Do you have to send your Airbnb cleaner a 1099? The 2026 rules for STR contractors

Do short-term rental owners have to send cleaners a 1099-NEC?

The instructions put the trigger in one sentence: "Report on Form 1099-MISC or Form 1099-NEC only when payments are made in the course of your trade or business." So the honest answer starts with a question you have probably already answered elsewhere on your return. Is your STR a trade or business?

For a long-term landlord with one duplex and a property manager, the position that rental activity is not a trade or business has real history behind it. Congress briefly closed that argument in 2010 (the Small Business Jobs Act added §6041(h), treating rental income recipients as being in a trade or business for 1099 purposes) and then repealed it in April 2011, retroactive to the first day it applied, before anyone had filed under it (P.L. 112-9, §3). What survived is the general rule, and a pair of questions at the top of Schedule E. Line A asks whether you made any payments that would require you to file Forms 1099. Line B asks whether you filed them.

Short-term rental operators are in a different spot than the duplex landlord, and it is worth being consistent about it. If you are taking the position that your rental is not a passive activity because you materially participate, if you log hours for the STR loophole or for REPS, if you deduct bonus depreciation from a cost segregation study against W-2 income, you are describing an operation you run, with vendors you direct. Answering "No" on Line A while describing that operation everywhere else on the return is a hard position to hold. There is no penalty for issuing a 1099 you were not strictly required to issue. There is a penalty, per form, for skipping one you were.

The working rule I use across five properties: if the STR is on Schedule E and I am claiming anything more than a passive loss, the cleaners, handymen and anyone else I paid $2,000 or more get a form. It costs an afternoon in January and removes a question a revenue agent would otherwise get to ask first.

What is the 1099-NEC threshold for 2026?

$2,000, aggregated per payee per calendar year, for payments made after December 31, 2025. Section 70433 of P.L. 119-21 (the July 2025 reconciliation act) amended §6041(a) to replace the $600 figure that had been in the statute since 1954, and made two conforming changes that matter to you: §6041A(a)(2), which covers remuneration for services, and §3406(b)(6), the backup withholding trigger, now both cross-reference the §6041(a) number. The IRS restated it in Rev. Proc. 2025-32: "For payments made after December 31, 2025, the base threshold under section 6041(a) is $2,000. This base threshold amount is adjusted for inflation for returns required to be filed in calendar year 2027."

Two things follow. First, the number will drift. Inflation indexing starts with returns filed in 2027, in $100 steps, so do not hard-code $2,000 into a spreadsheet and forget it. Second, the year of payment governs, not the year you file. The 2025 Schedule E instructions still say "at least $600," and they are correct for 2025 payments. The December 2026 revision of the 1099-NEC instructions says "at least $2,000," and it governs the forms you file in early 2027 for 2026 payments. Both are live on irs.gov at the same time. Read the year on the cover.

One more thing the higher threshold did not change: a cleaner you paid $1,900 still earned $1,900 of taxable income. The form is a reporting obligation on you. Their tax bill exists either way, and your deduction on Schedule E Line 7 does not depend on whether a 1099 went out. It depends on whether you can prove the payment.

Which STR vendors get a 1099-NEC, and which don't?

The test has three parts, and all three have to be true: you paid them in the course of the business, the payee is not a corporation, and the year's total for services hit $2,000. Run an STR vendor list through it and the answers split like this.

The row that trips people is the second one. An LLC is not a corporation. A cleaning business called "Sparkle Clean LLC" is, by default, either a disregarded entity or a partnership, and both get a 1099. It becomes exempt only if it elected to be taxed as an S or C corporation, and the only way you find that out is box 3 of its W-9. If the box says "Limited liability company" with a tax classification of S or C, you are done. If it says P, or the vendor checked "Individual/sole proprietor," send the form.

Does it matter whether I paid the cleaner by Zelle, Venmo, card, or check?

Yes, and this is the part almost every "1099 for landlords" article skips. The instructions carve out an entire class of payments: "Payments made with a credit card or payment card and certain other types of payments, including third-party network transactions, must be reported on Form 1099-K by the payment settlement entity under section 6050W and are not subject to reporting on Form 1099-MISC or Form 1099-NEC." When you pay by card, or through a network that settles goods-and-services payments, the reporting duty moves to the processor. You do not issue a 1099-NEC for those dollars, and you do not count them toward the $2,000.

