The Under-15-Day Rule

Updated August 21, 2026. Quick answer: what gets called the 14-day rental rule is really two different day counts, and mixing them up is what costs people money. The exclusion turns on days rented: rent out a home you use as a residence for less than 15 days in the year and the rent is not included in your gross income at all — you simply deduct nothing for that rental use. But it applies only if the home counts as your residence, and that is a separate test, measured in days of personal use. Both counts are below, from the statute itself.

The provision, in full

Notwithstanding any other provision of this section or section 183, if a dwelling unit is used during the taxable year by the taxpayer as a residence and such dwelling unit is actually rented for less than 15 days during the taxable year, then—(1) no deduction otherwise allowable under this chapter because of the rental use of such dwelling unit shall be allowed, and (2) the income derived from such use for the taxable year shall not be included in the gross income of such taxpayer under section 61.

— IRC 280A(g)

Both halves are conditions, not options. No deduction attributable to that letting, and the income is not included in gross income. The threshold is the statute’s own words: rented for less than 15 days.

The three conditions people skip

• You must use the dwelling as a residence. The provision opens with that requirement — it keys to the same personal-use test that governs the rest of the section.
• Actually rented for less than 15 days. Not offered, not available — rented. And it is a hard edge: at 15 days the exclusion is gone entirely, not proportionally.
• The rent must be real. The exclusion applies to what you actually charged. It is not a licence to invent a number.

The other 14 days: the count that decides whether you qualify

Go back to the first of those three conditions. The dwelling must be used during the taxable year by the taxpayer as a residence — and that phrase is defined elsewhere in the same section. Its definition is where the number people actually search for turns up, attached to a completely different count.

For purposes of this section, a taxpayer uses a dwelling unit during the taxable year as a residence if he uses such unit (or portion thereof) for personal purposes for a number of days which exceeds the greater of—(A) 14 days, or (B) 10 percent of the number of days during such year for which such unit is rented at a fair rental.

— IRC 280A(d)(1)

The IRS states the same test in plainer words: you use a unit as a home if you use it for personal purposes more than the greater of 14 days, or 10% of the total days it is rented to others at a fair rental price (Publication 527).

Now hold the two counts side by side, because the result runs opposite to the way people brace for it. If the property is rented for fewer than 15 days, then 10% of the rented days is at most 1.4 days — so the “greater of” is always the 14 days. Which means that to reach this exclusion at all, your personal use of the property must come to more than 14 days in the year.

So the failure mode is not renting too much. It is using the place too little yourself. Rent the property for 10 days, stay in it 6 days, and it is not your residence — (g) never opens, and the IRS instruction for that case is blunt: where a unit is used for personal purposes but not as a home, you report all of that rent as income. This is an exclusion written for a home you genuinely use, which you happen to let for a fortnight.

Where the cabin case fits

This is the one situation where a short let of a family cabin is genuinely tax-free: a fortnight during a local event, a race weekend, a festival. Two weeks of rent, excluded outright.

But note how it interacts with the rest of the section. Renting to a family member does not help you here either — their days are your personal use — and going past fourteen rented days does not phase the benefit out, it removes it.

What you actually file

The mechanics are the part most explanations leave out, and they are simpler than expected. Where you use the unit as a home and rent it for less than 15 days, the activity is not reported as rental activity at all:

If you use a dwelling unit as a home and you rent it less than 15 days during the year, its primary function isn’t considered to be rental and it shouldn’t be reported on Schedule E (Form 1040). You aren’t required to report the rental income and rental expenses from this activity.

— IRS Publication 527

There is no line to fill in and no election to make. You simply do not report it — which is exactly why your own record matters: nothing on the return evidences the day count, so it has to be defensible from a log you kept, not from the filing.

And note what survives. 280A(g)(1) denies deductions attributable to that letting; it does not touch deductions you would have had anyway. Publication 527 says so directly — expenses such as mortgage interest, property taxes, and any qualified casualty loss are still reported as normally allowed on Schedule A. The statute makes the same carve-out itself, in subsection (b), for any deduction allowable without regard to a trade-or-business or income-producing connection.

What it does not do

It creates no deduction for that letting — though, as above, it leaves your ordinary Schedule A deductions alone — it does not change how the property is treated for any other purpose, and it does not reach a property you do not use as a residence. It is a narrow exclusion for a genuinely short let, and its value is real precisely because it is narrow.

Related: why family rent does not help · selling a second home.

General information drawn from the Internal Revenue Code and IRS publications, not legal or tax advice. Co-ownership structures, partition rights, deeds and recording are STATE law and differ materially. Insurance wording controls what is covered, and a seasonally unoccupied property is treated differently by different insurers. We sell no property and receive nothing from any insurer.