Bucks County, PA Short-Term Rentals: Taxes & Fees (2026)

Ordinance No. 158 defines a 'booking agent' as a person or entity that facilitates or collects payment for hotel accommodations on behalf of an operator, expressly excluding anyone who merely publishes advertisements for accommodations. The ordinance's 'operator' definition folds booking agents directly into that category, meaning a short-term rental host who lists through a booking platform can trigger the platform's own collection duty. Section C(2) states that if a booking agent acts as a lodging operator and collects payment for rent, the booking agent must collect and remit the tax imposed under the ordinance, with that revenue deposited the same way as tax collected directly from a hotel operator under Section C(1): into the County's special travel-and-tourism fund managed by the Bucks County Treasurer.

This provision traces to Act 109 of 2018, which the ordinance's preamble recites as directing 'each booking agent who acts as a lodging operator and collects payment for rent, to collect and remit any additional or optional hotel tax' under the County Code, and requiring the deposited revenue be handled by county ordinance rather than left to the platform. The short-term rental itself still has to meet the ordinance's broad 'hotel' definition, which reaches guesthouses, bed and breakfasts, homesteads and similar structures held out to the public for temporary lodging, before the booking-agent remittance duty applies; owner-occupied permanent residences and a handful of institutional exemptions in Section A fall outside it.