How many nights does your Airbnb need to book?
Every property has a number of nights below which the month loses money. Most hosts have never worked out what theirs is. Put in your fixed costs and your rate, and find out.
Your month
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Costs you pay whether or not it books
The monthly payment on the property.
Power, water, heating, broadband. Averaged across the year.
Short-term let cover, contents, anything monthly.
Service charges, council tax, subscriptions, an average for maintenance.
What one night earns
Your advertised rate, before fees.
Around 3% on the split fee, much higher on the host-only fee.
What you pay for one clean. Spread across the stay below, not charged to every night.
Nights per booking, on average. Longer stays spread the turnover cost further.
Consumables and laundry, roughly, per night.
Nights in the month you are willing to let. Drop it if you block time for yourself.
12 of 30
You need 39% occupancy to cover $1,135.00 of fixed costs. Everything past night 12 is profit.
- Fixed costs per monthDue whether or not anyone books$1,135.00
- Airbnb's cut per night-$3.60
- Your costs per nightSupplies, plus the clean spread over 3 nights-$19.00
- You keep per night$97.40
A fully booked month would leave $1,787.00 after fixed costs. Most hosts should sanity-check this against their own quiet season rather than a good month.
Why this number is worth having written down
Break-even is not an accounting exercise. It is the thing that makes every other pricing decision straightforward.
Once you know you need eleven nights, a quiet week in February stops being vague anxiety and becomes a question with an answer: are you on pace or not? A last-minute discount stops being a gut call and becomes arithmetic. And an offer that would take you below your floor becomes easy to decline, which is much harder to do at 11pm looking at an empty calendar.
Fixed and variable, and why the split matters
A fixed cost arrives whether or not anyone stays. The mortgage does not care about your occupancy. Neither does insurance, broadband, or the standing charge on your energy bill.
A variable costonly happens because a guest did. The clean, the laundry, the coffee pods, Airbnb’s cut. These do not belong in your monthly total, because putting them there would charge you for turnovers that never happened. They belong in the per-night figure, reducing what each booked night contributes.
Getting this split wrong is the most common mistake in home-made versions of this calculation, and it always makes the property look worse than it is.
Three ways to move the number
- Raise the nightly rate. The most direct lever and the one most constrained by your market. Worth testing in your strong season, where demand gives you room.
- Cut a fixed cost. Less glamorous and often more effective. Insurance, energy tariffs, and subscriptions are worth an hour once a year.
- Protect the per-night figure. Minimum-night rules stop a fixed turnover cost from being spread across one night. This is often the biggest available gain and it costs nothing to try.
Notice what is not on the list: booking more nights. If the nights do not exist in your market, wanting them does not create them. The levers above work with the demand you already have.
Start from a real payout
This calculator estimates your net per night from your rate and costs. If you want the full booking-by-booking breakdown, including what the guest pays and how much of it you keep, that is the payout calculator.
See what you keep per booking →Short of nights, not of rate?
If the occupancy you need is higher than the occupancy you get, the problem is usually the listing rather than the price. Coho’s Listing Health Check reads yours and reports what is costing you bookings.
Check your listingQuestions hosts ask first
More free tools? See all free templates and calculators. Or read whether dynamic pricing is worth it at your size.