Every March, the same conversation happens over coffee at the Marsh Landing clubhouse. Someone mentions a neighbor who rented out their house for tournament week and cleared enough to cover a year of country club dues. Someone else says they heard you can't do that here, not with the HOA rules. Both are half right, and the half they're missing is the part that actually matters.
The tournament itself is not the constraint. THE PLAYERS Championship runs a fixed, short window each year, and the federal tax code happens to reward exactly that kind of short window. What decides whether a Marsh Landing homeowner can use that window is a specific paragraph sitting in the community's own recorded covenants, a paragraph most people have never opened.
The Calendar Math Nobody Runs
THE PLAYERS Championship at TPC Sawgrass, less than a mile from Marsh Landing's gates, followed a Tuesday-through-Sunday format in 2026, running March 10 through March 15. For 2027, tournament week begins Monday, March 8, with the competition rounds set for Thursday through Sunday, March 11 to 14.
Stretch either version out to its full length, gates open to gates closed, and you land somewhere in the six to eight day range.
| Year | Tournament Week Span | Total Days | Federal Tax-Free Rental Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | March 10 to March 15 | 6 days | 14 days |
| 2027 | March 8 to March 14 | 7 days | 14 days |
That right-hand column is the number nobody puts next to the tournament schedule, and it's the reason this particular week is worth more thought than a typical busy weekend.
The Rule With No Name Recognition Problem
Section 280A(g) of the Internal Revenue Code lets a homeowner rent out a primary residence for up to 14 days in a calendar year and exclude every dollar of that income from federal taxable income. No Schedule E, nothing reported. The provision picked up the nickname "the Augusta Rule" because it traces back to homeowners near Augusta National lobbying Congress in the 1970s after they started renting their houses out during Masters week and didn't want the income taxed. The rule applies nationwide, to any homeowner, for any reason, not just golf tournaments.
The mechanics are unforgiving in one direction only. Rent for 14 days and the income is untouched. Rent for 15 and every dollar from the entire rental period becomes taxable, with no partial credit for staying close to the line. That cliff is exactly why the tournament's actual length matters more than its reputation. A six or seven day tournament week leaves real room underneath a 14-day ceiling, room a homeowner would lose entirely by treating the week as an excuse to also rent out the following weekend or extend into a longer stretch.
None of this is a substitute for advice from your own accountant, and the fair-market-rent and documentation requirements that come with the exclusion are real. But the shape of the opportunity, a short high-demand week against a 14-day federal threshold, is the kind of detail that turns "the tournament is loud" into "the tournament is an asset decision," and it's one almost nobody frames that way until someone runs the numbers for them.
The Paragraph That Actually Governs You
Here is where the calendar and the tax code both step aside. Marsh Landing operates under a two-tier HOA structure, a Master Association layered over ten sub-associations, each with its own board and its own packet of rules. The Master Association's recorded governing documents include a specific amendment addressing short-term rentals, separate from anything the IRS or the tournament schedule has to say about it.
Ponte Vedra Beach itself sits in unincorporated St. Johns County, where short-term rentals are governed by the county's Short-Term Vacation Rental Ordinance, which generally permits STRs subject to registration, and carves out an exemption for owner-occupied single-family homes with a homestead exemption. That exemption is worth knowing, because it means a lot of Marsh Landing homeowners who live in their houses year round and only rent for tournament week may not need a county STR registration at all.
County exemption is not the same thing as HOA permission. Private covenants are allowed to be stricter than county rules, and Marsh Landing's own amendment on short-term rentals is the document that decides what's actually allowed inside the gates, independent of what St. Johns County or the federal tax code permit elsewhere. The Master Association's dues, listed at $990 per quarter as of early 2026 with sub-HOA assessments layered on top depending on neighborhood, fund the gate operations and common areas that any rental arrangement would run through, which is one more reason the association has a direct stake in how tournament-week rentals are handled.
The practical move is simple and almost nobody skips it once they know to ask: pull the Master Association's recorded amendment and your specific sub-HOA's rules before you commit to anything, in writing, from the management office rather than from a neighbor's memory of what the rule used to say.
What's Actually Close Enough to Use
The other piece of tournament week that gets flattened into generic advice is transportation, and here proximity changes the calculus entirely. THE PLAYERS runs a free area-resident shuttle program from three schools, historically Palm Valley Academy, Valley Ridge Academy and Pine Island Academy, built for fans coming from Nocatee and similarly distant pockets of St. Johns County. It's a useful program, and also not the one Marsh Landing residents are likely to need, since the neighborhood sits close enough to TPC Sawgrass that the more relevant options are the ones built for people already nearby.
THE PLAYERS offers complimentary bike and golf cart parking just inside TPC Sawgrass off PGA Tour Boulevard, near the Sawgrass Marriott entrance, a detail that matters if your Marsh Landing address puts the course within a short ride rather than a shuttle-lot drive. Rideshare pickup and drop-off is staged at the Couples entry off ATP Tour Boulevard, which is the more relevant access point for anyone starting from inside the gates rather than a remote parking lot.
Parking passes themselves are digital-only, sold in advance, and priced per day of tournament week rather than bundled with tickets, and the general lot has reached capacity before the weekend rounds in past years. None of that changes what a resident can plan for. It just means the planning question for someone who lives a mile from the course looks different from the planning question THE PLAYERS' own official parking and transportation page is mostly answering for everyone else.
The Actual Decision
Strip away the parts of this story that are the same every March, the traffic, the noise about how big the tournament has gotten, and what's left is a genuinely useful piece of local math. The tournament's own length keeps a rental well under the federal 14-day threshold. The county's ordinance likely exempts an owner-occupied Marsh Landing home from separate registration. Neither of those facts means anything until someone checks the one document that actually governs the decision, which is Marsh Landing's own recorded amendment on short-term rentals, verified in writing with the Master Association before a single guest is booked.
For a fuller look at what a typical week inside the gates looks like the other fifty weeks of the year, our guide to everyday life in Marsh Landing Country Club covers the club calendar, the HOA structure, and the questions residents ask most.
If you're weighing what your Marsh Landing property is actually worth, tournament week rental potential included, Sharon Mills can walk you through a current valuation built around this specific neighborhood, not a generic Ponte Vedra Beach estimate. Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see where your numbers actually stand.
