Hotel And Lodging Tax In West Virginia 2026: TOT Rates By City

How West Virginia's Hotel and Lodging Tax Works

West Virginia does not set a statewide hotel or lodging tax rate. The tax that applies to a hotel stay is entirely local: each county and each municipality decides on its own, by ordinance or commission order, whether to impose a hotel occupancy tax and at what rate, so what a guest pays depends entirely on the specific city or county where the hotel sits.

Authority for this tax comes from two separate parts of state law. Counties impose their version under W. Va. Code Chapter 7, Article 18 (the county hotel occupancy tax), while municipalities impose theirs under W. Va. Code Section 8-13-3 (part of Chapter 8's municipal taxation and finance provisions). Both statutes trace back to a single 1985 grant of authority letting local governments tax hotel occupancy for the first time, and both work the same way in practice: the tax is charged to the guest and collected by the hotel operator as part of the room charge.

A county's hotel occupancy tax only reaches hotels located outside the corporate limits of any municipality in that county. A county commission cannot tax a hotel sitting inside a city, since the city itself has that authority instead. That means every hotel in West Virginia answers to exactly one local taxing authority, never both a county and a city at once, though the two jurisdictions can and often do set different rates from each other. The tax covers hotels, motels, inns, and similar short-term lodging; bed and breakfasts, tourist homes, and similar lodging are covered by a related but separate state consumers sales tax rather than the local occupancy tax itself.

‍

Tax Rates and Extra Fees

Because West Virginia leaves the rate entirely to local governments, the range runs from the original 3% base rate up to the statutory 6% ceiling, and neighboring towns in the same county can land at different points on that scale. The table below reflects rates confirmed with the individual county or municipality, or with West Virginia's own State Tax Division directory of local hotel occupancy tax contacts.

Where a resort district has its own service fee, as at Snowshoe, that fee is layered on top of the county's hotel occupancy tax rather than replacing it, so a guest's total lodging tax burden in a resort market can run higher than the base county rate alone suggests. State law also restricts how counties and cities can spend hotel occupancy tax proceeds: the money is earmarked for tourism and convention promotion, convention facility construction and maintenance, or paying down bonds issued for those facilities, rather than going into a locality's general fund for unrelated spending. A 2021 amendment (SB 488) added independent-audit requirements for any convention and visitors bureau that receives a share of these proceeds and placed a moratorium, running through June 30, 2026, on creating new bureaus eligible to receive them.

‍

Collection and Remittance

The guest pays the hotel occupancy tax as part of the room charge, and the hotel operator is responsible for collecting it and remitting it to the correct local authority, whether that is a city finance office or a county sheriff's tax office. There is no single state filing: since the West Virginia Tax Division does not administer this tax, an operator with properties in more than one jurisdiction may owe separate returns to separate local offices, each on its own schedule. Charleston, for example, requires operators to file a monthly return and remit by the 15th day of the month following collection, with penalties starting at five percent for a late first month.

Since January 1, 2022, West Virginia law has also required marketplace facilitators, meaning online travel agencies and similar booking platforms that collect payment on a hotel's behalf, to collect and remit the hotel occupancy tax themselves on the bookings they facilitate. That shifts remittance responsibility for OTA-sourced bookings away from the hotel operator for that portion of the transaction, but the hotel still needs to reconcile what the platform collected against what it reports to each local authority.

‍

Exemptions From West Virginia's Hotel Tax

A guest who occupies a hotel room for 90 or more consecutive days is exempt from the local hotel occupancy tax under the statute governing municipal taxation, a threshold mirrored in practice by county ordinances as well. This is a much longer stay than what many operators assume, and hotels should keep documentation showing the stay was continuous from day one, since a broken or interrupted stay does not qualify.

Government bookings carry a narrower exemption than many operators expect. Charleston's ordinance, typical of how West Virginia municipalities handle this, exempts a room only when it is billed directly to the federal government, the State of West Virginia, or one of the state's political subdivisions. A government employee who pays for a room out of pocket and later gets reimbursed by their employer does not qualify for the exemption, even though the government ultimately covers the cost.

