Florida Just Made Airbnb the Tax Collector for Your Vacation Rental

What HB 7031 does

Florida closed its 2026 session with a tax package, House Bill 7031, that the Legislature put through at the end of May with about $272 million in cuts. The piece that matters for our clients with Florida property: short-term-rental platforms — think Airbnb, Vrbo, and the rest — must now collect and remit Florida sales tax on the rental charges they handle. It takes effect July 1, 2026.

This follows the same logic Florida already applies to online retail. The marketplace, not the individual seller, becomes the collector. For an owner who lists a condo through a platform, the state sales tax on each booking gets handled by the platform instead of landing on you to file. That’s a real simplification for the state portion. The trap is assuming it’s the whole story.

Why “the platform handles it” isn’t the full answer

Florida taxes short-term rentals — stays of six months or less — at the state sales tax rate plus a discretionary county surtax, and on top of that most counties impose a tourist development tax that runs several percent more. HB 7031 puts the platform on the hook for collecting state sales tax. It does not flip every county’s bed tax onto the platform, and county rules vary: some counties self-administer their tourist development tax and have their own registration and filing. If you book guests directly — through your own site, a repeat renter, a neighbor’s referral — no platform is collecting anything, and the full obligation stays with you.

So the owner who lists exclusively through one platform gets the cleanest outcome. The owner who mixes platform bookings with direct ones, or who’s in a county that runs its own bed tax, still has filings to make. We see the same pattern with clients who own a place in Florida and treat “no state income tax” as “no Florida tax paperwork.” The income tax is gone; the sales and tourist taxes on a rental are very much alive.

The rest of the package, if you own Florida property

A few other provisions are worth knowing. HB 7031 creates a sales-tax break for home-hardening — impact-resistant windows and doors — which matters if you’re upgrading a coastal property to cut insurance costs. It restructures the back-to-school sales-tax holiday into a fixed late-summer window and adds a months-long holiday on camping, fishing, and hunting gear. It permanently drops the sales tax on small propane tanks, the 20-pound kind. None of these move the needle on a tax return by themselves, but they’re timing levers if you’re already spending on the property.

The bill also nudges the homestead rules. Florida’s Save Our Homes assessment cap — the thing that limits how fast your homesteaded property’s taxable value can rise — gets a longer portability look-back, so a buyer moving between Florida homes can carry the benefit from a home given up within the prior three years. For a high-net-worth client finally making the New York-to-Florida move official, the portability timing is a detail worth getting right, because it decides how much of the cap benefit follows you to the new house.

Who this hits, by situation

Owners renting a Florida second home short-term

Check how you book. If everything runs through a platform, confirm the platform is collecting Florida sales tax from July 1 and review whether your county’s tourist development tax is also covered or still on you. If you take any direct bookings, keep your sales-tax registration active and keep filing. The rental still flows onto your federal return on Form 8825 or Schedule E regardless of who collects the sales tax.

Investors with a Florida rental portfolio

The collection shift can simplify state sales-tax compliance across several listings, but it doesn’t change the income-tax side or your county obligations. If you’re buying or selling, the usual planning — basis, depreciation recapture, a possible 1031 exchange — still drives the bigger numbers.

How The Reed Corporation helps

We work with New York clients who own Florida property and want the compliance handled without thinking about it. That means sorting out which taxes the platform now covers, which county filings remain yours, and how the rental income reports on your federal return — all in one view. For clients moving toward Florida residency, we coordinate the property side with the residency planning so the two don’t work against each other. If you own a Florida rental and you’re not sure what changes on July 1, we’ll map it to your specific setup through our business and financial management work.