Most Tampa hosts we clean for can tell you their occupancy rate to one decimal place and have no idea who's sending 13.5% of their revenue to the government. Usually they assume Airbnb handles it. Airbnb handles part of it. The gap is where people get letters.
What the 13.5% is actually made of
On a Hillsborough County stay of six months or less, the tax on the booking breaks down like this:
- 6% Florida state sales tax
- 1.5% Hillsborough discretionary sales surtax
- 6% Hillsborough County Tourist Development Tax (TDT)
Three separate line items, two different agencies. The state portion goes to Florida. The TDT goes to the Hillsborough County Tax Collector, which is the part that trips people up — a host who's current with the state can still be delinquent with the county.
And the detail that annoys everyone the first time they hear it: the tax applies to the total rental amount, cleaning fee included. Your cleaning fee isn't a pass-through expense in the county's eyes. It's rental revenue. Charge $225 for a turnover on a four-bedroom caged-pool house off Ehrlich Road and roughly $30 of tax rides on that line alone.
Where Airbnb helps, and where it stops
Since February 1, 2019, Airbnb has automatically collected and remitted the 6% county TDT on Hillsborough reservations under 184 nights. That's real, and it's why a lot of hosts have never opened a TDT return in their life.
Here's the catch. Platform coverage isn't uniform. How a platform treats the state portion can differ from how it treats the county portion, and Vrbo and direct bookings are a different animal entirely — the collection responsibility can land straight back on you. Run a listing on Airbnb, mirror it on Vrbo, and take repeat guests direct by text every Gasparilla season, and you're potentially in three different tax postures for the same house.
So the honest answer to "who remits it" is: pull your own payout statements and read the tax lines, per platform, per booking type. Don't take a forum post's word for it. Don't take ours either — this is a cleaning company writing, not a CPA.
The filing calendar nobody puts in their phone
TDT returns to the Hillsborough County Tax Collector are monthly. Due on the 1st. Delinquent after the 20th. That's the whole rhythm. Even in a month where a platform collected everything, you generally still have an account with an expectation attached to it — a quiet month is not the same as a month you get to ignore.
The TDT account is the easiest of the four things a legal Tampa STR needs. You can open it online, same day. The other three take longer: a Florida DBPR Vacation Rental license (about $150 to apply, typically 2-4 weeks — "Vacation Rental Dwelling" for a single-family home, "Vacation Rental Condominium" for a condo), a City of Tampa Business Tax Receipt, and a Hillsborough County Business Tax Receipt, roughly 1-2 weeks each. Run them in parallel and you're looking at 3-6 weeks total, not the weekend you budgeted for it.
One thing to stop Googling
If your search results keep surfacing a "Certificate of Use" requirement for short-term rentals, close the tab. That's Pinellas County — St. Petersburg and unincorporated Pinellas. It does not apply in Tampa or Hillsborough. We hear it constantly from owners in Carrollwood and Citrus Park who read a St. Pete guide and figured the bay didn't matter. It matters.
The City of Tampa, for its part, has no standalone STR ordinance at all. Your zoning question gets answered by Hillsborough County's Land Development Code, which limits rentals under 7 nights to commercial, lodging, and certain mixed-use districts. Worth confirming before you close on a pool home in Lake Magdalene and assume you can rent it by the weekend.
Why a cleaner brings this up at all
Because we see the invoices. When a host finally reconciles a year of TDT, the cleaning fee is the line they didn't expect to be taxable, and it's usually the one they'd been quietly underpricing to stay competitive on a big weekend. Children's Gasparilla lands Saturday January 24, 2026 and the Pirate Fest invasion follows on the 31st — 300,000-plus people, Bayshore closed, and a wall of same-day back-to-back flips across Northdale and Egypt Lake. Price that turnover for what it costs you after the 13.5%, not before.
Set a repeating reminder for the 20th. Pull one payout statement per platform this week and highlight the tax lines. If you'd rather have the turnover side handled while you sort the paperwork, send us your calendar — or start with what we cover across NW Tampa.