You own a property on Airbnb, and the monthly revenue looks good on the statement. But 2026 changed three things at once: the fee the platform charges, what the Receita Federal (Brazil’s federal tax authority) already knows about you, and how the country’s tax reform treats this kind of rental. Most owners haven’t redone the math yet.
This guide redoes it. Without the pitch of someone selling an Airbnb course, and without the alarmism of someone trying to talk you out of it. The numbers, checked one by one, and an honest answer: who it still pays off for, and who it no longer does.
Photo: Eduardo Zmievski via Unsplash — Beira-Mar Norte, Florianópolis
The market’s two players
Booking and Airbnb dominate short-term rentals in Brazil, and you often hear that one serves foreign tourists and the other domestic ones. It’s not quite like that: both have strong domestic demand, and the split between local and international guests varies more by city than by platform.
In practice, the difference between the two lies less in the audience and more in the fee each one charges the host, and that’s where the 2026 math changes.
Airbnb’s fee has changed
If you’ve heard that Airbnb’s fee rose to 16%, that’s true but incomplete. There was no simple increase to a single fee. Airbnb is migrating to a different charging model.
Under the old model, called the split fee, the host pays 4% of the booking value and the guest pays a separate service fee, between 14.1% and 16.5%. Under the new model, called the host-only fee, the host pays it alone, and the fee can reach 16% of the booking value. The guest pays nothing extra.
The migration began around October 2025 and continues rolling out by host segment throughout 2026. There is no single “increase” date: there is a change of model, which shifts the weight of the fee into your own payout.
In practice, this means two hosts can be on different models today, with different margins, without either one having done anything wrong. It’s worth checking which model your listing is on.
The tax authority has already requested your data
For years, renting through Airbnb without declaring the income was common. The platform sent no information to the Receita Federal, and many owners treated that money as invisible income.
That changed. The Receita Federal made a formal request to Airbnb, and the company publicly confirmed that it complied: it provided hosts’ names, CPF or CNPJ (Brazil’s individual and business taxpayer IDs), addresses, and transaction amounts, covering the period from September 2020 to December 2024. The request was grounded in the tax authority’s general auditing power under Brazil’s National Tax Code (Código Tributário Nacional).
There is still no law requiring Airbnb to report your earnings automatically every year — it was a one-off, retroactive request that the tax authority has already made once and can make again. For anyone who has never declared, the precedent already exists, and it changes the risk calculation.
Brazil’s tax reform weighs more heavily on short-term rentals
Here is the point fewest owners understand, and the one that weighs most on the 2026 math: Brazil’s tax reform, Complementary Law 214/2025, does not treat short-term rentals like annual rentals. It treats them as a lodging service.
The 90-day rule
Article 253 of the law establishes that a residential rental of up to 90 uninterrupted days, when the landlord qualifies as a taxpayer under the new regime, follows the same rules applied to hotels and inns. It is no longer just “renting out a property.” For the tax authority, it becomes providing a service.
Who qualifies as a taxpayer
Article 251 sets two criteria, and both must hold at the same time: rental revenue above R$240,000 (Brazilian reais, roughly US$44,000) in the prior year, and more than three distinct properties rented out. An owner with two properties, even if earning well, does not fall under this rule. An owner with four properties and meaningful revenue does.
The difference in tax burden
The difference in burden between the two regimes is real and measurable, and larger than it looks at first glance. An ordinary residential rental gets a 70% reduction in the calculation base for the IBS and the CBS (the two new value-added taxes created by Brazil’s reform), which results in an effective rate of around 8.4% for those two taxes. A short-term rental, classified as lodging, gets only a 40% reduction, which brings the effective IBS/CBS rate to around 16.8%, nearly double.
Adding income tax, which applies on top and can reach 27.5% in the highest bracket, the total burden for an individual owner doing short-term rentals, under the fully phased-in 2033 system, can exceed 44%. For an annual rental, the same total sits near 36%. It is not one isolated new tax: it is the usual income tax plus an IBS/CBS that treats short-term rentals as lodging, not as a rental.
One important correction: it is not true that every owner who rents through Airbnb will pay this higher burden in 2026. The Receita Federal itself has already debunked that generalization; taxation under the new regime only reaches those who meet the cumulative criteria of Article 251, the R$240,000 and the three properties you saw above. An owner with one or two properties, below those thresholds, stays on the usual income tax alone, without the IBS/CBS.
A warning for those who never declared
If you are one of the owners who rented through Airbnb without declaring anything, the next paragraphs matter more than the previous ones.
