Airbnb Is Scaling Back Lodging Tax Collection in Alabama. Here’s What Hosts Need to Do.

What Airbnb collected before

Until now, Airbnb has collected and remitted three layers of tax on most Alabama bookings:

• State lodging tax: 4%, or 5% in the 16 Mountain Lakes counties (Blount, Cherokee, Colbert, Cullman, DeKalb, Etowah, Franklin, Jackson, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Limestone, Madison, Marion, Marshall, Morgan, and Winston)
• County lodging and rental tax: 1% to 9%, depending on the county
• Municipal lodging tax: 2% to 13%, depending on the city

Hosts didn’t have to register, file, or remit anything for their Airbnb bookings. The tax came out of the guest’s total and went straight to the state.

What Airbnb collects from September 15

The nine jurisdictions that keep coverage, with the rates Airbnb lists:

That’s the full list. Notice what isn’t on it: the state lodging tax. The page’s wording suggests that after September 15, Airbnb stops collecting the 4–5% state portion everywhere, including inside those nine cities.

Who’s affected

If your listing is outside those nine jurisdictions: Airbnb stops collecting state, county, and city lodging tax on your bookings. All of it becomes your responsibility.

If your listing is inside one of them: Airbnb keeps collecting the local tax listed above, but you’ll likely need to handle the state portion yourself.

Either way, nothing about what’s owed has changed. Alabama still taxes every stay under 180 days. The only thing that changed is who’s collecting it.

What to do before September 15

1. Register for a state lodgings tax account. Go to My Alabama Taxes and choose “Register a business / Obtain a new tax account number.” Returns and payments are due on the 20th of each month for the previous month. If your liability was under $2,400 last year you can request quarterly filing.
2. Find out whether your county or city collects its own tax. ALDOR administers some local lodging taxes, but not all of them. Many Alabama cities and counties are self-administered. Check ALDOR’s contact list for all localities and register with yours directly if needed. Most self-administered local taxes can still be filed and paid through My Alabama Taxes.
3. Add the tax to your Airbnb listing. Use Airbnb’s custom tax feature so the tax is charged to the guest and passed through to you, rather than coming out of your nightly rate. In the listing editor, go to Settings, then Taxes, then Add a tax. You’ll need your Alabama tax account number. Airbnb’s instructions are here.
4. Check your Taxes page after the 15th. Confirm what Airbnb is still collecting for your listing. Don’t assume.
5. Track pass-through tax separately. Custom taxes show up as a separate line in your Airbnb payout and earnings report. That money isn’t yours. Set it aside for the 20th.

Why is this happening?

Airbnb hasn’t said. The most likely explanation is Alabama’s Tourism Tax Protection Act, which took effect in October 2024 and required platforms to collect lodging taxes statewide from January 2025. The Act also lets a platform off the hook for unpaid tax when it has a written agreement passing collected taxes back to the host to remit. It’s possible Airbnb is moving toward that model, keeping direct collection only where it has its own agreements with local governments. That’s an inference, not something Airbnb has confirmed.

Our take: this is what dependence costs

For years, one of the quiet advantages of listing on Airbnb was that it handled taxes for you. Vrbo and most other channels collect the tax and hand it back; Airbnb collected it and paid the state. Hosts got compliance for free.

Alabama shows that can be withdrawn with a help-page edit. No email, no notice period, no explanation. And it’s happening the same day Airbnb moves every host to a 15.5% service fee. You’re paying more for the platform, and in Alabama, getting less back.

Here’s the thing to notice: the terms only ever move in one direction. Fees go up. Refund policies get more generous to guests and the host absorbs it. Services that used to be included get trimmed. None of that is a scandal. It’s what a platform does when it owns the customer and you don’t. Airbnb’s job is to keep the guest on Airbnb. Your job is to keep the guest, full stop.

The hosts who read this news and shrug are the ones who already treat OTAs as what they are: a way to meet new guests, not the business itself. They know who’s staying with them. They have the guest’s email and phone number, not just an Airbnb thread. They deliver a stay good enough that the guest wants to come back, and they make it obvious how to do that directly. When the platform changes the rules, it changes the rules on a slice of their bookings, not all of them.

If Airbnb is your only channel, every one of these changes hits 100% of your revenue, and you find out about it the way Alabama hosts did this week: after the fact, on a help page.

So yes, register with ALDOR and sort out your tax settings. Then ask the harder question. If Airbnb made another change next month, would it be a nuisance or a crisis? The gap between those two answers is the guest relationship, and it’s the one thing no platform can take back from you once you’ve built it.

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