Philadelphia Hotel & Occupancy Tax Calculator

A $200 room in Center City actually costs $232.50 a night. Philadelphia taxes hotel occupancy at a combined 16.25% — among the highest of any major US city — by stacking Pennsylvania’s 6% state tax with a 10.25% city hotel room rental tax that funds tourism marketing and the Pennsylvania Convention Center. This calculator multiplies your rate by your nights and applies the full stack, broken into the same components your folio will show.

What is inside the 16.25%

The state component is documented by the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue; the city component — including its tourism and convention sub-parts — by the City of Philadelphia. Short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo are generally required to collect and remit the same combined rate on Philadelphia bookings, so the tax appears on those receipts too.

The arithmetic

room subtotal = nightly rate × nights
state tax     = subtotal × 6%
city tax      = subtotal × 10.25%
grand total   = subtotal × 1.1625

Both percentage layers apply to the room subtotal only — they do not compound on each other.

Worked example

A $200 per night room for three nights has a $600 subtotal:

That is $97.50 of tax on a $600 room bill. Because the whole stack is percentage-based (Philadelphia has no flat per-night unit fee), cheap and expensive rooms are taxed proportionally alike — unlike New York, where a flat nightly fee stings budget rooms hardest.

How Philadelphia compares

Combined lodging taxes in major US cities cluster between 12% and 17%. Philadelphia’s 16.25% sits near the top of the band — try the same stay in our New York City hotel tax calculator (14.75% + $1.50/night) or the Memphis hotel tax calculator (~16.75%) to see how the structure differs city to city. The pattern is consistent: convention-center funding rides on visitors’ folios because visitors do not vote in city elections.

Reading the folio line by line

Philadelphia folios usually split the stack rather than quoting 16.25% as one line, and knowing the anatomy helps you audit the bill at checkout:

• Room charge × nights — the base everything keys off; promotional discounts should reduce this line before tax is computed.
• State occupancy tax — the 6% layer, sometimes labeled simply “PA tax”.
• City hotel/room rental tax — the 10.25% layer, occasionally shown as two or three sub-lines (hotel tax, tourism, convention assessment) that sum to 10.25%.
• Property fees — parking, urban/amenity fees, pet fees: hotel revenue, not tax, each with its own tax treatment.

If the percentage lines do not equal 16.25% of the room subtotal to the cent, the usual culprits are a mid-stay rate change (each night taxes at its own rate) or a fee that was folded into the taxable base.

Edge cases that change the bill

• 30-day stays. Occupancy beyond 30 consecutive days generally falls outside transient-occupancy taxation. Extended-stay guests should ask the property exactly when the tax stops accruing — practices differ on whether relief is retroactive to day one.
• Exempt organizations. Government employees on official business and qualifying exempt organizations can escape some layers with proper documentation presented at check-in — after checkout is usually too late.
• Resort and amenity fees. The occupancy tax applies to the room charge; separately-stated fees can carry different treatment, which is why folios sometimes show tax on the fee line and sometimes do not.
• Booking-site prepayment. When you prepay a package price on a third-party site, the tax is computed on the wholesale room component — the receipt can legitimately show slightly different figures than this estimate.

Budgeting rule of thumb

For quick trip math, multiply any advertised Philadelphia nightly rate by 1.1625 — or simply add a sixth. A conference block at $189/night is really $219.71; a week’s stay at that rate carries about $215 of tax. If you are comparing a Center City hotel against a suburban one outside the city (where only the 6% state layer applies), the 10.25% city layer is frequently larger than the price difference itself — which is exactly the comparison this calculator is built to make visible.

Sources

• City of Philadelphia — Hotel Tax
• Pennsylvania Department of Revenue

Estimate only. Rates are set by statute and ordinance and can change; verify against the official pages above for anything contractual. All math runs locally in your browser.