Here's a line I hear from new hosts around the Conway lakes at least once a month: "The cleaning fee is just me passing along what I pay the cleaner, so it doesn't get taxed." It sounds reasonable. It's also wrong, and the Orange County Comptroller will happily explain why if you get audited.
Florida treats a short-term rental as a taxable transaction on the total rental consideration. That phrase does a lot of work. It means the nightly rate, yes, but also the cleaning fee, the pet fee, the resort fee, and anything else you tack onto the guest's total to stay in your place. If the guest has to pay it to book, it's part of the consideration, and consideration gets taxed.
The 12% breaks into two separate bills
People say "twelve percent" like it's one tax. It isn't. It's two, and they go to two different places.
- 6% Florida state sales tax on the rental. That one flows up to the state, through your booking platform in most cases.
- 6% Orange County Tourist Development Tax, the "bed tax." This is the part that trips people up. Orange County is one of the counties that self-administers its TDT. You don't send it to the Florida Department of Revenue. You remit it directly to the Orange County Comptroller.
Self-administered means monthly filing on the county's schedule. The return is due the 1st of the month for the prior month's rentals, and it's delinquent after the 20th. Miss the 20th and you're looking at penalty and interest, not a friendly reminder. So on a $200 night with a $150 cleaning fee, the taxable base is $350, and roughly $42 of tax rides on top of that. Twenty-one dollars of it is bed tax you're mailing to the Comptroller every single month.
Airbnb collecting doesn't always mean you're covered
The big platforms collect and remit a lot of this automatically now, and for a straight Airbnb booking in Orange County you may be fine on both the 6% and the 6%. But the myth gets expensive when you book direct, take a repeat guest over Venmo, or run a property that spans jurisdictions. "Orlando" is not one government. The Conway and Belle Isle side sits in unincorporated Orange County and incorporated Belle Isle respectively, Altamonte Springs is in Seminole County entirely, and each has its own registration and tax picture. The county TDT is not optional just because your platform usually handles it. If you take one dollar of rent off-platform, that filing obligation is yours.
Where the cleaner fits in
I run turnovers. I don't file your tax return, and any cleaner who tells you they do is guessing. But the cleaning fee is the exact spot where the host's bookkeeping and my invoice have to line up, so here's the split that keeps everyone honest.
The cleaner's job
- Invoice you a clear, flat cleaning charge per turnover. No vague bundling. You need a clean number to reconcile against the fee you charged the guest.
- Keep the invoices consistent month to month so your accountant isn't reverse-engineering what a March turnover cost versus a September one.
The host's job
- Understand that the cleaning fee you charge the guest is revenue, taxed at 12%, even though a chunk of it goes straight back out to me. What you pay your cleaner is a separate expense on your side of the ledger.
- Confirm what your platform actually remits for Orange County, and file the monthly TDT return yourself for anything it doesn't cover.
The mistake I see is hosts setting the guest cleaning fee to exactly match my invoice and assuming it nets to zero. It doesn't. You charged the guest $150, that $150 got taxed, and you still owe me $150. The tax came out of your margin, not out of thin air. Price the fee knowing that.
One practical note from the turnover side: your monthly TDT return and your monthly cleaning invoices cover the same rentals, so file them together. When I hand over an invoice, it should map one-to-one to a booking you already reported. That's the cross-check that catches a missed night before the Comptroller does.
If you're not sure which county your property even sits in, or whether your fee structure is leaving tax on the table, that's a fifteen-minute conversation worth having before your next filing. Reach out and we'll walk your specific address. And if you just want the turnover handled cleanly with paperwork your accountant can actually use, that's the whole point of what we do — here's how it works.