The new tax law made 100% bonus depreciation permanent
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed on July 4. Two provisions in it are relevant to anyone who owns a rental property: 100% bonus depreciation is permanent for qualifying property acquired after January 19, 2025, and the Section 179 expensing limit rises to $2.5 million (Tax Foundation's summary of the law).
Standard and important disclaimer before anything else: I am a property manager, not a CPA or a tax attorney. Nothing here is tax advice for your situation, and the rules around rental property, material participation, and passive losses are genuinely complicated and genuinely fact-specific. Take this post to an accountant who has other short-term rental clients. What I can usefully tell you is what changed in general terms, and what it means for the paperwork side of your operation — which is my job.
What changed, in plain language
Bonus depreciation lets you deduct the cost of certain qualifying property in the year you place it in service, rather than spreading it over many years. It had been phasing down. This law restored it to 100% and made it permanent for property acquired after January 19, 2025.
For rental owners, the relevance is that a building itself depreciates over a long schedule, but many components inside and around it have much shorter lives — appliances, furniture, certain flooring, some fixtures, landscaping and site improvements. When those shorter-life components can be fully expensed in year one, the timing of your deductions changes substantially.
This is also why cost segregation studies come up in every conversation about this. Whether one makes sense for your property is exactly the question to ask your accountant, and the answer depends on the size of the property, your income situation, and how you participate in the activity.
Why this is really a records post
Here is the part that is actually mine to talk about.
Every one of these provisions depends on your ability to substantiate what you bought, when it was placed in service, and what it cost. A deduction you cannot document is a deduction you do not take, and the single most common reason owners miss them is not ignorance of the law. It is a shoebox.
The owners who get the most out of any tax change are the ones whose records were already clean before the change happened. The year-end walk-through I do every December is mostly about exactly that, and it is a far easier exercise in July than in April.
The Boost part: what your statements carry
Here is the operating detail. Owner statements at Boost are built to be handed to an accountant without a translation layer.
Every expense is itemized with a date, a vendor, and a description. Not "maintenance — $840." Which vendor, what date, what they did.
Maintenance and supplies pass through at cost. What the vendor charged is the number on your statement. No markup — it is a term rather than a courtesy, and it sits on our fee page alongside the tiers. That matters at tax time as well as at payment time, because the amount on your statement is the amount you actually paid, and it ties to an invoice we can produce on request.
Capital items are distinguishable from repairs. A new refrigerator and a repaired refrigerator are different animals to your accountant. When we buy something for the home rather than fix something, that is identifiable on the statement rather than buried in a category total.
Revenue is broken out. Gross bookings, platform fees, cleaning pass-through, taxes, management fee, and nightly revenue — separately, so your accountant is not reverse-engineering four numbers out of one. It is the same five-number structure I ask owners to demand from whoever sends their statement.
Annual summaries are available on request if your CPA wants the year in one document rather than twelve.
None of this is exotic. It is what a statement should have done all along. But I have read a lot of statements from other companies over the years and a surprising number of them are, functionally, a payout notice.
What I would do this month
Talk to an accountant before you buy anything else. If a purchase is likely to be significant, the timing and the classification matter, and that is a conversation worth having before the money moves.
Pull your year-to-date expense detail. If you cannot produce an itemized list with dates and vendors in five minutes, fix that now rather than in April. A platform earnings view will not have it, because that dashboard reports one channel's gross and stops there.
Separate the capital purchases you have already made this year. Furniture, appliances, HVAC, big flooring jobs. Get them in one list with dates and amounts.
Ask whether a cost segregation study makes sense for your property. For some owners it clearly does and for many it clearly does not. Your accountant will know within one conversation.
If your current statements are not giving your accountant what they need, talk to Boost Rentals. Send me a recent statement and I will show you what ours looks like beside it. That comparison is useful information whoever ends up managing your home.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals