Editorial

How we research STR tax.

Last updated: 2026-06-19

Short-term-rental tax is a Your-Money-or-Your-Life (YMYL) topic. Every guide is built from primary tax authority, reviewed before publication, and re-verified on a schedule. This page documents the rules. The STR Ledger is an information service — it is not tax advice.

Primary-source rule

Every tax claim must trace to a primary source — the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), Treasury Regulations (Treas. Reg.), an IRS Revenue Procedure or Revenue Ruling, or an official IRS Publication. We require at least one primary-source citation matching our allowlist of authoritative hosts: federal government and education domains (.gov, .edu), the IRS, and Cornell Law (LII), Title 26. For example, material-participation rules for rentals trace to IRC §469 and IRS Pub 527. Secondary commentary may add context but never substitutes for the underlying statute, regulation, or IRS guidance.

Citation freshness

Tax law and IRS guidance change. Primary sources older than 24 months get a soft warning at review time; sources older than 60 months hard-fail until refreshed against the current Code, regulation, or publication revision. We distinguish what is currently in effect for a given tax year from what has since been amended, sunset, or superseded.

Author and reviewer

Content can be drafted by the editorial desk, but it must be reviewed by the reviewer of record before it publishes — author and reviewer are never the same person. The reviewer of record is carried in each post's reviewedBy field, which is the single source of truth, and reviewer bios live at /reviewers/{name}.

Disclaimer policy

Every guide carries a versioned disclaimer block at the top and in the footer, tracked via disclaimerVersion and never edited inline. The STR Ledger explains general tax principles — it does not give advice for any specific reader's facts. Every tax guide closes with a reminder to consult your CPA before relying on it. Your CPA files your return; the workbooks and guides only help you compute and organize the numbers.