DAC7: Airbnb and Booking.com now report your income to the tax office

The email arrived in January: Airbnb wanted my tax identification number, my full legal address, and the cadastral reference of my apartment, "to comply with DAC7." I almost ignored it as phishing. It wasn't. A host I know did ignore it — three reminders later, Airbnb paused his payouts until he filled in the form. The money for two completed stays sat frozen for eleven days.

If you rent on Airbnb, Booking.com, or Vrbo anywhere in the EU, the platform is no longer just a booking channel. It is a tax informant, by law, and it has been since 2023. Most hosts found out the way I did: a form request they didn't understand, attached to a deadline they didn't know existed.

What DAC7 actually is

DAC7 is the seventh revision of the EU's Directive on Administrative Cooperation. Strip the bureaucratic name and it does one thing: it forces digital platforms — Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia, your channel manager — to collect tax data on every seller who earns through them and hand it to the tax authority each year.

It is the EU's implementation of the OECD's Model Reporting Rules for Digital Platforms, which means it isn't only an EU thing. The UK runs the near-identical MRDP. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a growing list of others have adopted the same framework. If you host in one of these countries, the mechanics below are roughly your mechanics too.

The directive took effect on January 1, 2023. That made 2023 the first reporting period. Platforms filed their first reports by the end of January 2024, covering everything you earned in 2023. Each EU country wrote it into national law with its own name — Germany's is the Plattformen-Steuertransparenzgesetz (PStTG), and the data lands at the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern. France routes it to the DGFiP, Spain to the Agencia Tributaria. Same directive, local letterbox.

Here is the part that surprises people: the data doesn't just go to your country's tax office. The authority that receives it automatically forwards it to the country where the property physically sits. Rent out a flat in Lisbon while living in Berlin, and the Portuguese tax authority gets a copy. The whole point of DAC7 is to close the cross-border gap that used to let foreign-owned rentals slip through.

The exemption that does not exist for rentals

This is the single most misunderstood thing about DAC7, and the reason hosts who think they're too small to matter are wrong.

You have probably read that DAC7 only kicks in above "30 transactions or €2,000." That number is real — but it applies to sellers of goods. Someone flipping used furniture on a marketplace gets a free pass under 30 sales and under €2,000 a year. The directive calls them an "excluded seller."

Renting out immovable property is a different category, and it does not get that de minimis. There is no "fewer than 30 nights" or "under €2,000" floor for rentals. If a platform facilitated even one booking of your property in the reporting year, you are a reportable seller. One weekend let. One €120 stay. Reported.

The only carve-out on the rental side runs the other way: a single property listing with more than 2,000 bookings a year is excluded — that's the line drawn for large hotels, not for the host with a spare apartment. So the exemption that does exist is for entities far bigger than you, and the one you were counting on was never for rentals at all.

I've watched this trip up otherwise-careful hosts. "I only did eight bookings last summer, I'm under the threshold." There is no threshold. You're in the file.

What the platform sends, and to whom

The report isn't a vague summary. For each reportable host, the platform transmits a specific package:

Read that list again. Your name, your tax number, the exact apartment, the bank account, and a quarter-by-quarter revenue figure — all of it, cross-referenced, sitting in a tax-authority database that can be compared against what you declared. This is also why your booking platform now holds more sensitive identity data than it used to; if you care about how that's stored and who can request deletion, it's worth understanding the data-protection side too — see GDPR for short-term rental hosts.

One detail worth internalising: the revenue figure is the consideration paid or credited to you, net of the fees the platform withheld, reported in quarterly buckets. It is revenue, not profit. The tax office now knows what came in. What it doesn't know is your mortgage interest, cleaning costs, utilities, and depreciation — the deductions that turn revenue into taxable income. That's still your job to claim. DAC7 hands them the top line and dares you to under-report it.

What happens if you ignore the request

The form request isn't optional, and the platform isn't allowed to let you skip it. DAC7 puts the enforcement on the platform's shoulders, so the platform enforces it on you.

