How do I track material participation hours for a short-term rental?

Where is the Hours tracker in BNBCalc?

Click Hours tracker in the BNBCalc sidebar. It works on any account, with no plan needed, and it's built for US tax law only. You can also get there from a property analysis: in the STR Tax Calculator (USA) section, Track my hours opens the tracker with that property already added.

There's also a public version at the free material participation tracker, which works without signing in. Keep in mind that it keeps your hours in that browser only, and signing in clears them rather than adding them to your account. So if you plan to keep a log for the whole year, create a free account first and log from there, and re-enter anything you logged before.

How do I add a property and log hours?

1. Click Add a property to tracker. On the Manual tab, type a name for the property, or on Saved analysis, pick one of your Buy or Own analyses.
2. Choose the tax year at the top. The tracker covers this year and the five before it.
3. Fill in Date, Who, Category and Hours, add a description if you like, and click Add entry. Quick chips such as Guest message (15m) or Bookkeeping (1h) fill in the common jobs for you.
4. To keep a receipt or screenshot with an entry, click Attach file. Each entry takes up to five PDFs or images of up to 10MB each.

The tracker won't take a future date, more than 24 hours in one entry or a description over 500 characters, and it warns you when an entry is over 12 hours. It also marks any entry you logged more than 14 days after the work with a badge such as +20d, so you can see which entries were written up late. The tracker is built for a log you keep as you go, so the habit to build is logging the same day.

To change an entry, click its pencil icon (Edit entry). The entry then shows an Edited tag, and its original log date stays on record.

How do other people's hours count?

Click Manage people to add the people who also work on the property: a spouse, cleaner, co-host, property manager, contractor or anyone else. A spouse's hours start as Pools into yours, so they count with your own, while everyone else's start as Counts against you, and you can change either setting per person.

That split matters because one of the tests compares your hours with everyone else's. A cleaner who spends 150 hours at the property can stop you meeting it even if you've logged 120 yourself.

Which IRS tests does BNBCalc check?

The IRS lists seven ways to materially participate in Publication 925. BNBCalc's tracker checks three of them for each property:

Make sure your hours go past 500 for Test 1 and past 100 for Tests 3 and 7, since the IRS wording is "more than" in each. For Test 3, BNBCalc compares your hours with everyone else's combined, which is stricter than the IRS's "at least as much as any other individual".

The other four tests aren't tracked, and none of this is tax advice. Each property's card shows Passing, On track (50 hours or more) or Just started, and the tracker reminds you that material participation depends on facts it can't see, so review your log with your CPA.

What about real estate professional status?

Once you track two or more properties, an All properties view appears. Use it for work that covers your whole portfolio, like bookkeeping or software, which the tracker counts toward your real estate professional status (REPS) total but not toward any one property's tests. It adds those hours to your hours across all properties and shows your progress toward 750, along with a reminder that REPS also needs more than half of your working hours to be in real estate.

How do I export my log?

Click Export to spreadsheet. You'll get an .xlsx file for the property and tax year you've selected, with your totals, which tests pass, the people you've added and the full log: date, who, whether it counts as yours, category, activity, hours, when it was logged, when it was last edited and the names of any attached files. Keep in mind that the files themselves stay in BNBCalc, so keep your own copies of the receipts you'd show your CPA.