Seattle's lodging taxes, at city scale and for one night. Drag the assumptions and watch where the money lands. Every default traces to a public document — the sources are at the bottom, and every figure here can be recomputed from them.
The market
Scales total lodging revenue. 100% = the most recent actual year.
In 2024 about 11.4% — roughly one lodging dollar in nine.
The rules
The moment this leaves zero, two clauses fire: the convention-center tax may no longer be levied on those rentals at all (RCW 36.100.040(4)(a)(ii)), so the 7% does not stack — it disappears — and the quarterly passthrough to the City ends (14)(c). The city then collects its own, and pays to collect it.
Credited out of the state's sales-tax share for bond debt only (RCW 36.100.040(5)). It is not revenue the apparatus keeps: under (6)(a)–(b) the district must transfer the state an annual payment equal to that revenue plus interest every June 30, and only a shortfall becomes a state loan — it has drawn four times in four years, $35.9M. So it is a liquidity facility, and it is excluded from the apparatus total below. It expires July 1, 2029 — untick to see the world after that. Note it sits in a subsection with no short-term-rental carve-out, so it survives even if the city taxes short-term rentals.
Where a year of Seattle lodging tax lands
The cliff
What the City of Seattle collects from short-term rentals, at every possible rate of its own tax. The first dollar of a city tax costs the whole passthrough — so this is a cliff, not a slope. What the statute forecloses is not the act but the increment.
One night, two bills
| On a room | Hotel guest | Airbnb guest |
|---|
Downtown hotels averaged $301 last July, by Visit Seattle's count.
The district attributes 367,375 room nights to its own events in 2024, and those stays generate an estimated $5 million of the $93.5 million Seattle’s hotels sent it that year — about a dollar in nineteen. The gap between who is taxed and who is served is the whole argument, and it is in the district’s own numbers. (Note: the widely-quoted “3% of room nights” ratio is computed against a METRO denominator; the 7% is levied only inside Seattle, so the dollar share above is the apples-to-apples figure.)
Assumptions
= $93,491,443 of "regular" lodging tax ÷ 7% (FY2024 audit).
= $12.06M remitted ÷ 7% — the 2024 actual, so both sides of the ratio are the same year (Seattle Office of Economic & Revenue Forecasts, 2024 year-end revenue report). The City's 2026 adopted budget projects $12.5M; that is a later year, not this one.
~71 downtown hotels, set to reproduce the reported STIA of about $24M against the ~$1.34B citywide base. The bureau's and the district's own reported range is $23–26M, so this is the softest number on the page — move it and watch the ratio.
A business-improvement-area fee, not a tax. Carried from prior reporting.
The district's 3/27/2018 minutes valued the City's avoided administration at $3–4M setup plus $1.5–2M a year.
The 8.7% sales component is roughly 6.5 state + 2.2 local; the district credits 2.0 out of the state's share. ⚠ This split is DERIVED, not published by DOR — and "local" is city, county and transit together, at rates frozen for lodging by the 2000 cap. Not all of it is city money.
Today's passthrough is earmarked by statute. A city's own tax would not be — it would be spendable however the ordinance says.
Sources. Rates: Washington Department of Revenue, Lodging Rates and Changes, Quarter 3 2026 — a 15.7% total and a 7% convention-and-trade-center line on Seattle hotels and short-term rentals alike; the sales component is printed as the difference, 8.7%. Statute: RCW 36.100.040 — (4)(a)(ii) the no-stacking exclusion, (4)(b) the 7% Seattle rate, (5) the additional 2% credited against the state share for bond debt only and expiring July 1, 2029, (6)(a)–(b) the district's obligation to transfer that same amount back to the state each June 30 with interest — which is why the 2% is shown here as repayable and excluded from the apparatus total — and (14) the quarterly remittance to the City for community-initiated equitable development and affordable housing. Hotel revenue derived from the WSCC PFD FY2024 audited financial statements ("Lodging tax — regular," $93,491,443). Short-term-rental revenue derived from the 2024 actual remittance of $12.06 million (Seattle Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, 2024 year-end revenue report), so that both sides of the ratio sit in the same year. Room rate: Visit Seattle, as reported August 30, 2025 — downtown hotels sold 419,904 room nights in July 2025 at an average of $301. Assessment-district scale and the ~3% attributable-room-night figure are from prior reporting in this series. This is a model, not a forecast: it applies published rates to published revenue. Change an assumption and the arithmetic changes with it.