The mechanism is specified in the directive. If you don't supply the required data, the platform must send two reminders after the initial request. If you still haven't complied 60 days after that first request, the platform is legally required to do one of two things: close your account and block you from re-registering, or withhold your payouts until you provide the information.

That's not a threat the platform invented to nag you. It's an obligation it faces fines for ignoring. Which is exactly why my acquaintance's payouts froze — Airbnb wasn't being difficult, it was complying. The eleven-day delay was the cheap version. Drag it out and the account itself goes.

So when the "confirm your taxpayer information" banner shows up, treat it like a booking that's about to cancel: handle it the same day. The data they're asking for is data the tax office is getting regardless. Withholding it from the platform doesn't keep it from the tax authority; it just costs you your payouts.

The US version: 1099-K and the threshold whiplash

US hosts don't have DAC7, they have the Form 1099-K, and the last few years have been chaos.

The American Rescue Plan of 2021 set a $600 reporting threshold that was supposed to phase in, panicking every part-time host in the country. The IRS delayed it repeatedly. Then, in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act scrapped the phase-in entirely and reverted the federal threshold to its old level: $20,000 in gross payments AND more than 200 transactions in a year. Both conditions, not either. For most single-property hosts, that means no federal 1099-K at all.

Three caveats before you exhale:

1. States set their own, lower thresholds. Several states require a 1099-K well below the federal line — some at $600, some at $1,000. Where you host matters.
2. No form does not mean no tax. The 1099-K is a reporting trigger, not the tax itself. Every dollar of rental income is reportable whether or not a form lands in your mailbox. Missing the form doesn't erase the obligation; it just removes the IRS's automatic cross-check.
3. Backup withholding bites if your W-9 is missing. If Airbnb doesn't have valid taxpayer info on file, it can apply up to 24% backup withholding to your payouts regardless of any threshold. Same pattern as DAC7: fill in the form or watch your money get held.

And the trap that catches US hosts every spring: the 1099-K reports gross processed payments — typically more than what hit your bank, because it's before Airbnb's host service fee and can include amounts you later refunded. Don't enter the 1099-K number as your income. Reconcile it against your platform earnings summary, then deduct fees and refunds.

What this actually changes for your tax bill

Here's the calm version: DAC7 and the 1099-K did not create a new tax. You always owed income tax on rental earnings. What changed is that the tax office now has an independent, itemised record of what you took in — so the gap between "what I earned" and "what I declared" is now visible without an audit.

The practical move is the same in every country: keep your own clean records and make them reconcile to the platform's figure. Pull your annual earnings summary from each platform. Note that the DAC7 number is quarterly gross net-of-platform-fees, the 1099-K is annual gross before fees, and your bank statements are net of everything. Three different numbers for the same income. If you can explain the bridge between them, an audit is boring. If you can't, it isn't.

A concrete reconciliation that bites EU hosts: tourist tax. On some platforms and in some cities the platform collects the local tourist tax from the guest and remits it directly — it may or may not show in your DAC7 consideration figure depending on how the platform classifies it. If your declared revenue and the DAC7 revenue differ by suspiciously round per-night amounts, tourist tax is usually the culprit. We pulled apart who collects and remits that levy on each platform in who collects tourist tax on Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo — worth a read before you assume the numbers don't match because of an error.

The hosts who handle this well aren't the ones with clever schemes. They're the ones who, the day the platform asks for a TIN, paste it in, and who keep a one-row-per-booking spreadsheet that already matches what the platform will report. If you want that ledger built and reconciled automatically against your synced calendars, that's part of what RentTools does — one place where bookings, payouts, and the figures the tax office will see all line up.

One opinionated take

Stop treating the taxpayer-information request as junk mail. It is the single most consequential email your booking platform will ever send you, and the cost of ignoring it is frozen payouts at best and a closed account at worst — while the data flows to the tax office either way. The era where a small host could quietly run a flat off-book ended on January 1, 2023. The hosts who'll be fine are the ones who already keep books that reconcile to what the platform reports. Build that ledger now, while the only pressure is a form, not an auditor.