How this index is built

One city at a time, from the city's own page, with the sentence that states each number kept alongside it.

What counts as a source

Only a page published by the agency that writes the rule: a city or county department, a state tax authority, or a municipal code host the city itself links to. Not trade blogs, not listing-platform help centres, not other regulation aggregators — including ones that look authoritative.

That last exclusion matters more than it sounds. Aggregators are written by people reading the same pages, and when they drift, nothing tells you. Checking one against a city page during the build of this index turned up a licence fee that was $100 higher than the city's own figure and a tax split that attributed 10 points to a venue tax the city sets at 2.

What is recorded for every figure

• The value exactly as the city states it, including currency and period.
• A link to the page it came from.
• The date this site read that page.
• The sentence itself, kept for audit so a later disagreement can be settled without re-reading the whole page.

What happens when a city publishes nothing

The field says Not published and explains what is missing. It is never filled with a zero, a midpoint, or a figure carried over from another city. An empty field is a true statement; a guessed one is not.

What this site does not do

• No eligibility verdicts. "Can I rent my unit?" depends on zoning, occupancy class, lease terms, HOA rules and grandfather clauses. A page that answered it from a table would be wrong for a meaningful share of readers, and the cost of that error is a fine.
• No investment scores. Judgements about whether a market "pencils out" are opinions. They are not published here, and they are not mixed into the figures.
• No market data. Average daily rate, occupancy and revenue estimates come from commercial data vendors. They are not official, they are not verifiable the way a fee schedule is, and they are left out.

Freshness

Each city page carries the date its figures were read. Rules change without notice and cities rarely publish a changelog, so the date is the honest signal: it says when this was true, not that it is true now. Anything you rely on should be confirmed on the linked page before you act.

Sources used

• Austin, TX — austintexas.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Austin, TX — hotel tax — austintexas.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Texas state hotel tax — comptroller.texas.govchecked 2026-10-23
• New York City, NY — nyc.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Seattle, WA — seattle.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Boston, MA — boston.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Denver, CO — denvergov.orgchecked 2026-10-23
• Denver, CO — laws and regulations — denvergov.orgchecked 2026-10-23
• San Francisco, CA — sfplanning.orgchecked 2026-10-23
• Nashville, TN — nashville.govchecked 2026-10-23
• San Diego, CA — sandiego.govchecked 2026-10-23
• San Francisco, CA — transient occupancy tax — sftreasurer.orgchecked 2026-10-23
• San Francisco, CA — Office of Short-Term Rentals (sf.gov entry point) — www.sf.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Massachusetts room occupancy excise — www.mass.govchecked 2026-10-23
• Los Angeles, CA — City Planning HSO FAQ (PDF) — planning.lacity.orgchecked 2026-10-24
• Los Angeles, CA — Home-Sharing Ordinance full text (PDF) — planning.lacity.orgchecked 2026-10-24
• Los Angeles, CA — Housing Department, Home Sharing Ordinance — housing.lacity.govchecked 2026-10-24
• Los Angeles, CA — Office of Finance, Sharing Economy — finance.lacity.govchecked 2026-10-24
• Los Angeles, CA — Office of Finance, Home-Based TOT Requirements — finance.lacity.govchecked 2026-10-24

Sources deliberately not used

• Regulation aggregators
  Aggregators are not publishers. No official authority, no per-number citation, and third-party market data (AirDNA / AirROI) plus an explicitly non-government 'investor scorecard' sit on the same pages as the rules.
  Austin license fee listed as $836.30 new / $385.30 renewal; the City of Austin page states $736.60 new / $369.60 renewal. City tax split listed as 1% city + 10% venue; the city states 9% occupancy + 2% venue.
• Cities whose rules exist only as PDF
  The live page is a 24,000-character table of business-licence districts; the actual rules sit in linked PDFs. Not machine-readable, so it fails the change-detection test even though a human could read it.
• Cities rendered entirely client-side
  The HTML shell contains 65 characters of text; everything else is injected by script. A plain fetch cannot tell whether the rules changed, so similarity detection would be meaningless.
• Cities with no reachable rules page
  Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland, Honolulu, Las Vegas and New Orleans were probed at 20+ candidate paths and sitemaps. Either the paths 404, the site returns 403 to non-browser clients, or the page that loads is a department hub with no rules on it. No official source was found, so no page was built.
• Official, but blocks every client we have
  Washington Department of Revenue sits behind a Varnish cache that returns 403 to curl, to a browser-like fetcher, and to the agent's page fetcher. Tried /taxes-rates, /taxes-rates/other-taxes/retail-sales-tax, /taxes-rates/other-taxes/lodging-sales-tax, /find-taxes-rates/other-taxes/lodging and the site root; every one returned 403 or 404. Seattle's own site has no lodging-tax page in its sitemap.
• Official, but unreachable from this environment
  Tennessee migrated its revenue site and the old hotel-occupancy-tax path now 404s. tn.gov refused connections outright (curl exit 000), the Department of Revenue help centre at revenue.support.tn.gov returned 403 on both search and article pages, and the site search surfaced no rate page.
• Official, but the rate is not on the page
  The Department of Finance page states the flat per-room charges ($2.00 a day once rent reaches $40) and the state's $1.50 per unit per day fee, and says the ad valorem percentage is applied on top — but never prints the percentage. It is set in the Administrative Code. NYS Department of Taxation and Finance paths tried for the underlying rate returned 404.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with the city's page, the city is right. Write to [email protected] with the city and the figure, and it will be re-read against the source.