Transient occupancy

Definition

The tax status that keeps a guest a guest, and the day count that ends it.

Why It Matters

California hangs the whole distinction on the lodging tax: the landlord-tenant chapter applies to everyone who hires a dwelling unit except transient occupancy taxable as lodging, and that tax reaches an occupancy of thirty days or less. Past that the guest is a tenant and leaving becomes an eviction. The statute also closes the obvious workaround, barring an operator from making a residential-hotel occupant check out and re-register before thirty days to keep them transient, with a rebuttable presumption of that purpose and a civil penalty. Florida uses a different test entirely, asking whether a written agreement calls the unit the guest's sole residence, so a long-stay policy that travels between states does not.