PROVIDENCE – Airbnb, an online rental hosting platform, announced on Friday that it remitted a record $6 million in 2021 tax revenue to the state of Rhode Island, a 70% increase from 2019.
Arbnb remitted more than $1.5 billion in federal taxes in 2021, including Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, an 87% increase over 2019.
Samuel Randall, a spokesman for Airbnb, said that $6 million is the highest tax remitted to Rhode Island’s Division of Taxation by the company, which was founded in 2007.
Airbnb did not provide tax remittance numbers for Massachusetts and Connecticut, but it did note that New York generated more than $10 million, an increase of approximately 200% over 2019.
San Francisco-based Airbnb is an online marketplace for lodging, including room and housing rentals, operating primarily in the tourism sector.
Randall said the 2020 tax year was not referenced due to the pandemic, and Airbnb “wanted to compare two years of relatively normal travel between 2019 and 2021.”
New short-term rental properties listed on Airbnb in Rhode Island earned approximately $8 million in revenue in 2021, said Randall, noting that Airbnb short-term rentals in the state have generated $210 million in revenue since 2010.
Jessica Willi, executive director of the Block Island Tourism Council, said it’s great that the tax receipts from Airbnb are up 70% from 2019.
“The pandemic certainly drove people to the rental home market and it remains very strong,” she said. “Rhode Island has an important tourism economy and those tourism related taxes, like the 1% food and beverage tax, the hotel tax and the cottage tax that we are seeing here, are a boon to local and state government as they try and balance their budgets.”
Guests who book Airbnb listings in Rhode Island pay the following taxes as part of their reservation: a 7% Rhode Island sales tax, a 1% local hotel tax, and a 5% statewide hotel tax. Rentals of an entire home or apartment are excluded from the statewide hotel tax.
On Jan. 4, the R.I. General Assembly overrode Gov. Daniel J. McKee’s veto to enact a new short-term rental property registry. It was enacted per legislation sponsored by Rep. Lauren H. Carson, D-Newport, and Sen. Dawn Euer, D-Newport, which requires payment of a $150 annual fee for every short-term rental property in the state listed on online sites such as Airbnb and VRBO.
Rental properties that are hosted on the platform are required to register with the R.I. Department of Business Regulation. Requirements of the law only apply to short-term rental properties occupied for less than 30 days.
(UPDATES: comment from Block Island Tourism Council)
Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer. Contact him at Shuman@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @CassiusShuman.
