DAC7 (EU Platform Reporting Directive)
DAC7 is the seventh amendment to the EU's Directive on Administrative Cooperation, adopted as Council Directive (EU) 2021/514. It obliges digital platform operators — including OTAs and short-term rental marketplaces — to collect, verify and report information about the sellers earning income through them, and to share it with EU tax authorities. Rental of immovable property is explicitly in scope, which puts accommodation platforms at the centre of the regime. The rules applied from 1 January 2023, with the first reports filed by 31 January 2024 and annually thereafter.
What must be reported
For each reportable seller, the platform reports identity and tax data — name, address, tax identification number, VAT number and, for entities, business registration — plus the address of each property listed, the land registry number where available, the number of days rented, and the consideration paid or credited each quarter net of fees, commissions and taxes withheld by the platform. Tax authorities in the reporting member state then exchange the data automatically with the seller's country of residence and the country where the property sits.
Excluded sellers
The directive carves out categories that do not need reporting, most notably government entities, listed entities, and — relevant to hotels — any seller for whom the platform intermediated more than 2,000 property rentals per year for a single listed property. This large-volume exemption is designed to exclude hotel chains and professional operators whose income is already visible to tax authorities, while capturing individual and small-scale hosts.
Example
A host with three apartments in Portugal listed on an OTA earns €41,000 across 180 nights in a year. The platform reports the host's tax ID, each property address, nights rented and quarterly net payouts to the tax authority of the member state where it is registered, which forwards the data to Portugal. A 400-room hotel on the same platform exceeding 2,000 bookings on its listing is an excluded seller and is not reported.
Why it matters
DAC7 ended the practical anonymity of short-term rental income in the EU and pushed platforms into a compliance role: they must collect tax identifiers before payout, verify them, and can be required to freeze payments or close accounts for sellers who refuse to supply data. For hosts it has meant retroactive assessments and a visible shift of supply toward properly registered operators. For hotels it has narrowed the informal-supply cost advantage that unregistered rentals enjoyed, and it sits alongside a broader tightening — registration schemes, the EU short-term rental data regulation, tourist tax collection at source — that is progressively formalising the rental side of accommodation distribution.
Related
See KYC for Hosts for the identity checks platforms run alongside DAC7, Tourist Tax (City Tax) for the other levy platforms increasingly collect, and DSA (Digital Services Act) and DMA (Digital Markets Act) for the wider EU platform regulation package.