. You’re not escaping rules — you’re moving from one body of law into another, and picking up a tax obligation that may run months longer than you expected. The short-term set is mostly about permits and neighbors. The long-term set is about the rights of the person living in your house. The second one is older and far less forgiving of landlords who improvise.

Which is fine. Lower turnover, guests who treat the place like a home, no permit lottery — I’ll take that trade every time. But take it knowing what’s in it.

What I’d Actually Do

• Look up both numbers for your market, not one. Your city ordinance and your state tax code are written by different people who never compared notes.
• Get the length of stay in writing before check-in. In several states that single piece of paper decides whether the exemption reaches back to day one.
• Price the tax in until you’re certain it’s off. Assuming thirty days in a ninety-day state is how you eat the difference yourself.
• Use a real lease, not a booking confirmation. If your guest is legally a tenant, the paperwork should read like it knows that.

Same house, same guest, same furniture. The date they check out decides which laws you’re under and which taxes you owe — and those two answers don’t have to be the same date.

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I run four mid-term rentals. I’m not a lawyer or a tax advisor, and none of this is legal or tax advice. Ordinances, statutes and court rulings all move, and local taxes sit on top of state ones — home-rule cities in Colorado, county innkeeper’s taxes in Indiana and county lodging taxes in Ohio all set their own terms. Check your own jurisdiction before you make a decision based on a number you read on the internet, including mine.