Generally, yes. Buying linens, coffee, light bulbs, batteries, paper goods and replacement hardware for a short-term rental is work done in connection with the activity, and Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T counts that kind of work toward the hour thresholds. The difficulty is not the rule. It is that supply runs produce the entries an examiner questions first: round half-hours, errands that also served the household, and totals that would not survive someone asking how long it actually takes to buy a box of light bulbs.
Why the rule is easy and the entry is hard
The regulations do not list approved tasks. Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(1) describes participation as work done in connection with an activity in which the taxpayer owns an interest, with narrow carve-outs — investor-type work, and work of a kind an owner would not customarily do if its principal purpose were to generate hours. Restocking a rental is ordinary operating work. Nobody seriously argues a supply run is investor activity.
What makes these entries fragile is that they are small, frequent, and almost never documented at the time. An owner remembers the fifteen or twenty trips they made over a season, writes them up in March at 1.5 hours each, and arrives at a tidy thirty hours. The hours may even be roughly right. The record is now a set of identical estimates with nothing behind them, which is a different thing from a record of what happened.
The entries that invite doubt
Three patterns do most of the damage, and all three show up in supply-run lines more than anywhere else in a host's log:
- Uniform time for variable tasks. Every store trip logged at exactly 1.5 hours, in a log where no entry is ever 40 minutes or 2 hours 10, reads as an estimate applied retroactively rather than a measurement.
- Time out of proportion to the task. An hour to order two shower curtains online, three hours to buy light bulbs. Courts assessing material participation claims have been willing to measure claimed time against how long a described task would plausibly take, drawing on ordinary experience. An entry that fails that test does not just get trimmed — it makes the reader doubt the entries around it.
- Volume without variety. Forty shopping entries and almost nothing else is a log built around a threshold rather than around a property.
One implausible line is expensive out of proportion to its size, because credibility is assessed log-wide. If a reviewer concludes that some of your entries were reconstructed to reach a number, the reasonable entries lose the benefit of the doubt too. That is the practical argument for recording less time, more precisely.
Errands that served the house as well as the rental
This is the common case, and it is where owners most often write down something they cannot defend. You stop at a warehouse store, buy towels and bulk coffee for the rental and groceries for your own kitchen, and the trip takes two hours door to door.
The hours attributable to the activity are the hours spent on the activity. A trip that served two purposes does not become fully deductible time because the rental was one of them, and it does not become zero because your own shopping was the other. In practice that means logging the portion of the trip genuinely spent on rental supplies — and saying in the entry that the trip was shared, rather than leaving a two-hour line that the receipt quietly contradicts.
An entry that discloses the split looks careful. An entry that hides it looks like one an examiner found rather than one you wrote.
How to record a supply run
Five fields, written the same day:
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Date | The actual date, not the week |
| Property | Which rental, by name or address |
| Minutes | Real elapsed time on rental work — 35, not 0.5 |
| Task | What you bought and why: "replaced two broken table lamps, bought bulbs and a surge strip" |
| Document | The receipt, and a note if the trip was shared with personal shopping |
The receipt is what distinguishes a supply-run entry from an assertion. It carries a date, a time stamp, a store, and a list of items — four facts that either corroborate your line or contradict it. In STR Tracker you can attach the receipt photo to the log entry itself, so the document and the minutes live in the same record instead of in a shoebox you will have to reconcile a year later. Our free log template has the same five columns if you would rather keep this on paper or in a spreadsheet first.
For the long form of this, see what a credible log entry looks like — the same discipline applied to ten ordinary entries.
Bulk runs for more than one property
If you own two or three rentals and buy for all of them in one trip, you have a small allocation problem rather than a licence to log the trip three times. Two defensible approaches, both of which you should discuss with your CPA or EA before relying on either:
- Log the trip once, against the property that drove it, and note in the description that supplies for the other properties were included.
- Split the minutes across the properties in proportion to the shopping, and keep the single receipt attached to each entry or to one entry the others reference.
Which one matters depends on whether you are testing material participation property by property or under a grouping election — and that is a question about your return, not about your log. What the log has to do either way is make the allocation visible, so the same trip never silently produces more hours than it took.
Reconstructing a season you did not log
If you are reading this in the middle of a tax year with nothing written down, the regulations do not require a contemporaneous daily log. Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(4) allows participation to be established by other reasonable means, including appointment books, calendars and narrative summaries that identify services performed and the approximate hours spent. IRS Publication 925 describes the same tests in plainer language.
"Other reasonable means" is not the same as a round estimate, though. For supply runs, the reconstruction that holds together is built from documents you already have: card statements, store receipts and order confirmations, each one producing an entry with a real date, a real store and a task you can describe. Trips you cannot tie to a document are the ones to leave out. Our guide on reconstructed versus contemporaneous logs walks through how far that gets you, and where it stops.
Find your weakest entry before someone else does
A useful habit, once a quarter: sort your log by minutes, descending, and read the top ten lines as a stranger would. Then read every entry that shares an identical duration with three or more others. One of those lines is your weakest, and it is almost always a shopping or errand entry.
Ask of it: what document supports this, and would the time surprise someone who has done the task? If the answer is uncomfortable, fix the entry now — correct the minutes, add the detail, note the shared trip, attach the receipt, or delete it. Correcting your own record during the year is ordinary record-keeping. Editing it after a notice arrives is something else.
What to write down
- Real minutes, the same day, for the rental portion of the trip only
- The property, by name, on every entry
- What you bought and the problem it solved, in one specific sentence
- The receipt, stored with the entry
- A one-line note whenever the trip also served your household or another property
None of this is about reaching a number. It is about making sure that if someone reads your thirty hours of supply runs line by line, each line reads like something that actually happened. Whether the resulting hours satisfy any particular test for you is a question for your CPA or EA, who will ask to see exactly these fields.