Bank rails are the opposite. A check, a wire, an ACH from your operating account, and a Zelle transfer are all you paying them directly. Zelle says it plainly on its own FAQ: "The law requiring certain payment networks to provide forms 1099K for information reporting does not apply to the Zelle network." Nobody is reporting those payments except you. Venmo and PayPal sit in the middle: a payment tagged as goods and services (or sent to a business profile) is a third-party network transaction the processor reports; a friends-and-family payment is not, and both companies say so in their tax FAQs.

The practical consequence for an STR operator is that a single cleaner can be partly reportable. If you paid Sparkle Clean $1,400 by Zelle and $1,200 by card, your 1099-NEC obligation is measured on the $1,400, which is under the threshold, so no form. Paid the whole $2,600 by Zelle? Form. That is why the payment method is a column in the vendor ledger, not a footnote.

What about cleaners paid through a cleaning app?

Turnover apps and cleaner marketplaces do two different things, and the 1099 answer depends on which one yours does. If the app is a scheduling layer and you still pay the cleaner yourself (Zelle after each turn, a weekly ACH), nothing changed. You are the payer and the rail is a bank rail. If the app collects from your card and pays the cleaner out of its own settlement flow, that is a payment card or third-party network transaction, the processor carries the reporting under §6050W, and those dollars fall outside your 1099-NEC. Pull up how the money actually left your account. The answer is usually obvious from the bank statement: a card charge to the app means the carve-out applies; a transfer to a person's name means it does not. If you cannot tell, ask the platform which forms it issues to cleaners and keep the answer with your year-end file.

What if a cleaner refuses to give me a W-9?

Then you become a withholding agent, which is the outcome nobody wants. Once a payee is at or over the reporting threshold and has not given you a taxpayer identification number, §3406 requires you to withhold 24% of every further payment, deposit it, and report it on Form 945. The threshold for that duty now tracks §6041(a), so it is also $2,000. A cleaner who will not hand over a W-9 in October has, by December, cost you a payroll-style filing and cost themselves a quarter of their pay until it gets sorted out. Almost nobody chooses that once it is explained.

Which is the argument for timing. Collect the W-9 while you still owe the vendor money. In September you have the next check and they have a form that takes four minutes to fill in. In late January they have moved on and you have a deadline. The March 2024 revision of Form W-9 is current as I write this. What you need from it is the legal name, the tax classification box, the address, and the TIN. Keep the signed copy; you do not send it anywhere.

When are 2026 1099-NECs due?

Section 6071(c) sets the 1099-NEC due date at January 31 for both the recipient copy and the IRS copy, paper or electronic. January 31, 2027 falls on a Sunday, so the deadline for 2026 forms is Monday, February 1, 2027. There is no automatic extension for Form 1099-NEC; the 30-day Form 8809 extension that covers most information returns does not apply to it. The 1099-MISC (rent to a landlord, for arbitrage operators) keeps its January 31 recipient date but has a later IRS date: February 28 on paper, March 31 electronically.

If you file ten or more information returns of any kind in the year, counted together (W-2s, 1099-NECs, 1099-MISCs, 1098s), you have to e-file. That rule has been in effect since 2024 filings and it catches more small operators than they expect: three cleaners, two handymen, a photographer, a co-host and a couple of W-2s is ten. The IRS's own portal, IRIS, is free, takes manual entry or a CSV, and handles up to 100 returns per batch. Paper filers need the scannable red-ink Copy A, not a printout from a PDF.

What is the penalty for not filing a 1099-NEC?

Two penalties, actually, because the IRS copy and the payee copy are separate obligations under §6721 and §6722, with matching amounts. For returns required to be filed in 2027 (that is, 2026 forms), Rev. Proc. 2025-32 sets them at $60 per return if you file within 30 days of the due date, $130 if you file by August 1, and $340 after that or never. Intentional disregard is the greater of $690 or 10% of the amount that should have been reported, with no cap. A small business (under $5 million in average gross receipts) caps out at $244,500, $698,500 and $1,397,000 per tier per year, which is not a number an STR operator will reach, but the per-form figure adds up faster than people think.

Put that against a real vendor list. Five properties, four unincorporated cleaners, two handymen and a lawn service is seven forms. Skip them all, get noticed after August, and it is $4,760 before anyone looks at the deductions those payments supported. Which is the quieter cost: Line A on Schedule E, answered "No" next to $30,000 of cleaning and maintenance on Line 7, is an invitation to ask what those payments were and who received them.

Where does cleaner pay go on Schedule E?

