I'm a Canadian and I rent my Florida condo on Airbnb. Is that different from a normal rental?

Yes, in one narrow way, and not in the three ways people expect. A short enough average stay can take the activity out of the code’s definition of a “rental activity”. It doesn’t make the income active, it doesn’t create US self-employment tax for a nonresident alien absent a section 233 totalization agreement, and it doesn’t settle 27.5 years against 39. A US citizen is never a nonresident alien, wherever they live, so the self-employment answer isn’t theirs. Three tests in three Code sections, and most content merges them.

What this page isn’t: the US-domestic short-term-rental playbook. Cost segregation, grouping elections, the strategy as a shelter for other US income, all of it assumes a US taxpayer. This page is the non-resident slice; the corridor page carries the rest.

Is short-term renting different from renting the condo by the year?

Different for the first of the three tests below. For the second no day count appears in the test at all, and for the third nothing settles it. Nightly renting can pull the activity out of “rental activity” status for the passive-loss rules, which is a real consequence. It puts no day threshold into the self-employment test, which has none of its own, though what you do for guests can matter there to anyone the IRC 1402(b) exclusion doesn’t cover. It can bear on the depreciation period, because transient use is the fact that moves the class, though nothing here settles that.

Question	Governing test	Day threshold
Is it a per se passive “rental activity”?	Reg 1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii)(A), averaged per Reg 1.469-1(e)(3)(iii)	7 days, a gross-rental-income-weighted average across classes of property; clearing it leaves IRC 469(c)(1), where trade-or-business status and material participation (Reg 1.469-5T(a)) decide passivity together
Am I subject to self-employment tax?	IRC 1402(b) first, then Reg 1.1402(a)-4(c)(2)	none
Is it 27.5-year or 39-year property?	IRC 168(e)(2)(A)(ii)(I) transient-basis test, with (ii)(II) adding your own use back	none defined

The seven-day figure belongs to the passive-loss rules, and the only ground for saying it does no work in the other two tests is that you read them and find no day figure there. Section 1402 runs its own test and no day threshold appears in it, and the transient-basis test supplies none either. One direction of that separation is written down rather than inferred: Reg 1.469-5T(b)(2)(i) won’t count a participation standard met “under any provision (including sections 1402 and 2032A and the regulations thereunder) other than section 469” for section 469 purposes, so a section 1402 standard can’t be imported into the passive-loss analysis. It says nothing about the reverse. If you use the place yourself, your own US days are a separate problem, on the snowbird property page.

What does the seven-day rule actually say?

It says an activity isn’t a rental activity for the year if the average period of customer use is seven days or less, and it’s one of six exceptions rather than the whole rule. Reg 1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii) is a temporary regulation, still temporary after decades, running (A) through (F). Most nightly rentals land on (A).

• (A) Average period of customer use of seven days or less, so an average of exactly seven meets it. It’s an average, and no single stay decides it.
• (B) Average period of customer use of 30 days or less, and significant personal services “provided by or on behalf of the owner of the property”, so a co-host’s work can count. Conjunctive.
• (C) Extraordinary personal services, with no day threshold, but only where the customer’s use is incidental to receiving them. The regulation’s examples: a hospital, a boarding school.
• (D) The rental is incidental to a non-rental activity, on the narrow terms of (e)(3)(vi).
• (E) The taxpayer customarily makes the property available during defined business hours for non-exclusive use by various customers.
• (F) The taxpayer provides the property, as an owner, for use in a non-rental activity of a partnership, S corporation or joint venture in which the taxpayer owns an interest. Reg 1.469-1T(e)(3)(vii) requires all three.

That average isn’t the one you’d work out by hand. Reg 1.469-1(e)(3)(iii) makes it “the sum of the average use factors for each class of property”, each factor being a class’s average period of customer use times its share of the activity’s gross rental income. So it’s income-weighted, and a unit with long stays can drag a short-stay one over the line even on a small share of the income, which is what happens below. A class isn’t a rate tier you invent: (iii)(E) groups “items of property” by any method keeping items “for which the amount of the daily rent differs significantly” out of the same class.

Within a class, it’s “the aggregate number of days in all periods of customer use” over the number of those periods, counting “only periods that end during the taxable year or that include the last day of the taxable year”. The same paragraph counts a continuous or recurring right to use as a period in its own right, without regard to “whether the right to use the property is pursuant to a single agreement or to renewals thereof”, so a repeat guest on renewals isn’t a stack of short stays. Exception (B) isn’t foreclosed either. Reg 1.469-1T(e)(3)(iv)(B)(3) strips out the long-term-rental bundle, “cleaning and maintenance of common areas, routine repairs, trash collection”, and turnover cleaning of the unit and guest support aren’t on that list; (iv)(A) makes “significant” a facts-and-circumstances test on frequency, the work involved, and value against the rent.

Now the part most short-term-rental content gets wrong. Clearing exception (A) does not make your activity non-passive. IRC 469(c)(2) makes a rental activity passive, and IRC 469(c)(4) applies that paragraph “without regard to whether or not the taxpayer materially participates in the activity”. The exception removes that per se characterization and nothing else. What’s left is IRC 469(c)(1), two prongs together: the activity has to be one “which involves the conduct of any trade or business”, and the taxpayer has to not materially participate, which Reg 1.469-5T(a), another temporary regulation, defines in seven alternatives including more than 500 hours.

