No — buying the furniture in December does not get you the deduction in December. Depreciation starts when property is placed in service, not when you pay for it, and for a rental that means the unit is ready and available to rent. If your short-term rental is not rent-ready until January, the furniture you bought in December is deducted on next year's return. The purchase date does not control it; the rent-ready date does. Here is what that costs and what you can still do about it.
When is a short-term rental actually placed in service?
A rental is placed in service when it is ready and available for its intended use — finished, furnished, functional, and genuinely offered for rent. Not when a guest arrives. Not when the first booking lands. A unit that is listed, bookable, and operationally ready on December 28 is placed in service in 2026 even if nobody checks in until February.
The flip side is stricter than owners expect. A unit with the beds still boxed in the garage, no working heat, or no listing anywhere a guest could find it is not available for rent, no matter how much money you spent in December. The furniture sitting inside it rides on the same date as the property itself: it is not in service in your rental activity until the activity is open for business.
This is also why the furniture question and the building question cannot be separated. The reclassified components a study carves out of the building — flooring, cabinetry, specialty electrical, appliances, land improvements — are governed by the same placed-in-service date as the sofa. Miss December 31 and the entire first-year deduction moves, not just the part you bought at the furniture store.
What missing December 31 actually costs: a worked example
Take a $540,000 short-term rental closing in late November 2026, with land at roughly 15% of the price, leaving about $459,000 of depreciable basis. A documented study on a furnished STR of that size commonly reclassifies around 30% — call it $137,700 of 5-, 7-, and 15-year property. Separately, the owner spends about $38,000 furnishing it: beds, seating, televisions, kitchenware, linens, patio furniture, and appliances.
With 100% bonus depreciation restored for property acquired (contract signed) and placed in service after January 19, 2025, both buckets are fully deductible in the first year the unit is in service. At a 32% marginal federal rate:
• The reclassified $137,700 is worth about $44,064 of federal tax saved.
• The $38,000 of furnishings is worth about $12,160.
• Together, roughly $56,200 of first-year federal tax savings.
Now the only variable that matters: if the unit is rent-ready and listed by December 31, that $56,200 lands on the 2026 return. If the final cleaning, the last delivery, or the listing slips to January 3, the identical $56,200 lands on the 2027 return instead — a full year later. The deduction is not lost. It is deferred twelve months, which at a 7% return costs about $3,900 in time value, and considerably more if 2026 is the year you actually had the income to absorb it.
Does the de minimis safe harbor let you deduct it sooner?
Not past the placed-in-service wall, no. The de minimis safe harbor election lets a taxpayer without an applicable financial statement expense items at or below $2,500 per invoice line rather than capitalizing them, which is genuinely useful for linens, small appliances, lamps, and kitchenware. What it changes is how an item is deducted, not when your rental activity begins.
Costs you incur before the rental is open for business are generally start-up expenditures rather than current deductions. Those follow their own rule: up to $5,000 deductible in the year the activity begins, with the remainder amortized over 180 months. So pre-opening spending does not vanish, but it does not accelerate into the prior year either — and amortizing it is worse than the bonus depreciation a few earlier days would have bought.
Does waiting until January cost you the 100% bonus?
No. Furniture bought in late 2026 and placed in service in early 2027 still qualifies for 100% bonus depreciation, because both tests — acquired after January 19, 2025, and placed in service after that date — are satisfied either way. You keep the rate. You simply claim it a year later.
How to get a unit placed in service before year end
If the deduction needs to land in 2026, the work is operational rather than clever. Finish the furnishing and installation. Get utilities on and heat working. Complete any certificate or registration your municipality requires before a unit may be rented. Publish the listing with real availability on the calendar at a real nightly rate, and keep the screenshot. Keep the invoices and delivery dates for everything you placed in the unit, and keep a dated photo set of the finished rooms.
That last item does double duty. A dated photo set of a fully furnished, rent-ready unit is also the single most useful document a study relies on when it allocates your 5- and 7-year property, which is why we ask for it. If you want the deduction in the year you are claiming it, prove the unit was open for business in that year.
For the mechanics of how individual furnishings get classified and depreciated once the unit is open, our walk-through of short-term rental furniture and appliance depreciation goes line by line, and the placed-in-service date itself gets its own full treatment. The savings calculator on our homepage will put a first-year number on your own property in about a minute.
One caveat before December gets away from you: if the unit genuinely will not be ready, forcing a listing live on December 30 with no heat and no beds is not a tax strategy. Placed-in-service is a question of fact, and a reviewer tests facts. Every study we deliver is built to be audit-ready and passes a documented quality-control review.