The full fee picture — what Airbnb takes, what operating costs eat, and what's really left after a month of hosting.
The first time I seriously ran the numbers on a property I was considering, I projected about $3,100/month in gross revenue. I'd done the math: nightly rate times estimated occupancy, felt solid. Then I started subtracting things. By the time I got through Airbnb's cut, cleaning, supplies, utilities, and a maintenance reserve, I was looking at $1,040. Not $3,100. And that was before the mortgage.
I didn't buy that property. I'm glad I didn't.
What I learned — the hard way, with a spreadsheet at 11pm — is that the gross revenue number is almost meaningless. It's the number every calculator and "how much can you make on Airbnb" YouTube video leads with, because it sounds exciting. The number that actually matters is what hits your account after you've paid everyone else. For most hosts in most markets, that's somewhere between 40 and 60 cents on every dollar of gross bookings.
Here's what goes into that gap.
Under the standard split-fee model, Airbnb takes 3% of your booking subtotal — that's nightly rate times nights, plus any cleaning fee you charge. On a $150/night 3-night stay with a $75 cleaning fee, they get $15.75. Individually, that's nothing.
But across a full month of active bookings, you're looking at $60–$90 gone to Airbnb before you've paid a single real cost. One thing worth knowing: the 3% applies to your cleaning fee too. If you charge guests $100 to cover cleaning, you're actually netting $97 of it. Minor, but the cumulative effect over a year is a few hundred dollars you didn't know you were giving away.
If I had to name the one expense that blindsides new hosts most, it's not Airbnb's fee. It's cleaning — not because any single clean costs that much, but because of how many of them happen in a month.
I've paid $87 for a 1-bedroom turnover and I've paid $165 for the same square footage. It depends on the cleaner, the market, the time of year, and how much of a disaster the last guests were. A realistic range is $85–$150 per turnover, with reliable cleaners in most cities sitting around $110–$120.
At 60% occupancy and an average 2-night stay, you're doing about 9 turnovers a month. At $110 each, that's $990/month. Almost a thousand dollars — on a listing where gross revenue might be $2,400.
Here's the part most advice skips: your cleaning fee doesn't cancel this out. If you charge guests $80 and you're paying $110 per clean, you're still $30 underwater on every single turnover. Over 9 turnovers, that's $270/month you're quietly losing. The cleaning fee helps. It doesn't solve it.
The real fix is minimum stay requirements. A 2-night minimum roughly cuts your turnover count in half. You'll lose some one-night bookings — but if your cleaner charges more than $75, those bookings were probably costing you money anyway.
Toilet paper, hand soap, dish soap, paper towels, trash bags, coffee if you offer it, shampoo, laundry detergent for the linens. Every single turnover. It doesn't feel like much per stay, but it's a guaranteed line item that almost nobody includes in their first projection.
I budget $50/month for a 1-bedroom and I'm usually within $10 of that. Buy in bulk — Costco or a restaurant supply store cuts this by 30–40% versus grabbing things at the grocery store when you run out. Boring advice. Effective advice.
Long-term rental tenants typically pay their own utilities. Airbnb hosts do not have this luxury. Electricity, water, gas, WiFi, and usually at least one streaming service because guests expect it and will mention it in the review if it's missing.
For a 1-bedroom, $150–$250/month is typical. If you're in a place with real summers or real winters, budget toward the higher end — guests have no financial reason to be conservative with the thermostat, and many aren't. I've heard from hosts in Phoenix who see summer electricity bills jump by $80–$100/month just from guests leaving the A/C at 68° around the clock. There's no good solution for this besides budgeting for it.
This is the expense that's invisible until it's very, very visible. The dishwasher dies. The bathroom faucet won't stop dripping. A guest leaves and the mattress needs to be replaced. These things happen on their own schedule, which is to say, the worst possible one.
STR properties wear faster than owner-occupied homes — more people cycling through, less careful handling of things, higher friction on every surface and appliance. The standard real estate rule is 1% of property value per year for maintenance. I'd use 1.5% for an active Airbnb, maybe 2% in high-occupancy situations.
On a $300,000 property that's $375–$500/month set aside. Even when things are running smoothly, don't skip this. The month you don't have a reserve is inevitably the month the water heater goes.
Airbnb's AirCover protection is free and better than nothing. That's genuinely the most positive thing I can say about it. It has real exclusions, coverage caps, and a claims review process that can take weeks at exactly the moment you need fast answers.
Most hosts who've been doing this for more than a year carry a dedicated STR insurance policy — companies like Proper Insurance and Steadily specialize in this. Expect to pay $1,200–$3,000/year depending on the property. That's $100–$250/month. If you're running an Airbnb as an actual income source, this isn't optional.
Here's what this actually looks like on a 1-bedroom in a mid-size U.S. city. $130/night, 62% occupancy (about 19 nights booked), average stay around 2.5 nights.
| Line Item | Monthly Amount |
|---|---|
| Gross booking revenue (19 nights × $130) | $2,470 |
| Airbnb host fee (3%) | −$74 |
| Cleaning costs (~8 turnovers × $110) | −$880 |
| Supplies and consumables | −$50 |
| Utilities | −$190 |
| Maintenance reserve | −$200 |
| Insurance (STR policy) | −$150 |
| Net operating income | $926 |
That's 37% of gross — before you touch the mortgage. If this host has a $1,400/month mortgage, they're losing money every month. At $700/month mortgage, they're netting $226. Whether that's worth the time and attention is a personal call. But at least it's the real number, not a projection built on wishful math.
I want to be clear: I'm not arguing against hosting. There are situations where this math looks completely different.
High nightly rates change everything. A vacation property doing $300+/night absorbs the same $880/month in cleaning costs in a fundamentally different way than a $100/night urban studio does. The fixed costs are the same; the revenue base isn't.
No mortgage is the other scenario where it obviously works. If you own the property outright, that $926 in the example above is just cash in your pocket every month.
Low cleaning costs help enormously too — whether that means cleaning yourself, finding a genuinely affordable cleaner, or using minimum stay requirements aggressively to cut turnover count. And markets where you can sustain 70%+ occupancy consistently give you more revenue to spread those fixed costs across.
None of that means you should use optimistic assumptions in your model. It means you should find out which of those advantages actually applies to your situation before you commit.
Airbnb's 3% is fixed. Utilities are roughly fixed. Some things you genuinely have control over:
Minimum stay requirement. Going from 1 night to 2 nights doesn't just reduce turnovers — it also tends to filter out a category of guest who books one-night stays specifically because no one else will take them. Worth doing on more than financial grounds.
Nightly rate. Even $10–$15 higher at the same occupancy makes a meaningful difference to your cost ratio. Dynamic pricing tools (Airbnb's built-in tool, or third-party like PriceLabs or Wheelhouse) do a better job of calibrating this than a static number you set and forget.
Cleaning fee. Set it to cover your actual cleaning cost. Not $65 because it feels reasonable. If your cleaner charges $115, charge $115. Guests filter primarily on total price, not on the fee breakdown.
Supply costs. Bulk purchasing from Costco or a restaurant supply store cuts the consumables line by 30–40% per year. It's not exciting but it's money that stays in your pocket for zero additional effort once you set it up.
Plug your actual nightly rate, occupancy, and costs into HostCalc to see exactly what you'd net each month.
Calculate My Net Income →Understanding your fees is step one. Step two is knowing what occupancy rate you need to actually profit, and step three is avoiding the cash flow mistakes that catch most new hosts off guard.