The penalty
The penalty for omitting rental income on your Brazilian income tax return is 75% of the tax due, set out in Article 44 of Law 9,430/96. In cases of proven fraud, tax evasion, or collusion, this aggravated penalty rises to 100% of the tax debt — not the 150% many people have heard about; that rate was reduced by Law 14,689/2023. But the 150% did not disappear: it applies again in one specific case, which you’ll see next.
The five years of retroactivity
The tax authority can charge retroactively. The deadline for the tax authority to assess this credit, when there was no declaration at all, is five years, counted from the first day of the fiscal year following the year in which the assessment could have been made. That is Article 173, item I, of Brazil’s National Tax Code. There is a technical point under debate at the STJ (Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice) about which deadline applies in specific scenarios of partial omission, but for anyone who never declared anything, the five-year rule is the one that governs.
The penalty rises if you reoffend
There is an aggravating factor most people are unaware of. If, within two years of a prior assessment, the tax authority finds new willful misconduct by the same taxpayer, the aggravated penalty is no longer 100% and returns to 150% of the tax debt. This is the repeat-offense provision in Article 44, paragraph 1-A, of Law 9,430/96, added by the same Law 14,689/2023 that reduced the standard rate. Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court has confirmed this scale in its ruling on General Repercussion Theme 863: 100% is the ceiling for isolated proven fraud, 150% is the ceiling when there is a repeat offense.
Add that to what you’ve already read: the tax authority has already requested and received Airbnb host data. Anyone who rented without declaring in the last five years faces a concrete risk, not a hypothetical one. In these cases — years without declaring, doubt about your own classification, or risk of a repeat offense — it’s worth spending less on trying to save at the consultation stage and more on a tax lawyer and a good accountant before acting, to get the calculation and the regularization strategy exactly right.
Revenue is not profit
Here lies the most common confusion among people calculating whether Airbnb is worth it: looking at gross revenue and thinking it’s what’s left at the end of the month.
It isn’t. From the revenue that comes in, the following come out in sequence: the platform’s own fee, which you saw earlier; the commission of a property manager, if you hire one, which usually falls between 15% and 35% of gross revenue, though it’s worth confirming the exact percentage with whoever you hire, because there is no public index consolidating this; the cleaning cost at every guest turnover; and, unlike an annual rental, the condominium fees, water, electricity, and the IPTUIPTU — Imposto Predial e Territorial UrbanoTributo municipal anual sobre imóveis urbanos. Base de cálculo é o valor venal — quase sempre abaixo do valor de mercado — definido pela prefeitura.Ver tudo → (Brazil’s municipal property tax), which for short-term rentals usually fall to the owner, not the guest.
With an annual rental, the tenant pays most of these recurring expenses. With a short-term rental, you do. The revenue from a property on Airbnb may even be higher, in absolute terms, than that of an equivalent annual rental. What’s left at the end, after all these outflows, tends to be a much tighter figure than the gross statement suggests.
The wear and tear no one counts
There is a cost that rarely makes it onto the spreadsheet: wear and tear on the property. The high guest turnover of an Airbnb tends to accelerate wear on furniture, paint, and décor, more than a fixed tenant living in the same place for years.
It’s important to be honest here: there is no public index that measures this difference precisely. It’s a reasonable inference across the sector, based on common sense about how a property behaves under intense use and constant turnover, not a settled figure. But it’s worth counting as a recurring cost, even without an exact number: maintenance work more frequent than in an equivalent annual rental.
Who it still pays off for
Putting together the fee, taxation, operating costs, and wear and tear, we arrive at the question that matters: who does Airbnb still pay off for in 2026?
The answer lies in how you operate, not in the property itself. It pays off for the owner with few properties who manages everything alone: greets the guest, cleans or arranges cleaning directly, solves problems without a middleman. Without paying a manager’s commission, the margin left over still covers the platform fee and the higher tax burden.
It stops paying off, or pays off far less, for those who have to pay a property manager, an outsourced cleaning team, and also shoulder the new taxation. In that scenario, the outflows pile up faster than the revenue grows, and what remains can fall below what the same property would yield as an annual rental, with far less work.
The rule is not about the neighborhood, the property’s standard, or how much it earns per night, but about how many hands touch the operation between the booking and the money in your pocket.
