DAC7: what booking platforms report about your rental income
Every January, Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo send the French tax authorities a full breakdown of what you collected the previous year. Most owners have never heard of the DAC7 directive until a request for clarification lands in their tax portal. Here is what is reported, why the figures never match your bank statement, and how to stay protected.
What DAC7 forces platforms to report
Since the EU's DAC7 directive came into force, every booking platform — Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and direct-booking sites running through a payment operator — files a report with the French tax administration each January covering the previous year. The file contains your identity, tax number, IBAN, the address of each property let, the number of nights sold, gross amounts collected quarter by quarter, and the commission withheld. You receive your own copy of that summary before 31 January. In practice, the administration knows your rental income before you declare it, and the pre-filled figures on your online return increasingly draw on this data. The days when Airbnb income could slip under the radar are over: the question is no longer whether you are visible, but whether your numbers line up with theirs.
Why the reported amount never matches your actual rent
The trap in DAC7 is not the reporting itself — it is the nature of the amount reported. Platforms declare a gross figure, collected from the guest, before their commission is deducted. Airbnb includes the cleaning fee charged to the guest; Booking.com reports the full reservation value even though you only received the net amount after a 15–18 % commission. Add tourist tax, collected by some platforms and not others, plus refunds on cancellations, and the gap against your bank statement easily reaches 20–30 %. That gap is entirely normal and legitimate: under the régime réel you declare the gross and deduct commission, cleaning and running costs. Under micro-BIC, however, the flat-rate allowance applies to the gross figure — declaring your net means under-declaring. Knowing which number goes where is your first protection against a reassessment.
The audits DAC7 triggers, and how to get ahead of them
Since 2024, the DGFiP automatically cross-checks DAC7 files against 2042-C-PRO returns and the accounts filed by owners on the régime réel. Three anomalies trigger an almost systematic follow-up: platform income with no BIC declaration at all, a declared amount materially below the gross figure reported, and a property let in a commune where no registration number is linked to your name. A fourth signal applies in high-demand zones: a night count above the legal 120- or 90-night cap on a primary residence, now reported night by night. The first contact takes the form of a request for clarification, which you have thirty days to answer. A clean file — platform statements, commission invoices, property-management reports, expense receipts — turns a potentially heavy audit into a simple administrative formality.
What to put in place right now
September is the right moment to secure the current financial year, before the winter season concentrates the bulk of alpine income. Three actions are enough. Download your Airbnb, Booking and Vrbo earnings reports for the first eight months today and reconcile them against your bank transfers: any unexplained gap is far easier to fix in September than the following spring. Next, check that the identity and tax number registered on each platform match the legal owner of the property exactly — an SCI, joint ownership or a mis-entered spouse produces a DAC7 file attributed to the wrong taxpayer. Finally, adopt a single monthly statement per property, consolidating every channel, gross and net. That is precisely what SmartStay produces each month for its owners: a document that goes straight to the accountant.
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