Personal Use Of Your Short-Term Rental

By Jason Watson, CPA
Posted Saturday, March 21, 2026

Personal use days are what you would expect but they also include days when you rent the property to others for less than fair rental price. Personal use days do not include any day that you spend working substantially full time repairing and maintaining your rental property.

Sidebar: Under IRC Section 280A(d)(2), you cannot rent to family members either. The same vacation home rules apply, and their days will count against your personal use days even if they pay fair market value rent. However, if they use the rental property as their primary residence and pay fair market rent, then family members are treated like any other tenant.

What about days where you are improving the property (recall the betterment, adaptation and restoration standards from our improvements versus repairs section)? This is a conundrum without clear answers. The sentence at the end of the paragraph above was ripped off from the IRS. It reads in full as-

Days used for repairs and maintenance.
Any day that you spend working substantially full time repairing and maintaining (not improving) your property isn’t counted as a day of personal use.

If you spend a week building a deck or remodeling a kitchen, those days are not rental days since the property is not available for rent. We can agree with that. But are they personal days? No, not necessarily.

In Van Malssen v. Commissioner, Tax Court Memo 2014-236, the Tax Court emphasized that the purpose of the stay is the primary factor in determining personal use. In other words, work is not leisure.

If you are actively working on the rental property hauling materials, managing contractors, or performing construction, it is reasonable to argue those days are not personal use, even if they do not fall neatly within the repair safe harbor (i.e., they go beyond honey-do chores on the rental property).

However, this position is not explicitly supported by statute or regulations. Unlike repair days, improvement days are not clearly excluded from personal use, which creates potential audit risk. As a result, these days occupy a gray area: not rental, not clearly personal, and highly dependent on facts and documentation.

Frankly, we are not sure why the IRS cares. It should come down to this- your butt is in the rental, is it for personal reasons or business reasons?

Assuming improvement days are neither rental use days nor personal use days, how does this impact you? In most cases, it doesn’t directly affect your rental-use percentage calculation, since that formula only considers rental days and personal use days. We discuss computing the percentage of expenses allowed as rental property deductions in more detail in a bit; for now, it is simply rental use days divided by the total days of use (personal + rented).

• Days spent improving the rental property do not impact this calculation. It could, however, if the tax code defined total days of use to include improvement days.
• Days spent repairing and maintaining the rental property also do not impact this calculation as personal use days.

Why did the IRS add the “(not improving)” qualifier then? No one knows. If they do, it is a well-kept secret.

Sidebar: Specifically for partnerships where two or more people own a rental property inside of an entity, and as far as we can tell from the tax code and other resources, each owner (partner) does not get a fresh set of 14 days or 10% rented days. That’d be nice, right? Rather, if owner A uses the property for 10 days, and owner B uses it for 9 days, this will be 19 days total.