- Is there HST on rent in Ontario?
- It depends on what is being rented. Long-term residential rent — a month or more — is exempt, so no HST is charged. Commercial rent is taxable at 13%. Short-term residential stays under 30 days at more than $20 a day are also taxable at 13%, because the CRA treats them as a commercial supply rather than as residential rent.
- Is there GST/HST on rental income from commercial property?
- Yes. Rent from commercial real property is a taxable supply, and a landlord whose taxable revenue exceeds $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters must register and charge 13% HST in Ontario. This is the opposite of the residential default, and it catches operators who assume all rent is exempt.
- Do you pay sales tax on rent in Ontario?
- Ontario has no separate provincial sales tax on rent — HST is the sales tax, and whether it applies depends on the type of rent. Long-term residential rent is exempt. Commercial rent and short-term stays under 30 days are taxable at 13%. Searching for "sales tax on rent" and "HST on rent" in Ontario is asking the same question.
- When do I have to register for GST/HST?
- Once total taxable revenue across everything you operate exceeds $30,000 CAD in four consecutive calendar quarters. Short-term and commercial rent count toward that figure; exempt long-term residential rent does not. You then have 29 days to register.
Long-term rent: generally exempt
Residential rent for a period of a month or more is generally exempt from GST/HST. This is the default a lot of operators mentally apply everywhere — which is exactly what causes trouble once the same portfolio also runs nightly stays.
Commercial rent is taxable — the mirror image of the residential rule
Rent from commercial real property is a taxable supply. Office, retail, industrial and warehouse space, and the land under them, are all taxed at 13% in Ontario once the landlord is registered — there is no equivalent of the residential exemption. Operators who run both kinds of space in one portfolio tend to carry the residential assumption across, which is the single most expensive mistake in this guide: uncollected HST on commercial rent is the landlord's liability, not the tenant's, and it is recovered from the landlord with interest whether or not it was ever charged.
What counts as rent is broader than the base figure on the lease. The consideration for the supply includes the additional rent a commercial tenant pays — operating-cost recoveries, the tenant's share of property taxes, common-area maintenance — so those amounts are taxable at the same rate. Parking, storage and signage licensed to a tenant are taxable supplies in their own right.
Mixed-use buildings have to be apportioned
A building with flats above a shop is making two different supplies at once: an exempt residential one and a taxable commercial one. The rent has to be split accordingly, and so does the input tax credit — HST on a roof repair is recoverable only to the extent the roof serves the taxable part of the building. There is no single portfolio-wide percentage that survives an audit; the apportionment has to be reasonable and traceable to the space it describes.
Registering voluntarily is often worth it here
A small commercial landlord below $30,000 can register voluntarily, and frequently should. A commercial tenant is almost always a registrant themselves, which means the HST you charge costs them nothing — they recover it as an input tax credit — while registration lets you recover the HST on your own costs. The calculation is quite different from the residential side, where the tenant is an individual who cannot recover anything and every point of tax is a real price increase.
Short-term stays are a different category entirely
The CRA treats a rental period under 30 continuous days, at a daily rate over $20, as a commercial supply — the same tax treatment as a hotel room, not as residential rent. Run any nightly-stay inventory in Ontario and that income counts toward HST registration, even inside a portfolio whose other units are all long-term leases.
The $30,000 threshold is portfolio-wide
You're required to register for GST/HST once your total taxable revenue exceeds $30,000 CAD across four consecutive calendar quarters — and if you operate multiple properties, their short-term income is combined to test that threshold, not assessed unit by unit. Once you cross it, you have 29 days to register.
Ontario's HST rate is 13%. If a booking platform is collecting and remitting on your behalf while you're unregistered, that doesn't remove the reporting obligation — the income still has to appear on your return.
How Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com handle the tax before you're registered
Since 1 July 2021, Canada's digital-economy GST/HST rules have shifted the collection obligation onto the platform itself, for as long as the host isn't GST/HST registered. An accommodation platform must register and start collecting GST/HST once it facilitates, or expects to facilitate, more than $30,000 CAD in taxable Canadian short-term accommodation on behalf of non-registered hosts over a rolling 12-month period — at which point it becomes the "deemed supplier," charging, collecting and remitting tax on the listing price and, per Airbnb's own guidance, on cleaning fees and guest service fees too.
The moment you register for GST/HST yourself and add your registration number to your host account, the platform stops collecting and remitting on your behalf — the obligation reverts to you. This is the step operators most often miss: registering with the CRA doesn't automatically update your platform account. Forget to add the number, and the platform keeps collecting on a listing that's now legally your own responsibility to tax correctly.
What you can claim back once you're registered
Once registered — whether because you crossed $30,000 or you registered voluntarily — you can claim input tax credits (ITCs) to recover the GST/HST paid on costs tied to your commercial short-term-rental activity: renovation and repair costs, furniture and equipment, property-management fees, and the commission a booking platform deducts from every reservation.
Where the recovery stops
For a property built or substantially renovated from scratch, the CRA's self-supply rules generally cut off ITCs on construction or improvement costs incurred after the point of substantial completion. For an existing unit converted to short-term use, the more common trap is mixed use: if a property runs long-term (exempt) leases most of the year with occasional short-term (taxable) stays, only the portion of expenses tied to the taxable use is recoverable, not the whole bill.
