Vacation Rental Taxes in Hawaii

If you rent a place to visitors, three taxes are owed on every stay. GET, the state's transient accommodations tax, and your county's.

The booking sites don't take that off your hands. Airbnb's own page for Hawaii hosts says GET and TAT are owed on the gross rents, and the state says using a booking site or a manager doesn't take the taxes off the owner.

So the question is whether they go on the guest's bill or come out of your rent.

Here's an example with made-up numbers.

An owner in Maui County rents her unit for five nights at $250 a night, with a $150 cleaning fee. She quotes one flat price.

The cleaning fee counts. A cleaning fee the guest has to pay is part of the rent for TAT. So the rent on this stay is $1,400.

One flat price

If $1,400 is all the guest pays, the taxes come out of it:

• GET at 4.5 percent: $63.00
• State TAT at 11 percent: $154.00
• Maui County TAT at 3 percent: $42.00

That's $259, or 18.5 percent of the stay. She keeps $1,141.

Taxes on the bill

If the taxes go on the bill as their own lines, the guest pays them on top of the rent:

• GET at 4.712 percent of the rent: $65.97
• State TAT: $154.00
• County TAT: $42.00

The guest pays $1,661.97, and she keeps the $1,400. That's $259 more for her on one five-night stay.

The Department of Taxation confirmed in writing that the state and county TAT you pass on are not subject to GET. That holds only when GET and each TAT are on their own lines of the bill.

GET is 4.712 percent here and not 4.5 for the same reason as in GET Is Not a Sales Tax. The GET you add is income too.

The January change

The state TAT went from 10.25 percent to 11 percent on January 1, 2026. A listing that still adds 10.25 percent comes up $10.50 short on this stay. Over thirty-six stays like it, that's $378 a year.

If you set your rates before 2026, check them.

Long stays

A stay of 180 days or more isn't a transient stay, so TAT doesn't apply to it. GET still does.

Try It: One Stay

1. I built a free calculator for this: the Vacation Rental Tax Calculator. It runs on your own screen and collects nothing. Put in your last stay: the nightly rate, the nights, the cleaning fee and your island. A good answer is seeing both versions side by side, taxes on the bill and taxes inside the price.
2. Compare that with what the guest actually paid you. A good answer is knowing whether the taxes were on the bill or came out of your rent.
3. Check the rates on your listing or your invoice. A good answer is 11 percent state TAT, your county's 3 percent, and GET of no more than 4.712 percent.

Registering for these taxes is a separate step, and your CPA can help with it. Your county sets its own rules for short-term rentals, so check with the county too.

P.S. The state's notice on the TAT change is short: Announcement 2025-03.