Line 7, "Cleaning and maintenance," for what you paid the cleaner. The cleaning fee the guest paid you is not an offset against it; that fee is rent, and it belongs in Line 3 gross income at the amount the guest paid, not the amount Airbnb deposited. That distinction is where most PMS exports go wrong, and it is also why the 1099-NEC total for a cleaner almost never matches the "cleaning fees" column in your platform report: one is what guests paid you, the other is what you paid out. Handyman and repair labor is Line 14; a co-host's management fee is Line 11; the photographer and the bookkeeper are Line 10 or Line 19 depending on how you classify them. The line-by-line post walks every one of them.

The point of keeping this per vendor, not just per line, is that the same ledger answers two questions in January. Grouped by Schedule E line, it fills the form. Grouped by payee, with the payment method and the W-9 status next to each total, it fills the 1099s. RentReel's vendor tracker exists because I was building that second view by hand every December: it totals each vendor for the year, applies the right threshold for the tax year ($600 for 2025, $2,000 for 2026), flags which W-9s are still missing, and exports the 1099-NEC rows. The math is not hard. Having it already done on January 2 is the part that matters.

What to do between now and January

1. Pull every unincorporated vendor you have paid so far in 2026, with the year-to-date total and the payment method per payment. Anyone at $1,500 or above by September will likely cross $2,000 by December.
2. Request W-9s from that list now, while you still owe them the next turn. Read box 3 on each one that comes back; "LLC" alone does not exempt anyone.
3. Split each vendor's total into bank-rail dollars (reportable by you) and card-or-network dollars (reportable by the processor). Only the first pile counts toward $2,000.
4. Decide the Line A answer on purpose, consistent with the rest of the return. If you are claiming non-passive treatment, file the forms.
5. Count your information returns. Ten or more of any kind means e-file; set up an IRIS account before January, because the TCC application is not instant.
6. Calendar February 1, 2027 for the 1099-NECs and March 31 for any 1099-MISC. There is no extension for the NEC.

The rest of the fall sequence (reconciliations, hours-log catch-up, cost seg lead times) is in the Q4 tax-season checklist. The W-9 step is the one that gets harder every week you wait.

Related deep dives

• The STR operator's Q4 tax-season checklist: the month-by-month version, with W-9 collection slotted into October.
• Schedule E line-by-line for STR operators: Lines 7, 10, 11, 14 and 19, and where each vendor's payments land.
• The gross rent trap in PMS exports: why guest cleaning fees are income, not an offset.
• Schedule E vs Schedule C for Airbnb: the other place "trade or business" shows up, and the test that actually decides it.
• How to track §469 material participation: the hours position that makes the Line A answer matter.
• Repairs vs improvements: the handyman's invoice is a 1099 question and a capitalization question at the same time.
• Three STR tax mistakes: the short version, if you are new here.

Sources

• Instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC (12/2026): the $2,000 threshold, box 1a, the payment card and third-party network carve-out, the corporate exemption, rent paid through a property manager, the §6071(c) January 31 date.
• Rev. Proc. 2025-32, §2.15 (the §6041(a) $2,000 base threshold and the §6041A / §3406(b)(6) conforming changes) and §§3.57 to 3.58 (§6721 and §6722 penalty amounts for returns required to be filed in 2027).
• P.L. 119-21, §70433 (amending IRC §§6041(a), 6041A(a)(2), 3406(b)(6)); P.L. 111-240 §2101 and P.L. 112-9 §3 (the 2010 enactment and 2011 retroactive repeal of §6041(h)).
• 2025 Instructions for Schedule E (Form 1040): Lines A and B, and the $600 figure that applies to 2025 payments.
• General Instructions for Certain Information Returns (2025): no automatic extension for Form 1099-NEC; 24% backup withholding; the 10-return e-file threshold under T.D. 9972.
• IRS, E-file Forms 1099 with IRIS: free portal, 100 returns per batch, 1099-NEC supported.
• IRS, Backup withholding: the 24% rate and Form 945.
• Zelle, "Does Zelle report how much money I receive to the IRS?": Zelle does not issue Form 1099-K.

Disclaimer

RentReel is bookkeeping software, not tax advice. Whether your rental is a trade or business, and whether a given worker is a contractor or an employee, are decided on your facts. The figures above are cited to the IRS instructions and revenue procedure current as of September 2026; the threshold is now indexed and will change. Consult a licensed CPA, ideally one who works with short-term rentals, before filing.