Anyone booking a short-term rental in Onondaga County will now pay a room occupancy tax just like the tax automatically added to a hotel room. County lawmakers changed a local law Tuesday to include properties rented through Airbnb, VRBO, and other booking platforms. County Chief Fiscal Officer Kristi Smiley told legislators software handles most of the transactions.
“All the remittance will be done through those booking sites, so it will not be on the owner to necessarily remit the sales or the room occupancy tax every time,” she said. “So we've been talking with those platforms as well.”
Smiley says most owners use a booking platform, but those who don’t must collect and remit their tax revenue accordingly. Legislator Colleen Gunnip said the measure essentially adopts a state law which requires the county to create a short-term rental registry using some of the new revenue.
“With the registry, we're going to have a better handle as to how many there are in our community and if there's different circumstances with the number of days in a year that people do this versus the number of rooms per short term rental like bed and breakfast,” she said. “They would be subject to this rule also.”
Gunnip said the county might revisit the measure sometime next year depending on the data collected by the registry. She says the idea is to level the playing field between hotels and short-term rentals. The county stands to collect an estimated $1 million in revenue per year.
