Does your short-term rental pass the 7-day test?
Paste your booking dates. You'll get your average period of customer use — the number the rule actually turns on — per property.
No signup. No email. Nothing is uploaded: the maths runs in your browser.
One booking per line, check-in and check-out. Paste straight from an Airbnb, Vrbo, OwnerRez or Hospitable export — extra columns are ignored.
This is a calculator, not tax advice. It computes one number from dates you supply. Whether your properties qualify depends on facts this page can't see — confirm it with your CPA before you file.
What the 7-day test actually says
A rental activity stops being a "rental activity" under the passive-loss rules when the average period of customer use is seven days or less. That's Temp. Reg. §1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii)(A), and it's the sentence the whole thing rests on.
The arithmetic is unglamorous: total nights rented ÷ number of bookings. Not occupied nights divided by days in the year. Not your typical stay. The average across every booking period in the year, property by property.
Three places people get it wrong
Averaging the portfolio instead of the property. The test applies per activity. A cabin averaging 3.1 nights and a mid-term unit averaging 44 don't blend into a single comfortable number.
Counting nights instead of bookings. One 30-night stay and ten 3-night stays is 60 nights across 11 bookings — an average of 5.45, not 30.
Assuming the average holds. It's recalculated every year. A property at 6.4 nights this year can cross the line next year on a handful of longer winter bookings, and nothing tells you unless you're watching.
Passing the test is the first hurdle, not the last
Clearing seven days means the activity isn't automatically passive. It does not by itself let you deduct losses against other income — for that you still have to materially participate, under one of the seven tests in Temp. Reg. §1.469-5T. The one that catches people is the test comparing your hours to everyone else's: if your cleaner logs more hours on the property than you do, you can fail it while doing plenty of work.
Worth reading next: which rentals qualify for STR treatment, and how the STR rule differs from real estate professional status.
Doing this once, by hand, for one year
That's what this page is. RentReel computes the same number from your actual reservations, for every property, and keeps it current as bookings arrive — so you find out you've drifted over seven days in March, not the following April.
See it on your own bookings