Generally, yes. Work you do yourself on a short-term rental — replacing a leaking valve, patching drywall, rehanging a door, swapping a lock — is work done in connection with the activity, and Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T counts that kind of work toward the hour thresholds in the material participation tests. Repairs are usually the strongest entries in a host's log, because each one leaves a part, a receipt and a visible change behind. The risk is not that repair hours fail to count. It is that they get written down in round numbers nothing supports.
Why repair hours read as credible
The regulation does not publish a list of qualifying tasks. Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(1) describes participation broadly as work done in connection with an activity in which the taxpayer owns an interest, and then carves out two categories. Paragraph (f)(2)(ii) excludes work done in an investor capacity — reviewing financial statements, compiling analyses, monitoring the finances without managing anything. Paragraph (f)(2)(i) excludes work not customarily done by an owner if a principal purpose of doing it was to avoid the passive loss rules.
Hands-on repair work sits outside both exclusions in the ordinary case. Nobody is going to argue that fixing the property's plumbing is an investor activity, and property owners have customarily repaired their own property for as long as there have been property owners. That is why a repair entry tends to survive scrutiny better than a line that says "reviewed performance" or "planning."
Cleaning and turnovers sit in a slightly different place, because there the questions are about substantial services and about whether the work is customarily done by an owner. The guide to whether cleaning counts walks through that distinction. Repairs raise it far less often.
Proportionality: a faucet is not six hours
The single fastest way to damage an otherwise honest log is to claim time that does not match the task described. A reader who knows what the work involves can tell when a cartridge swap is written down as half a day, and one implausible line invites a closer look at every other line on the page.
So log actual elapsed minutes, not a comfortable round figure:
- Replacing a faucet cartridge: 30 to 60 minutes, more if the shutoff is seized
- Patching and repainting a drywall ding: 45 minutes, plus a second visit to sand and finish
- Rekeying two exterior locks: 30 minutes
- Diagnosing and resetting a tripped GFCI that killed the bathroom outlets: 20 minutes
- Replacing a garbage disposal: 90 minutes to three hours depending on the plumbing
Real work runs long for real reasons, and those reasons belong in the entry. A 20-minute job that became three hours because the shutoff valve failed and the supply line had to be replaced is entirely plausible — when the note says so. The same three hours with no explanation is the entry a reviewer circles. The post on what a credible log entry looks like goes through the anatomy of the line itself.
Log the false starts, too. The trip where the part turned out to be wrong, the failed diagnosis, the hour spent waiting for a supplier to open — those are hours actually spent on the activity, and they make the record read like a record rather than a reconstruction.
Receipt plus photo equals corroboration
A repair is the rare participation hour that produces third-party evidence without any extra effort. The hardware store receipt is time-stamped and itemized. The part number matches the fixture. A photograph of the failure and a photograph of the finished work bracket the entry.
Keep the three together. A log line that says "2:10 pm–3:25 pm, replaced kitchen faucet cartridge, unit 2" is fine on its own; the same line with the receipt for the cartridge and a photo of the old one on the counter is much harder to wave away. In STR Tracker, files attach to the individual entry rather than to a shared folder, so the receipt and the photos stay tied to the hour they support instead of drifting into a pile that has to be re-matched years later.
Two habits make this cheap. Photograph the receipt at the register before it goes in your pocket, and photograph the work area before you start, not just after you finish. The before shot is the one people forget and the one that actually establishes there was something to repair.
Getting there and getting the parts
Trips to the hardware store and to the property are part of the job, and whether that time counts is its own question with real disagreement behind it. The post on travel time covers what the Tax Court has accepted and refused, and why local trips to a nearby property generally read differently than long-haul travel.
Two practical points regardless of how that question is resolved for you. Record the trip as its own line with its own purpose rather than folding it into the repair, so the two can be separated later without rebuilding the log. And when one supply run serves a personal errand as well, either split the time or leave it out entirely. Mixed-purpose trips are a known weak point, and a log that contains a few obviously commingled errands invites doubt about the rest of it.
Bulk runs for several properties have the same fix: allocate the minutes across the properties they served, note the basis for the split in the entry, and keep the single receipt attached to one of them with a cross-reference.
Repairs you hired out
When a contractor does the work, the contractor's hours are not yours. What is yours is the coordination: diagnosing the problem, getting quotes, scheduling, meeting them on site, inspecting the work, handling the invoice. Log that, in actual minutes, and describe it as coordination rather than as the repair.
Then log the contractor's hours as well, on their side of the ledger. Several of the material participation tests turn on comparisons — the 100-hour test in Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(a)(3) requires that your participation be at least 100 hours and not less than the participation of any other individual, including people paid to work on the property. IRS Publication 925 describes the same framework. A half-day plumbing visit is a real block of someone else's time, and it is much easier to capture the day it happens than to estimate from an invoice in February.
A maintenance calendar you can log against
Scheduled maintenance produces hours every year and is the easiest category to forget entirely. Put the recurring items on a calendar so each one becomes an entry when it is done: HVAC filters and service, smoke and carbon monoxide detector batteries, water heater flush, gutter clearing, deck and exterior inspection, appliance descaling, caulk and grout, exterior door hardware, pest treatment, seasonal opening and closing.
None of these takes long. Together, across a year and across several properties, they are a meaningful block of hours that mostly goes unrecorded because it does not feel like an event.
What to write down for every repair
- Date, and the actual start and end time
- Which property, and which unit or room
- The specific fault and the specific fix, in one plain sentence
- Minutes actually spent, including diagnosis, second trips and waiting
- Parts and their cost, with the receipt attached
- Photos before and after
- Anyone else who worked on it, and for how long
- Whether the work was a repair or an improvement — note it and let your preparer decide
That last point is a separate question from hours. Whether a cost is a deductible repair or a capitalized improvement turns on rules that have nothing to do with §469, and the answer does not change whether the time counts. Flag it and ask your CPA rather than deciding it inside your log.
If your repairs currently live in a mix of text threads, receipts in a drawer and memory, the cheapest fix is to start recording them as they happen rather than reconstructing them in March. You can start a log and have the next repair in it the same day.