You can skip the real-estate-professional test too. IRC 469(c)(7) is the statutory carve-out from the per se rental rule, with its “more than 750 hours” of services, and if your activity already isn’t a rental activity there’s nothing left for it to carve out. Wrong test, and plenty of content routes owners into it.

Do I owe US self-employment tax on the Airbnb income?

No, and it has nothing to do with how many services you provide or how short the stays are. None of that is a US citizen’s or a US resident alien’s answer: a nonresident alien is neither, wherever they live. IRC 1402(b) defines self-employment income as net earnings “derived by an individual (other than a nonresident alien individual, except as provided by an agreement under section 233 of the Social Security Act)”. The exclusion sits inside the definition of the tax base, in a parenthesis, which is why it gets missed. With no self-employment income, there’s nothing for IRC 1401 to tax.

• It yields to a totalization agreement. The parenthesis carves out whatever a section 233 agreement provides, so the exclusion isn’t absolute.
• Residency flips it. A resident alien is inside chapter 2 like anyone else, and IRC 7701(b)(1)(A) makes an alien a US resident on any of three routes: lawful permanent residence, the substantial presence test, or the first-year election in IRC 7701(b)(4). The question goes live the year one of them is met.
• A non-citizen resident of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam or American Samoa is deemed not to be a nonresident alien “for purposes of this chapter”, so the exclusion isn’t theirs.

So the services test is the one you don’t reach, and it’s regulatory rather than statutory: IRC 1402(a)(1)‘s own exceptions are a real estate dealer’s rentals and an agricultural carve-out. The rule people quote is Reg 1.1402(a)-4(c)(2), which pulls payments for rooms out of “rentals from real estate” where “services are also rendered to the occupant”, in “hotels, boarding houses, or apartment houses furnishing hotel services, or in tourist camps or tourist homes”. The regulation puts both limbs in one sentence and prefaces it “Generally”: services count where they are “primarily for his convenience and are other than those usually or customarily rendered in connection with the rental of rooms or other space for occupancy only”. Maid service is its example of one that counts, trash collection of one that doesn’t. Its neighbour (c)(1) is friendlier for a whole-unit listing, since payments for “entire private residences” are “generally rentals from real estate”. No day threshold appears anywhere in it, and a nonresident alien never reaches it, because IRC 1402(b) emptied the tax base first. It goes live the day you become a US resident, or if a section 233 agreement applies, and it was never switched off for a US citizen, who isn’t a nonresident alien however long they’ve lived in Canada.

Is my Airbnb condo 27.5-year or 39-year property?

Unresolved for a single unit, and anybody telling you 27.5 without testing it is guessing. IRC 168(c) sets 27.5 years for residential rental property and 39 for nonresidential real property. IRC 168(e)(2)(A) defines residential rental property by an 80 percent gross-rental-income test, and excludes from “dwelling unit” any “unit in a hotel, motel, or other establishment more than one-half of the units in which are used on a transient basis”. So short-term renting can land you in the 39-year column.

• The 80 percent test is annual, so classification can move year to year.
• Your own use feeds that test. Where you occupy part of the building, IRC 168(e)(2)(A)(ii)(II) adds “the rental value of the portion so occupied” to its gross rental income, which is the snowbird’s problem.
• “Transient basis” has no statutory definition and no day threshold. The seven-day rule doesn’t fill that gap; it belongs to another section for another purpose.
• The residual catches you. IRC 168(e)(2)(B) makes nonresidential real property the leftover category of section 1250 property, so failing the residential test still leaves a building classified.
• The single-unit question is open. How “more than one-half of the units” applies to one condo or one house isn’t answered by the statute, and we haven’t found it answered anywhere we’d cite. Treat it as unresolved, not as 27.5 by default.

So no depreciation number here. The period still matters, because IRC 1016(a)(2) cuts basis by the depreciation allowed but “not less than the amount allowable”, so basis falls whether or not you claim it, and what that does to your gain on a sale is its own guide.

Does any of this change the 30 percent withholding on my rent?

Not by itself. IRC 1441(c)(1) switches the 30 percent withholding duty off for income effectively connected with a US business and included in gross income under section 871(b)(2), and no day figure appears in that test, so the seven-day average doesn’t reach it. Trade-or-business status is an input to this question rather than an output of it.

• You don’t need an active business to get out of the 30 percent. A plainly passive rental reaches the same withholding result through the section 871(d) election, which is the guide that owns this question.

What should I do next?

Two jobs. Work out the average period of customer use for the year on the weighted basis and keep the working, because that number decides which side of the rental-activity line you’re on. The calendar is the source data; the class allocation behind the weighting is the part nobody can reconstruct later. Then write down what you did on the property and how long it took, because material participation is one half of the IRC 469(c)(1) test that decides whether the activity is passive, and whether it’s a trade or business at all is the other half.

This guide is general information, not tax advice for your specific situation. Which points apply, and how, depends on your facts.