‍

Common Mistakes Hotels Make With TOT Compliance

• Assuming a 30-day exemption applies to the occupancy tax. West Virginia's consumers sales tax exempts stays over 30 consecutive days as a "permanent place of abode," but the separate local hotel occupancy tax exemption threshold is 90 consecutive days, not 30.
• Treating county and municipal rates as interchangeable. A property just outside a city's corporate limits may owe the county's rate instead of the city's, and the two rates are frequently different, as seen with Harpers Ferry's 5% against Charles Town's 6% in the same county.
• Exempting a government booking paid by a reimbursed employee. Only rooms billed directly to a government entity qualify for the government exemption; a stay an employee pays for and expenses later remains taxable.
• Missing the resort service fee in a stacked market. In areas like Snowshoe, an operator that remits only the base county occupancy tax and skips the resort district's additional fee under-collects on every booking.
• Relying on a single statewide filing process. Because the West Virginia Tax Division does not administer this tax, a multi-property operator has to track separate due dates and remittance addresses for every county or city where it operates.
• Forgetting to reconcile OTA-collected tax. Since marketplace facilitators became responsible for collecting and remitting the tax on their own bookings in 2022, a hotel that also remits tax on those same reservations risks double-paying or under-reporting if it doesn't reconcile platform reports against its own records.

‍

Where A PMS Fits Into TOT Compliance

With no statewide default rate to fall back on, a property management system has to know which of West Virginia's roughly 55 counties and hundreds of municipalities a given hotel sits in, apply that specific local rate to every folio, and flag the handful of markets, like Snowshoe's resort district, where a second fee stacks on top. A PMS that stores the correct local rate per property, tracks stay length against the 90-day exemption threshold automatically, and separates OTA-collected tax from tax the property itself owes gives an operator a much cleaner audit trail than trying to reconstruct all of that by hand at filing time.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Does West Virginia have a statewide hotel tax rate?

No. West Virginia does not impose a hotel tax at the state level. The only hotel tax a guest pays is set locally, by a county under W. Va. Code Chapter 7, Article 18, or by a municipality under W. Va. Code Section 8-13-3, and the rate depends entirely on which local jurisdiction the hotel is in.

2. What is West Virginia's hotel tax?

West Virginia's hotel tax is formally called the hotel occupancy tax. It is a privilege tax charged to the guest and collected by the hotel operator as part of the room charge, and each county or municipality that chooses to impose it sets its own rate, up to a statutory ceiling of 6% of the room charge.

3. What is West Virginia's lodging tax?

"Lodging tax" is another name for the same charge as the hotel occupancy tax described above. West Virginia does not distinguish between "hotel tax," "lodging tax," "occupancy tax," and "bed tax": all four terms refer to the local tax imposed on the rental of a hotel room.

4. How long does a guest have to stay to be exempt from West Virginia's hotel tax?

A guest who occupies a hotel room for 90 or more consecutive days is exempt from the local hotel occupancy tax. That is a separate, longer threshold than the 30-day "permanent place of abode" rule that applies to West Virginia's consumers sales tax on lodging, so operators should not assume the two exemptions share the same day count.

5. Does West Virginia require hotels to disclose resort fees or other charges up front?

Roommaster could not verify a West Virginia statute that specifically requires all-in or upfront pricing disclosure for hotel resort fees or similar add-on charges, beyond the general consumer protection standards that apply to any retail transaction in the state.

6. Who is responsible for filing and remitting West Virginia's hotel occupancy tax?

The hotel operator is responsible for collecting the tax from guests and remitting it to the county or municipality that imposed it, since the West Virginia Tax Division does not administer this tax itself. Since January 1, 2022, marketplace facilitators such as online travel agencies must also collect and remit the tax on the bookings they process on a hotel's behalf.

7. Can a hotel be taxed by both a county and a city in West Virginia?

No. West Virginia Code specifically bars a county from imposing its hotel occupancy tax on hotels located inside the corporate limits of a municipality within that county. Every hotel in the state is subject to exactly one local hotel occupancy tax, either the county's or the city's, never both at once.