IRC Section 280A(g) is a narrow rule with a plain result. Rent out a personal residence for 14 days or fewer in a tax year and you do not report the rental income. It came out of Augusta, Georgia, where homeowners rented to Masters crowds. It applies anywhere, including Los Angeles.
The self-rental version: your business rents your home for a legitimate business use, pays you fair market rent, deducts the rent, and you exclude the income. Fifteen days breaks it. The exclusion is all or nothing, and the count includes every day the home was rented that year, not just the days your company used it.
What has to be true
A real business use. A board meeting, an annual planning session, a partner offsite. Something you would have held somewhere and paid for. A "meeting" that is a family dinner is not a business use.
Fair market rent. What a comparable space in your market actually charges for the same block of time. Not a number you like.
A paper trail. A written rental agreement between you and the entity, an invoice, an actual payment from the business account, an agenda, and notes or minutes from the meeting. Comparable quotes for the rate, dated and saved.
Setting the rent
Price the space, not the story. Pull written quotes for meeting or event space of similar size in your area, save them with the date, and pick a rate inside that range. Keep the quotes in the file with the agreement.
No published percentage or dollar threshold makes a rate automatically safe. There is no safe harbor here. What protects you is a rate you can source to real comparables and produce years later.
Entity notes
An S corporation or C corporation is the cleaner fact pattern: a separate entity paying rent to its owner, with a corporate resolution and a check. A single-member LLC taxed as a disregarded entity is the same taxpayer on both sides of the deal, which makes it much harder to support.
Also check the other side of the ledger. Rent paid to an owner can hit related-party rules, and if the business use is thin the deduction can be challenged even where the exclusion holds.
Where these fall apart
Round numbers with nothing behind them. A rate no comparable supports. Minutes written the week the notice arrives. Rent accrued but never paid. Fourteen days that turn out to be fifteen once the summer sublet is counted.
The exclusion is real and available. It is also small, precise, and entirely dependent on contemporaneous documentation. Set the rate before the meeting, pay it from the business account, and keep the file where you can find it.
If you own a business and a home in Los Angeles and want to know whether this fits your facts, bring your entity structure and last year's return to a consultation.