Two details are worth noting for those with few properties. First, the law provides a social reduction of R$600 (about US$110) per property per month, deducted directly from the IBS/CBS calculation base, which lowers the burden for those operating at a smaller scale. Second, those who qualify as taxpayers may consider structuring the operation as a company (pessoa jurídica) under the presumed-profit regime (lucro presumido): the estimated burden falls between 19% and 22%, well below the 44%-plus of an individual doing short-term rentals. It’s a decision that requires a case-by-case assessment, not a blanket recommendation.
The case of the studios
Photo: Danilo Rios via Unsplash
For anyone with a studio or kitnet (a compact one-room apartment), especially near UFSC (the Federal University of Santa Catarina), a separate aside is in order. You often hear that rents for this kind of property have plummeted in recent years. The data does not confirm that: in neighborhoods like Trindade and Itacorubi, residential rents rose, not fell, over the last twelve months.
There is another mistaken idea behind that doubt: that short-term rentals only pay off near the beach or in a tourist neighborhood. That reading ignores that Florianópolis has developed a rich and varied tourism profile that reaches well beyond the coast — and Trindade is a direct example. The area concentrates training programs such as those of the Military Police and the Fire Department, along with the constant flow of UFSC: master’s and doctoral students, visiting researchers, and attendees of academic and outreach events who spend days or weeks in the city. It’s a real short-stay demand that residents of the area rarely notice day to day, but which sustains short-term occupancy even far from the shore.
What is real is the pressure coming ahead. The supply of student-focused studios is genuinely increasing, with new developments launched near UFSC over the last two years. Demand for student housing remains strong, but with more options reaching the market, it’s reasonable to expect rent growth to slow, even though it hasn’t fallen so far.
For anyone considering Airbnb or an annual rental in a studio in this area, the moment calls for attention to this trend, not panic over a drop that hasn’t happened yet.
Alternatives for those leaving Airbnb
If the math didn’t add up after all this, there are paths forward, not only the option of continuing to operate at a relative loss.
One is to sell the small property built for short-term rentals and buy a larger one, with a profile that appeals more to those seeking an annual rental: families, professionals, people who want to live somewhere for years, not days. Another is simply to recalibrate the annual rent to its true market value, which tends to generate enough demand without the operational wear of short-term rentals.
Neither is automatic or guaranteed. Both require understanding the right moment to sell, buy, or reprice, which is exactly where a real estate curator who follows the market closely makes the difference.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an Airbnb earn per month in Florianópolis?
It depends less on the property and more on who operates it. Before looking at gross revenue, you have to deduct the platform fee, the property manager’s commission if there is one, cleaning, and the fixed expenses that fall to the owner in short-term rentals. What’s left at the end of the month is usually much lower than the figure showing on the bookings statement.
Which pays off more, Airbnb or an annual rental?
There is no single answer. Airbnb pays off for those with few properties who manage everything alone, without paying a property manager or an outsourced cleaner. An annual rental pays off for those who prefer predictability, less operational work, and don’t want to shoulder the higher tax burden the reform applies to short-term rentals.
What are the downsides of Airbnb?
The platform fee, which can reach 16% under the current model; the heavier taxation after the reform, which can exceed a 44% total burden for those who qualify as taxpayers, versus about 36% for an annual rental; the costs that fall to the owner, such as condominium fees and cleaning; and property wear that is probably greater, due to the high guest turnover.
What fee does Airbnb charge?
It depends on your listing’s model. Under the old split-fee model, the host pays 4% and the guest pays separately between 14.1% and 16.5%. Under the new host-only fee model, rolling out since October 2025, the host pays it alone, and the fee can reach 16% of the booking value.
Is Airbnb worth it in Florianópolis?
It’s worth it for the owner with few properties who manages everything directly, without intermediaries. It stops being worth it, or is worth far less, for those who have to pay a property manager, a cleaning team, and the new tax burden all at once; in that case, an annual rental usually yields more net income, with less work.
What to do with this math
If you’ve made it this far and recognized yourself in the first group, the one that manages alone and still closes the books in the black, Airbnb remains a reasonable choice in 2026. It’s just worth redoing the numbers with the updated fee and taxation, because the margin has probably shrunk since the last time you calculated.
If you recognized yourself in the second group, caught between paying a property manager, cleaning, and the higher tax burden, it’s worth considering whether the work still justifies what’s left. Sometimes the answer is to switch to an annual rental. Sometimes it’s to stay in short-term rentals, but with management that truly optimizes what is currently being wasted on operational inefficiency.
Regente follows this market closely, both sides of it, and helps owners decide with real numbers, not market averages. If you’d like to review the math on your property, talk to a consultant.
