Paris loves taxes. Loves them! They (literally) make the trains run on time, and fund the libraries, and support that wild and expansive social safety net we Americans keep hearing about. Now, with the Olympics coming up, those taxes are going up — at least one of them will definitely impact your credit card statement if you’ll be staying in Paris this year. The hotel tax — known in some quarters as tourist taxes, the taxe de séjour, and also as the Olympics tax — is going up.

Visitors to Paris have already been surprised to see these higher-than-usual taxes on their bills — but the Olympics tax does not, of course, wait for the Olympics. Rather, they came into effect on January 1, 2024. In 2023, the nightly hotel tax started at €1 for one-star hotels, holiday villages, guest rooms and hostels, rising to €5 for “palace”-level establishments, like Le Bristol and the Four Seasons George V.

Now, the cheapest tier is €2.60, while the palace level is €14.95 — and those are all calculated per night, not per stay. If you’re bunking at the Four Seasons, an extra €100 on the bill at the end of the week might not matter much, when you’re paying €1200 a night for the room — but for all of us staying in two-star hotels, an extra €3.25 per night could register as an unpleasant little surprise. [See here for a complete breakdown of all the price increases, at each level of accommodation.]

Of course, this is totally separate from the (much) higher hotel room rates you’ll see from late July through mid-August, when the XXXIII Olympic Summer Games kick off in Paris. (Specifically, from July 26 – August 11.) Quite average one-bedroom Airbnbs are now fetching $500 per night, while five-star hotels like the Barrière Group’s Fouquet’s Paris is nothing short of $6,000 per night — if they have availability for your dates. (Maybe that extra €14.95 supplement per night isn’t the worst thing about staying in Paris this summer.) And we’ll note it’s part of a larger trend that is not at all specific to France, with perennially oversubscribed destinations like Amsterdam, Iceland and Venice in varying stages of considering-to-implementing similarly sizable tourist taxes — and they’re not even hosting the Olympics.