Who Doesn't Pay Accommodation Tax in Slovakia? Exemptions City by City

The one nationwide rule: temporary refuge (§ 38a)

The single exception applying across the whole country arrived with an amendment effective 30 March 2022. It is terse:

“A person granted temporary refuge under a special regulation is not a taxpayer.”

— § 38a of Act No. 582/2004 Coll.

Note the construction: this is not an exemption from a tax that would otherwise be owed — such a person is not a taxpayer at all. The Slovak Financial Directorate’s methodological guidance spells out the procedure for hosts: the payer “records them in the detailed register of accommodated persons, but does not count those persons’ overnight stays into the tax base.”

Three things that are routinely misunderstood about this provision:

• It is not a nationality. An odídenec is a person granted temporary refuge by the Slovak Ministry of the Interior under § 2(j) of Act No. 480/2002 Coll. on Asylum. A Ukrainian national without that status is not covered — and a person of any other nationality who has been granted it is.
• The document is not named after the statute. No guest will show you anything labelled odídenec; the current document is marked dočasné útočisko (temporary refuge). If you wait for the statutory term, you will reject a valid document.
• Record them, don’t charge them. The guest belongs in the guest register exactly like any other. Only their nights drop out of the tax base.

And one rule that is not an exemption: the 60-night cap

Under § 39 the tax base is the number of overnight stays, but no more than 60 stays per taxpayer with a single payer in one calendar year. From the 61st night with the same host no tax is collected — not because the guest is exempt, but because those nights are not counted into the base.

In practice this is a different line in the monthly return. Bratislava’s form, for instance, distinguishes nights not counted into the tax base, nights of exempt persons, nights on which the tax was collected by the payer’s representative, and nights on which it was collected by the payer — four separate categories.

Everything else lives in your city’s ordinance

The overview below shows how far apart cities are in practice. These are the municipalities whose exemption provisions we verified directly against the ordinance text:

Two cities 30 kilometres apart can therefore have completely different exempt categories — and the same child is exempt in Košice but taxable in Poprad. Rates and deadlines for further destinations are in our overview of accommodation tax rates.

The Bratislava trap: exemptions don’t apply to platform bookings

This is a provision most hosts have never read, and it touches nearly every Airbnb or Booking.com reservation:

“The exemption under § 10(1) of this ordinance is not granted where the paid temporary accommodation is intermediated between the payer and the taxpayer through digital platforms.”

— § 10(4), Ordinance No. 4/2023 of the Capital City of Bratislava

In other words: the same guest with the same disability card is exempt on a direct booking and not exempt on a platform booking in Bratislava. Entitlement does not depend on who the guest is, but on how the reservation reached you.

The other cities listed above have no such clause — Prešov and Nitra contain nothing of the kind, while Košice and Poprad regulate only the institution of the payer’s representative (i.e. how a platform would collect the tax on your behalf), which is not the same as voiding exemptions. If you operate in Bratislava, however, this is the first thing to check in your ordinance.

How exemptions are proven

Slovak ordinances are far more specific about proof than Czech statute — and mutually inconsistent. Bratislava’s ordinance assigns a different document to each type of exemption:

And it adds a duty that goes further than anything in Czech law: “All documents proving the ground for the taxpayer’s exemption shall be kept by the operator as part of the register of accommodated persons, in the form of an annex to the register.” (§ 10(3)). Bratislava wants not just the reason — it wants the documents retained as an annex to the guest register.

Compare with the others:

• Prešov requires the student to “demonstrate this fact to the payer by a school attendance confirmation at the time of accommodation” — so the document must be presented at check-in, not supplied later.
• Poprad is satisfied with a record in the register of accommodated persons. No document is archived.
• Košice lists the exempt categories without prescribing a specific document for each one.

Regardless of city, one baseline from the Financial Directorate’s guidance applies: the register contains name and surname, permanent address, date of birth, the number and type of identity document, and the length of stay — plus “further records needed to determine the tax correctly (e.g. exceeding the maximum number of overnight stays with the same payer, entitlement to a tax reduction, exemption from the tax).”

An exemption you fail to claim costs you money. An exemption you cannot document is an audit finding — the municipality compares the tax remitted against your register and asks why the number of taxed nights does not match the number of guests. See what to prepare for an inspection.

Three mistakes that cost money

1. Imported Czech rules. The most common error among hosts operating in both countries: in the Czech Republic, persons under 18 are exempt by statute in every municipality. In Slovakia that is a particular city’s choice. In a municipality whose ordinance has no age exemption, you owe tax on an infant — and if you did not collect it, you pay it yourself.

2. Confusing an exemption with a reduction. Nitra’s university students are not exempt; they have a reduced tax. In the return these are not the same: an exempt night is not counted into the tax base at all, a reduced night is counted, merely at a lower rate. Reporting a reduction as an exemption understates your tax base.

3. Assuming exemptions apply “automatically”. Even in cities that grant an exemption, entitlement does not arise by itself — it arises by being proven. If you do not ask a Prešov student for their school attendance confirmation at check-in, you have not claimed the exemption and the tax was yours to collect.

How Best Guest handles it

Best Guest holds exemptions as rules bound to a specific municipality, not as one nationwide setting — precisely because the Slovak catalogue of exemptions is municipal. Each property gets the set of exemptions its own city’s ordinance grants, including differences like Poprad’s seven-year threshold against Košice’s eighteen.

The guest selects the ground for exemption during online check-in and you confirm it before closing the reservation — for age-based grounds, entitlement is derived directly from the date of birth the guest entered, so the same person cannot be marked both a minor and a senior. Each exemption keeps the reason together with the citation of the ordinance provision it rests on, so at an inspection you are showing not just a number but its legal basis. Accommodation tax is then calculated only on the nights that genuinely belong in the tax base, and the monthly municipal return follows from that automatically.

Related pages

• How the local accommodation tax works
• Overview of accommodation tax rates in top destinations
• Accommodation tax in Košice
• Accommodation tax in Bratislava
• Host inspections: what to prepare
• Act No. 582/2004 Coll. on Local Taxes