Generally, no. Listening to a short-term rental podcast on the commute, working through a paid course, reading forum threads about a market you might buy into — none of that is work done in the operation of a rental you already own, and it does not belong in the hours you count toward a material participation test. The narrow exceptions are research aimed at a specific operating decision and routine bookkeeping for the activity itself. This post sorts the categories, and explains why the answer is to tag these hours rather than delete them.
Where the exclusion comes from
Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(1) describes participation as work done in connection with an activity in which the taxpayer owns an interest. Two carve-outs follow. Paragraph (f)(2)(i) excludes work not customarily done by an owner where a principal purpose was avoiding the passive loss rules. Paragraph (f)(2)(ii) excludes work done in the taxpayer's capacity as an investor — reviewing financial statements, preparing analyses for one's own use, monitoring the finances in a non-managerial way — unless the taxpayer is directly involved in the day-to-day management or operations.
Education sits outside the front half of that definition before the carve-outs even matter. A course about buying rentals is not work in connection with the rental you own. It is preparation to be a better owner, which is a fine use of an evening and a poor line in an hours log. The guide to what counts as participation covers the same boundary from the other direction, and an earlier post on investor hours works through the (f)(2)(ii) exclusion in detail.
Education: courses, podcasts, books, conferences
Treat these as not counting. That includes:
- Paid courses, cohorts and coaching programs
- Podcasts, YouTube channels and newsletters
- Books and conference sessions, including the travel to get there
- Forum and group participation about hosting in general
- Watching tutorials on software you are considering
The common thread is that none of it changes anything at the property. An examiner reading a log with eleven hours of "STR education" in a week is being told the owner studied, not that the owner operated. Those entries also tend to crowd out the entries that would have carried the log.
There is one honest nuance. Training that is part of doing a specific task — twenty minutes learning the dynamic pricing tool you actually use, in the session where you set your rates — is difficult to separate from the task, and most people log the task and stop splitting hairs. A weekend course is not that.
Research: it turns on whether a decision follows
Market research — reading about cap rates in a city you do not own in, pulling comps for a property you have not bought — is classic investor activity and generally does not count. Acquisition time is its own question, and it is not the same question as operating the rental you already have.
Research tied to a live operating decision about a property you own reads differently. Comparing three hot tub models before replacing the one that failed, pricing cleaners in your market before switching vendors, checking your city's new permit rules because your listing has to comply: that work is upstream of a decision you then make and implement. Many practitioners count it and log it as part of the decision, not as standalone study.
The distinction a log should make visible is whether something happened afterward. Research with a decision attached has a follow-on entry — the purchase, the vendor change, the permit filing. Research with nothing attached is reading.
Bookkeeping for the activity
Recording income and expenses for a rental you operate is ordinarily work in connection with the activity, and many practitioners count it. Categorizing transactions, reconciling the rental bank account, chasing a missing cleaner invoice, assembling the year's records — this is administrative operating work, and owners customarily do it.
Keep it proportionate and keep it specific. "Bookkeeping" as a recurring four-hour Sunday block, every Sunday, invites the question of what took four hours. "Reconciled September platform payouts to the bank, coded 34 transactions" does not.
Be aware of the boundary with (f)(2)(ii). Reviewing the statements after they are prepared, to see how the property is doing, is the investor activity the regulation names. Producing the records is operating work. Same evening, different lines.
Time with your CPA
It depends on what you discussed, and preparing your own tax return is the weakest case of the set. Return preparation is generally treated as a taxpayer obligation rather than participation in the rental activity, and IRS Publication 925 frames the passive loss rules around participation in the operations of the business.
A call with a CPA about whether to place a property in service before year end, or how to structure a co-host arrangement, is closer to an operating decision. A call about your personal return is not. If you log CPA time at all, write down the subject, and let your adviser decide what to exclude.
Does any of it count toward the 750-hour test?
This comes up because real estate professional status under IRC §469(c)(7) asks for more than 750 hours of services in real property trades or businesses, plus more than half of all personal services — a much larger number to reach, which tempts people to count study time. The test asks about services performed in those trades or businesses, and general education is not a service performed for anyone. Practitioners are, as a rule, conservative here, and the 750-hour test has proved unforgiving in litigation when logs were padded with soft categories.
The safer reading is that hours excluded from the material participation analysis are also excluded from the 750. Our 750-hour guide sets out what the test actually requires. If you have a specific reason to think otherwise, that is a question for your CPA, not for a blog.
Tag it, do not delete it
The reason to record excluded hours rather than skip them is that you will not remember, in March, whether the three hours on a Tuesday in June were a course or a contractor. A log that contains everything and labels it can be filtered. A log that contains only what you were confident about in the moment cannot be re-examined.
STR Tracker puts an activity category on every entry — guest communication, repairs and maintenance, financial and accounting, and so on — and totals hours by category in the report, so education and research entries can be separated out rather than quietly inflating a number. Whatever tool you use, the requirement is the same: a label that survives the year, applied when you write the entry.
What to write down
For each entry in this grey zone:
- The subject, not the category alone. "Researched replacement hot tubs, three quotes" beats "research".
- What it led to, if anything — the order placed, the vendor hired, the rate change made.
- The property, or "all properties" for genuine portfolio administration.
- A tag that marks it excluded when you know it is education, so the total you rely on is the total after exclusions.
Then run the filter once a quarter and look at what you have tagged. If a meaningful share of your hours is study rather than operation, the number you are watching is not the number that matters. Start a log that keeps the distinction, and ask your CPA which categories they want counted before you rely on the total.