Real Estate Professional Time Log: A Checklist That Holds Up

By Tom, CPA · Updated October 27, 2026

Part of: Rental Property Taxes

TL;DR: Real estate professional status depends on hours, and hours depend on proof. Keep a log as you go, record what you did, where, for which property and how long, and leave out investor-type and on-call time. Pub. 925 allows any reasonable method, but reconstructed estimates are where taxpayers most often lose.

Educational only, not tax, legal, or investment advice. Examples are illustrations, not predictions. Rules and limits change; verify current figures and talk to a qualified professional about your situation.

Your tenant pays the mortgage; the IRS pays for the roof over 27.5 years. If you qualify as a real estate professional, the IRS may also let that depreciation offset your other income. The price of admission is proof: more than 750 hours in real property trades or businesses in which you materially participate, more than half of all your working time, and material participation in the rentals themselves.

Pub. 925 says you can use any reasonable method to prove participation and do not have to keep contemporaneous daily time reports if you can establish participation another way, such as an appointment book, calendar or narrative summary. In practice, the closer your records are to a real-time log, the easier an exam goes. This checklist is built for that.

CPA Warning Label: If your log shows you working 26 hours on Christmas Day, the IRS will believe it about as much as your relatives did. Contemporaneous, specific and plausible beats big round numbers.

Contemporaneous logs

• [ ] Start the log on January 1 (or the day you begin), not in April of the following year.
• [ ] Record entries the same day or within a few days, using a calendar, app or spreadsheet with automatic timestamps where possible.
• [ ] Each entry has: date, start and end time or duration, property or activity, task, and who else was involved.
• [ ] Attach or reference evidence: emails, texts with tenants and contractors, receipts, mileage records, photos, invoices.
• [ ] Track spouse hours separately; for REPS each spouse's hours are counted separately, though for material participation spouse hours combine.
• [ ] Keep a parallel record of hours at any other job, because the more-than-half test compares real estate hours to all personal services.
• [ ] Summarize monthly totals so you can see whether you are on pace for 750 hours.
• [ ] Back up the log and keep it with the tax return for at least as long as the return can be examined.

What hours count

Hours count toward REPS if performed in real property trades or businesses in which you materially participate. Pub. 925 lists real property trades or businesses: development or redevelopment, construction or reconstruction, acquisition, conversion, rental or leasing, operation or management, and brokerage.

• [ ] Showing units, screening and meeting tenants.
• [ ] Negotiating and signing leases.
• [ ] Doing repairs and maintenance yourself, and meeting contractors on site.
• [ ] Supervising renovations and turnovers.
• [ ] Collecting rent and handling tenant issues.
• [ ] Searching for and acquiring properties, if you are in the acquisition trade or business (this can be a gray area for pure investors).
• [ ] Bookkeeping that is part of day-to-day management, not just reviewing statements.
• [ ] Travel time directly tied to these tasks, kept reasonable.

Employee hours in real estate (for example, as a leasing agent at a company) count only if you are a more-than-5% owner of the employer.

Investor-type hours that don't

Pub. 925 says work done as an investor does not count as participation unless you are directly involved in day-to-day management or operations. Investor work includes:

• [ ] Studying and reviewing financial statements or reports on operations.
• [ ] Preparing summaries or analyses of finances or operations for your own use.
• [ ] Monitoring the finances or operations of the activity in a nonmanagerial capacity.

Also exclude or treat with care:

• [ ] Time "on call" waiting for tenant calls that never came.
• [ ] Education, seminars and podcasts about real estate investing.
• [ ] Work not customarily done by owners and done mainly to avoid the passive loss rules.
• [ ] Excessive or duplicated travel time.
• [ ] Hours a property manager or cleaner worked; they are not your hours.

Sample log format

Illustration: To pass 750 hours, a landlord needs about 14.5 hours a week averaged over 52 weeks. If she also works 1,000 hours a year at another job, real estate hours must exceed 1,000 to meet the more-than-half test, about 19.3 hours a week. Full-time W-2 employees, with about 2,000 work hours, would need more than 2,000 real estate hours, which is why REPS is uncommon for them.

Tax court losses to learn from

Tax Court cases on REPS and material participation tend to turn on the same handful of facts. Lessons drawn from that body of cases:

• [ ] Logs reconstructed after the fact, especially after an exam starts, with round-number estimates, have often been given little weight.
• [ ] On-call time does not count. In Moss v. Commissioner, 135 T.C. 365 (2010), the Tax Court held that a taxpayer's "on call" time for his rental properties did not count toward the 750-hour requirement because he performed no actual work during those hours. The court also repeated its view that the regulations do not allow a post-event "ballpark guesstimate" of hours.
• [ ] Hours claimed that are implausible next to a full-time job are a red flag.
• [ ] Taxpayers who used a property manager for most day-to-day work had trouble showing material participation in the rentals themselves.
• [ ] Failing to make the election to treat all rentals as one activity has caused taxpayers who met the 750-hour test overall to fail material participation in individual properties. See the grouping election.

Read actual cases with care; facts drive outcomes, and this is not a substitute for reviewing your situation.

Reporting and year-end checks

• [ ] Total REPS hours over 750 and over half of all personal services.
• [ ] Material participation in each rental activity, or in the aggregated activity if you elected to combine rentals.
• [ ] Schedule E line 43 completed for real estate professionals (Pub. 925).
• [ ] Log and evidence stored with the return.
• [ ] For couples, confirm which spouse qualifies; see REPS spouse strategy.