You're not a VAT payer, and yet you're supposed to pay 21% on every Airbnb and Booking commission. The most commonly breached tax obligation in the field — and why a small turnover won't save you from it.
“I'm not a VAT payer, so VAT isn't my concern.” I said that sentence for years too. It's the most widespread misconception in the whole field, and it costs real money — up to three years back, with interest.
A VAT payer and an identified person are two different things
You only become a DPH (Czech VAT) payer above a turnover of CZK 2,000,000 a year. You become an identifikovaná osoba (identified person) the moment you, as a business, receive a service from a company in another EU state. Airbnb invoices you its commission from Ireland, Booking from the Netherlands. The first commission they deduct makes you an identified person. Regardless of turnover, even with one apartment and five bookings a year.
What it involves
- Registration within 15 days of receiving the first commission, electronically via the MOJE daně (My Taxes) portal.
- 21% tax on every commission and on the payment services fee the platform deducted. With no right to deduct — it's a pure cost.
- A tax return only for months in which a commission was received, within 25 days after the end of the month. The deadline can't be extended. It's a few lines.
- A control statement — you never file one. Towards Czech guests you remain a non-payer; nothing changes in your prices.
Example: a booking for CZK 10,000, a 15% commission = CZK 1,500 (Booking typically 15%, Airbnb is moving to a single host fee of 15.5%). On that, you declare CZK 315 in VAT. With annual revenue of CZK 600,000, that's roughly CZK 19,000 a year.
The one thing you have to do right away: enter your VAT number
As soon as you're registered, enter your DIČ (VAT/tax ID) in your Airbnb profile (Account settings → Taxes) and in the Booking extranet (Finance → Finance settings → VAT details). The DIČ has the form CZ + IČO; for an individual, CZ + Czech personal identification number.
Why it's so urgent: as long as the platform doesn't have your DIČ, under European rules it has to charge you Czech VAT at 21% itself. As an identified person, you can't deduct it, and according to the prevailing interpretation this doesn't cancel your obligation to declare the tax in the Czech Republic. So you pay twice. Once you enter your DIČ, the invoice comes at 0% with a note about the reverse charge — and you declare the tax only once, yourself.
You can tell from the document: on Airbnb, the “VAT rate” column shows 21.0% vs. 0.0%; on Booking, there's a sentence about the reverse charge.
Why it gets discovered
The tax administration receives data from the platforms under DAC7, including the amount of commissions deducted. Matching hosts without identified-person registration with commission invoices is trivial for it. It can assess tax 3 years back, plus late-payment interest (11.75% a year in the second half of 2026), a fine for late filing of up to 5% of the tax, and, in an audit, a 20% penalty.
If you haven't been doing it so far
Come forward yourself. The 20% penalty doesn't apply to tax you declare yourself in a supplementary return — you pay the tax, the interest and possibly a fine for late filing, but not the penalty. The procedure: registration, DIČ into the platforms, and for past months, returns with the tax on commissions based on the invoices you download from your platform accounts.
What about the flat-rate tax
Registering as an identified person doesn't prevent you from entering the flat-rate tax regime. It's a separate obligation alongside income tax.
In Ubyo, you have the platform commission for every booking, and in Finance (Reverse charge) a monthly summary of the tax base for the identified-person return, broken down by platform. Filling in the return then takes minutes.
Marco, founder of Ubyo — He has been running apartments in Prague for over seven years and wrote Ubyo because he didn’t want to do any of this by hand.
For information only, not legal or tax advice — always discuss your specific situation with a professional. This article is a translation of the Czech original.