The New Residential Rental Property rebate doesn't survive a switch to short-term
If you bought a newly built or substantially renovated unit and claimed the New Residential Rental Property (NRRP) rebate, that rebate is built entirely around long-term residential use, not nightly stays. To qualify, the unit's first use has to be as someone's residence, under a lease providing continuous occupancy of at least one year, by an individual using it as their primary residence. The rebate itself isn't small — up to $6,300 federally (36% of the GST paid, phasing out between $350,000 and $450,000 fair market value) plus up to $24,000 provincially in Ontario (75% of the provincial portion of the HST paid, capped at a $400,000 property value), a combined maximum of $30,300. Sell within a year to a buyer who isn't acquiring it as their own primary residence, and the CRA claws the rebate back with interest.
What the CRA has actually enforced
This isn't theoretical. In 1351231 Ontario Inc. v. The King (2024 TCC 37), a corporation rented a condo on long-term leases from 2008 to 2017, then switched to nightly Airbnb bookings before selling the unit in 2018. The CRA reassessed the sale for GST/HST — reported at roughly $80,000 — because the switch to short-term use meant the property no longer met the definition of a "residential complex" under the Excise Tax Act, triggering a change-in-use self-supply. The Tax Court upheld the assessment, and the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the taxpayer's appeal in 2025 (2025 FCA 53). The operating lesson: converting a long-term unit to short-term stays, even briefly before a sale, can turn what you expected to be an HST-exempt transaction into a taxable one.
Accounting choices: the Quick Method, filing frequency, and registering early
The Quick Method
Instead of tracking ITCs on every expense, a registrant with $400,000 or less in annual taxable supplies (including associates) can elect the Quick Method: remit a flat percentage of HST-included revenue rather than the full 13% collected minus ITCs. In Ontario, the service-business rate is 8.8% of HST-included revenue, with a 1% credit on the first $30,000 of eligible supplies each fiscal year. Accountants, bookkeepers, financial and tax consultants, and lawyers are specifically excluded from electing it; a short-term rental operator isn't.
How often you file
Filing frequency is set by annual taxable supplies: annual by default at $1.5 million or less, quarterly between $1.5 million and $6 million, monthly above that. Most operators who've just crossed the $30,000 registration threshold land in the annual category — for a calendar-year filer, a return due 15 June and payment due 30 April. One catch: if net tax owing hits $3,000 or more in a year, the CRA requires quarterly instalment payments even under annual filing. You can elect a more frequent period than your default; you can't elect a less frequent one.
Registering before you hit $30,000
Nothing stops you from registering voluntarily below the small-supplier threshold, which is worth considering ahead of a major renovation or furnishing push — HST on a bathroom rebuild or a full furniture package is only recoverable as an ITC if you're registered when you pay it. The trade-off: voluntary registration commits you to the same charging, filing and remittance obligations as a mandatory registrant from day one, and once registered, the CRA requires the account to stay open for at least twelve months before you can request cancellation.
Why this is a multi-line problem, not just an STR one
The operators most likely to get this wrong aren't dedicated Airbnb hosts — they're long-term-lease portfolios that quietly picked up a few nightly-stay units to cover vacancy. If your books don't already separate short-term from long-term income per unit, you won't notice you've crossed the threshold until a filing deadline forces the question.
Direct PMS separates short-term from long-term income per unit, which is the split that decides when you cross the $30,000 threshold — and the one most portfolios cannot produce on demand.
One ledger, every line →- Canada.ca — GST/HST for digital-economy businesses: platform-based threshold →
- Canada.ca — GST/HST for digital-economy businesses: platform-based accommodation →
- LRK Tax LLP — The New Residential Rental Property HST Rebate →
- Mondaq — 1351231 Ontario Inc. v. The King, 2024 TCC 37: case summary →
- Airbnb Help Centre — GST, HST and QST collection and host self-registration →
- CRA — GST/HST Memorandum 19.1: Real Property and the GST/HST →
- CRA — GST/HST Memorandum 19.2: Residential Real Property →
- Excise Tax Act, s. 221 — collection of tax and the registered-purchaser exception →
- Added a section on commercial rent, which is taxable — the mirror image of the residential exemption the guide previously covered alone. Added direct answers and CRA memoranda 19.1 and 19.2 as sources.
- Added platform deemed-supplier rules, the NRRP rebate, and the 1351231 Ontario Inc. line of cases.
BC moved short-term rental regulation from the municipality to the province: a principal-residence requirement in most communities, a provincial registry, and a duty on the platforms to enforce both.
Alberta is the loosest short-term rental regime of the four big provinces — no provincial licence, no principal-residence test — which puts the whole of the compliance burden on the city and the tax.
Quebec put the enforcement duty on the platforms: a listing without a valid registration number is one the platform is not allowed to publish, and the fines for publishing it anyway are aimed at the platform as much as the host.
La France superpose trois régimes : la déclaration, qui est nationale ; le plafond de nuitées, qui dépend de la commune ; et le changement d'usage, qui ne concerne que les logements qui ne sont pas votre résidence principale.