Payments, payouts and the records to keep

Where the money comes from, and what each leaves behind

Airbnb releases a payout about 24 hours after check-in for a normal stay, and a bank transfer then takes three to five business days to land. Its fee reaches you one of two ways: a split structure where the host pays around 3% and the guest carries the rest, or a host-only fee, most often 15.5%, taken entirely from your payout. Either way the fee is charged on the booking subtotal, which is the nightly price plus your own fees and excludes the guest service fee and taxes.

Booking.com is different in a way that matters for reconciliation. You either collect from the guest yourself and settle a commission invoice, or you use their payments product and are paid out daily, weekly or monthly, with up to ten days for funds to reach your account. Their commission is charged on the total booking amount, which expressly includes cleaning fees, service fees and any no-show or cancellation fee you charge. You cannot compare an Airbnb take rate with a Booking.com take rate without first normalising for that.

Direct bookings paid by bank transfer or UPI leave the cleanest trail of the three, because the reference number on your statement ties to one stay with nothing deducted in between. Cash has a hard legal ceiling: nobody may receive two lakh rupees or more in cash from one person in a day, or for a single transaction, or for transactions relating to one event. The penalty is an amount equal to the sum received, and it falls on the person who took the cash. A villa week settled in cash is exactly the shape that triggers it.

Mark no-shows and cancellations in the Booking.com Extranet within 48 hours of checkout. Past that you are billed commission on revenue you never received, and getting it reversed is your problem.

GST: the numbers that changed in September 2025

Registration first. You must register once aggregate turnover passes twenty lakh rupees in a financial year. Goa is a normal-category state, so twenty lakh is your number, and the forty lakh figure you may have read applies only to suppliers dealing exclusively in goods, which a homestay is not.

The rates changed with effect from 22 September 2025. Accommodation where the value of supply is seven thousand five hundred rupees or less per unit per day is taxed at 5% without input tax credit. Above that it is 18% with credit. Note the basis: it is the value of supply, meaning what the guest actually pays for the room that night, not your published rack rate. A nine thousand rupee rate discounted to six thousand sits in the 5% band.

One piece of folklore is worth killing. There is no exemption for rooms under a thousand rupees a night. That entry was omitted with effect from 18 July 2022, and a great deal of advice online has not caught up. A registered host letting a room at eight hundred rupees charges 5%.

• Below twenty lakh turnover: no registration, and you charge no GST.
• Listing through Airbnb or Booking.com does not force you to register: for an unregistered host the platform pays the GST on the room itself.
• But those platform bookings still count towards your twenty lakh threshold, which is the trap: the platform paying your GST does not keep you small.
• A stay of at least ninety continuous days valued at twenty thousand rupees or less per person per month is exempt, which is the long-stay guest Goa gets a lot of.

Ask your CA about one change specifically. From 30 March 2026 the place-of-supply rule for intermediary services changed, and Airbnb's own India tax guide now warns hosts that fees paid to an overseas platform may become an import of service taxable under reverse charge, and that a host in that position may need to register regardless of turnover. Whether a given platform's fee is an intermediary service is contested and fact-specific. It is the most consequential open question on this page.

The two deductions, and the one nobody claims

Income tax is deducted by the platform at 0.1% of your gross earnings, under what used to be section 194-O and is now in the Income-tax Act, 2025, which replaced the 1961 Act from 1 April 2026. The rate has been 0.1% since 1 October 2024. Without a PAN it is 5%. Individuals and HUFs are outside it where gross sales and services for the year stay at or below five lakh rupees and a PAN or Aadhaar has been given.

It is worth knowing that Booking.com's own India help page still states 1% on net transaction value. The statutory rate is 0.1% and the statutory base is gross. Check what was actually deducted in your Form 26AS or AIS rather than in a platform help article, and reconcile to the quarterly certificates Airbnb emails.

The second deduction only exists if you are GST-registered: tax collected at source at 0.5% of the net value of taxable supplies made through the platform. For an unregistered host there is none, because the platform is paying the GST itself. The part hosts miss is that this credit is not automatic. The platform files its return, and the amount then waits on the GST portal under TDS and TCS Credit Received until you accept it. Unaccepted, it sits there instead of in your cash ledger.

Why your bank statement will never match the tax portal

This is structural rather than an error, and understanding it once saves an annual argument. Tax is deducted on the gross booking value, while the payout reaching your bank is net of the platform's commission. So the figure the tax department sees and the figure your bank shows can never be the same number.

On a booking with a subtotal of one lakh rupees and a host-only fee of 15.5%, the platform keeps fifteen and a half thousand, deducts a hundred rupees of tax on the full lakh, and credits you about eighty-four thousand four hundred. Your Form 26AS reports a lakh.

The fix is in how you book it, not in how you chase it. Record gross revenue as income and the platform fee as an expense. Never record the net payout as your revenue, because then your return understates income against what the platform has already reported, and that mismatch is exactly what draws a question. Which head your income sits under matters here too: under business income the platform fee is deductible, while under income from other sources it is not.

Cancellations, deposits, and the month that will not tie

A forfeited cancellation fee is not a windfall outside the tax net. The CBIC's circular of 3 August 2022 treats a retained or forfeited amount where a customer fails to take up hotel accommodation as assessable at the same rate as the service itself. So a cancellation fee on a Goa villa booking carries GST at the accommodation rate.

A refundable security deposit is the opposite, and the GST law says so directly: a deposit is not treated as payment for a supply unless and until the supplier applies it as consideration. Held, it is a liability rather than income. Applied to the room bill or forfeited on a no-show, it becomes consideration and is taxed. What happens when you apply a deposit to damage is genuinely unsettled, with no clarification specific to damage deposits, so treat it as the open question it is rather than assuming either answer.

Then there is month-end. A checkout on 29 September paid out on 1 October and cleared days later belongs to September for the owner and to October for the bank. Report on stay dates, reconcile on payout dates, and show both on the statement, rather than choosing one and being asked about the other every quarter.

What to keep, and for how long

If you are GST-registered the retention period is the firm one: books and records must be kept for seventy-two months from the due date of filing the annual return for that year, and longer if an appeal or an investigation is running, until a year after it ends.

For income tax, the books requirement bites once income or turnover crosses the thresholds in the Act, and the retention period under the current rules is reported as seven tax years, up from six under the old ones. We could not open the bare rule to quote that figure, so confirm it with your accountant. Taking the two together, a host who keeps everything for eight years is safe under both without having to remember which rule applies to what.

What to keep is less ambiguous than how long: the booking with its dates and gross value, the platform's payout statement, the commission and fee breakdown, the tax deducted and its certificate, the invoice or receipt given to the guest, and the bank credit the payout became. If any one of those six is missing, the other five cannot be reconciled.