The 7% hotel tax hit July 1. Here is what it changes on your Nashville rental.
On July 1 the Metro hotel occupancy tax went to 7 percent, plus the $2.50 per-night flat fee, under BL2022-1529 — the bill that helps fund the new stadium on the East Bank. Metro Finance published the change here. Ten weeks later I am still getting the same question on owner calls, so let's answer it properly.
No, it does not come out of your nightly revenue
Occupancy tax is a guest-side tax. It sits on top of what the guest pays you, it is collected and remitted, and it never belongs to you. If you look at a reservation and see a bigger tax line than you saw in June, that is not money leaving your pocket.
That is the easy half. The half that actually matters to your P&L is this: guests do not shop nightly rates. They shop the total on the checkout screen. Nightly rate plus cleaning fee plus taxes plus platform fees is one number to them, and every dollar added anywhere in that stack makes your listing look more expensive against the listing three streets over.
So a tax you do not pay can still cost you a booking. That is the part worth managing.
Where the pressure actually shows up
Two places.
The first is the shoulder nights. A Tuesday in late January is a price-sensitive night. A guest deciding between two 2-bedrooms in East Nashville at $140 and $155 is now deciding between two totals that are both a little higher than they were in the spring, and the gap between them matters more, not less.
The second is length of stay. Cleaning fees and flat per-night charges hurt short stays disproportionately. A $150 cleaning fee on a two-night stay is $75 a night of invisible price. Add the flat occupancy charge and you have quietly made your listing bad at exactly the bookings that fill your calendar gaps.
I am not telling you to drop your rate. I am telling you to go look at your total, on a phone, the way a guest sees it, for a random Tuesday in November. Most owners have never done that.
What we do about it on our side
Every Boost owner gets a monthly statement that separates four things: gross booking revenue, the pass-throughs, the platform fee, and our management fee. Taxes and cleaning are pass-throughs. They show as their own lines, at the actual amount, with no markup from us — we do not make a cent on your cleaning fee or your supplies, and I want that visible on the page rather than buried in a net number.
The reason I built the statement that way is selfish as much as anything. When a tax rate changes mid-year, or a cleaner raises their price, or a platform adjusts how it presents fees, I want to see it in one column instead of reverse-engineering it out of a net deposit six weeks later. Owners should be able to do the same.
If your current manager sends you a one-line payout and calls it a statement, ask them to break out the pass-throughs. If they will not, that tells you something.
Three things worth doing this month
Audit your cleaning fee against your actual cleaner invoice. A lot of Nashville listings have a cleaning fee that was set two years ago and has drifted from the real cost in both directions. If yours is padded, you are paying for it in conversion on short stays.
Check your minimum stay for the winter. If your total price is heavier at the front end, a two-night minimum in a slow month may be doing more damage than a one-night minimum with a slightly firmer rate.
Look at your competitive set on total, not ADR. Pull up five comparable homes in your neighborhood and price a real weekend. If you are the third-cheapest on nightly rate and the most expensive on total, you have a fee problem, not a pricing problem.
The bigger point
Nashville got more expensive for visitors this summer, and it will get more expensive again. That is what happens in a city that is building a stadium and adding hotel rooms at the same time. Owners who treat their nightly rate as the only lever they have will spend the next two years wondering why occupancy keeps sliding while their rate looks competitive.
The lever is the total. Nightly rate, cleaning fee, minimum stay and length-of-stay discounts all move it, and they move different parts of the calendar. That is why we reprice every listing every week instead of setting a rate in March and looking at it again in September.
If you own a short-term rental in Nashville and you have not looked at your all-in guest price since the tax change, send it over and I will look at it with you — no charge, no pitch required. Get started here and tell me the address. I will pull your comparable set and show you what your total looks like next to theirs.