If your short-term rental hours are short in October, the honest way to close the gap is to do work you would otherwise have hired out or deferred, and to log it in real minutes as you go. There is no way to describe your way to 100 hours; the Tax Court has rejected logs padded with uniform entries and standard blocks. There is, however, a lot of genuine operational work sitting in most properties between now and December 31, and twelve weeks is enough to do it. Here is a plan built around real tasks, in the order that makes sense for a property heading into winter.
Week 0: find your true number
Before adding anything, audit what you have. Open the log and check three things for the 2026 tax year:
- Per-property totals. Material participation is tested activity by activity. A combined number across two properties tells you nothing unless you have grouped them, which is a separate question for your CPA.
- Entries that would not survive. Round blocks, "on call" time, investor work like reviewing statements, and anything that reads as a guess. Subtract them mentally. That is your defensible total.
- Everyone else's hours. The 100-hour test in Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(a)(3) requires more than 100 hours and more than any other individual. Pull the cleaner's invoices and the handyman's bills, and estimate their hours from them. The gap you have to close is the larger of two: 100, or the top other participant's total plus one.
Write both numbers down. The 100-hour test guide explains the second half of the test, which is the half owners forget in Q4.
Weeks 1–4: the deferred maintenance list
Every STR has a list of things that were going to be hired out eventually. If you can do them competently, this is the month. Real repairs are the strongest hours a host has, because they leave evidence: parts receipts, before-and-after photos, a visible change in the property.
Candidates that commonly fit a fall calendar:
- Caulk and seal windows and exterior doors; replace weatherstripping.
- Service or clean the HVAC filters and vents, dryer vent, range hood.
- Repair the small things guests have mentioned all season: a loose railing, a sticking lock, a slow drain, a wobbly chair.
- Touch-up paint in high-traffic rooms.
- Gutter cleaning and downspout checks, if you are comfortable doing it safely.
- Replace worn linens, towels and kitchen items, and log the inventory count, not just the shopping.
Log each as its own entry with the actual duration. "Replaced weatherstripping on three exterior doors, 1h 40m, hardware receipt attached" is an hour and forty minutes that will hold. "Maintenance, 4h" is not.
If a task is beyond you, hiring it out is fine. Then log only the time you actually spent: scoping, sourcing, meeting the contractor, inspecting the result. Time watching someone else work is not participation; the court in Hairston (T.C. Memo 2019-104) gave no credit for a week logged "supervising" painters.
Weeks 5–8: the listing, the pricing, the photos
The middle of the quarter is the time for operational work that does not require a vacant property.
- Listing refresh. Rewrite the description, update the amenities list, redo the house manual, check every automated message for accuracy. Log the session with what changed.
- Pricing review. Set the holiday and shoulder-season calendar, adjust minimum stays, review the past year's occupancy by month. Setting prices for your own property is operational; reading market reports for their own sake leans toward investor time, which Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(2)(ii) excludes. Log the decision, not the reading.
- Photography. Stage, shoot and edit new photos, or coordinate a photographer and select the images. Both are real hours if they are actual hours.
- Guest communication. Inquiries pick up before the holidays. Log each response as the minutes it took, with the thread date in the notes.
These tasks tend to produce many short entries. That is fine and, in fact, credible. A log of twenty-minute and forty-five-minute entries on different days looks like a business being run.
Weeks 9–12: winterization, inventory, deep clean
Late in the quarter the property needs the work that protects it through winter, and much of it is yours to do if you choose.
- Winterize exterior plumbing, hoses and irrigation; insulate exposed pipes; set thermostat schedules.
- Inspect and stock heating-related supplies: firewood, space heater checks, smoke and CO detector batteries.
- Deep clean the areas a turnover does not reach: behind appliances, inside cabinets, upholstery, mattress protectors.
- Full inventory of supplies and consumables against a list; reorder and restock.
- Walk the property with a punch list and photograph each item done.
Each of these produces its own corroboration. Keep it attached to the entry.
What not to do
The temptation in December is to make the log say what you need it to say. Three patterns the Tax Court has specifically called out:
- Uniform entries. In Hairston, 121 of 360 calendar entries were exactly one hour, including 36 for receiving a rent check or making a deposit. The court called it a pattern of inflation and found the total overstated by at least 150 hours.
- Standard blocks. In Mirch (T.C. Memo 2025-128), seven hours of cleaning per stay and eight hours of "on call" time per rented day produced 944.5 claimed hours and 7.4 counted.
- Padded routine tasks. Lucero (T.C. Memo 2020-136) is cited for a log whose credibility suffered when routine entries did not fit the tasks they described.
The common thread is that one implausible pattern taints the entries around it. If you did the work, log the minutes. If you did not, the plan above is a list of work to do, not a list of things to write.
Recompute the comparison in early December
Adding hours on your side changes only half of the test. If the cleaner's turnovers continued through the fall, their total moved too. Before you call the year done, put the numbers side by side:
| Person | Basis of estimate | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| You | Dated log, minute-level | ___ |
| Cleaner | Invoices × average turnover time | ___ |
| Handyman | Invoices, job descriptions | ___ |
| Co-host or manager | Task log or written estimate | ___ |
If anyone's line is close to yours, your CPA needs to know now, while there is still a December to work with. STR Tracker's per-property progress dashboard shows your hours against the goal and against the other participants you have entered, which is the comparison this table makes by hand.
Book the CPA call for early December
The hours have to be real by December 31, but the conversation should happen before that. Bring the per-property totals, the other-participants table, the average-stay figure, and the entries you flagged as questionable in week 0. Ask which material participation test the preparer expects to rely on and whether anything you logged this quarter will be excluded. The year-end hours checklist lists what else to have ready.
Twelve weeks of genuine work is a normal quarter for a self-managed property. It is only unusual if the log has been empty until now, and the fix for that is to log the work you were going to do anyway, as you do it. If you are starting from a blank page, start a free trial this week and log the first winterization task tonight.