Every Airbnb fee calculator applies the same multiplier, and you can run it in your head between check-ins. Most hosts now pay one service fee of 15.5%, deducted from the payout, so take your nightly rate times the nights, add your cleaning and extra guest fees, and multiply by 0.845. A $180 night sold for three nights with a $90 cleaning fee comes to $630 booked. Airbnb keeps $97.65 and $532.35 reaches your account.
The sum, line by line
Airbnb sets out the same sum in words on its help page about calculating your payout: your nightly rate plus your optional extra charges, minus the host service fee and any co-host payouts you share, is your payout.
| Line | The example above |
|---|---|
| Nightly rate times nights | $540.00 |
| Cleaning fee | $90.00 |
| Booking total the fee is charged on | $630.00 |
| Host service fee at 15.5% | $97.65 |
| Your payout | $532.35 |
The fee applies to the whole booking total, cleaning fee included. Move $40 out of the nightly rate and into the cleaning fee and the guest still pays $630, while Airbnb still takes $97.65.
The 0.845 assumes no value added tax on the fee itself, and Airbnb's payout page says VAT may be added on top of the service fee, so a host in a country that levies it keeps a little less. Airbnb's help pages also stop short of saying whether an occupancy tax you collect through the platform sits inside that booking total. Booking.com is explicit that it charges no commission on local taxes such as city tax. Until Airbnb says the same, hold one payout breakdown next to one guest receipt and see which figure the 15.5% came off.
If your listing sits on the older split fee, the host share is usually 3%. On the same stay that is $18.90 out of your side and a payout of $611.10. The guest then pays a service fee of 14.1% to 16.5% on top, so those three nights cost them somewhere between $718.83 and $733.95. Airbnb's service fees article carries both structures and says the split fee is being phased out.
Which fee you are on, and when it changes
Airbnb began the switch in October 2025 with hosts who price through property management or channel software, and moved most of them off the split fee then. In July 2026 it announced it was bringing most of the remaining hosts across too, and the help center now says it is transitioning all home hosts to the single structure. So hosts on connecting software have been paying 15.5% since 2025, and everybody else is being moved now. A host who has switched cannot switch back.
Hosts living outside the European Economic Area had until September 15 to adjust their prices, while hosts inside it, hosts in Switzerland and software-connected hosts who have not yet switched have until October 13. Airbnb says that hosts who miss their deadline will see lower prices and lower payouts per night, so anyone in the US or Canada who left their rates alone in the first half of September is already earning less on every booking. If that is you, put your prices up.
Most hosts pay 15.5% under the single fee. The rest typically pay 14% to 16%, and listings in Brazil and Mexico pay 16%.
Why the money that lands will not match the sum
Most fee calculators stop at the percentage. Airbnb's payout page lists eleven separate things that move the number afterwards, and four of them come up when you reconcile a payout against your own books.
Apply a weekly or monthly discount and it comes off before the service fee is worked out, which lowers the fee along with the payout. Monthly stays are collected and released in installments, so a single booking can arrive across several payouts and none of them will look like the total. Anything you share with a co-host is deducted after the service fee, which is the order to check when the two of you disagree about a number. Value added tax may also be charged on top of the fee, which affects hosts whose listings sit in countries that levy it.
Seven more sit behind most of the payouts that look wrong at first glance: weekend or custom calendar pricing you set months ago and forgot, routing rules and minimum payout amounts holding money back, a fee your own bank charges, Fast Pay, a currency exchange charge when your listing currency and your payout currency differ, an adjustment fee after a refund or a cancellation you started, and a host coupon you sent.
What the other three take
| Platform | What you pay | What the fee is charged on |
|---|---|---|
| Airbnb, single fee | 15.5% for most hosts, 14% to 16% for the rest, 16% in Brazil and Mexico | The total booking amount |
| Airbnb, split fee, being retired | About 3% from you, plus 14.1% to 16.5% from the guest | The booking subtotal |
| Vrbo, pay per booking | 5% commission plus a 3% payment processing fee | Commission on the rent and on cleaning, pet and similar fees you charge. Processing on the whole payment you receive, taxes and refundable damage deposits included |
| Vrbo, through property software | 5%, or 12% to 15% in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, with no processing fee | The same rent and fees base |
| Vrbo, a booking that starts on Vrbo and finishes elsewhere | 10% | Rent, mandatory fees and withheld deposits, leaving out taxes and refundable deposits |
| Booking.com | Not published. Set by your country, your property type and the agreement you signed | The total booking amount, including cleaning fees, service fees and no show and cancellation charges. Local city tax is excluded, and in most countries VAT or GST is included |
| Expedia | Not published. Your market's percentage is shared during contracting | Not published |
Platform pages checked on September 2026.
Vrbo's 3% processing fee is charged on the whole payment you receive, taxes and refundable damage deposit included, so a property that takes a large deposit pays a card fee on money it plans to give back. Booking.com publishes no percentage at all, but it does publish where yours lives: your accommodation agreement, or the Finance tab under Reservation statements. Its commission page also answers a question I have been asked twice this year. If the percentage on your statement is higher than the one in your contract, you are probably enrolled in a marketing program such as Preferred Partner or Visibility Booster, and the gap between the two figures is what that program costs you.
The second cut, which no calculator has
On Booking.com the commission is followed by a second deduction that the property funds itself, the Genius discount. Joining Genius is optional. Once you join, a 10% discount applies automatically to your least expensive and most popular room type. Genius members at Levels 1, 2 and 3 all receive that same 10%. The deeper bands are opt-in: you can switch on 15% for Level 2 and 3 members and 20% for Level 3 members, alongside optional extras like free breakfast or a room upgrade. Booking.com states plainly that the standard Genius discount is funded by you.
Run both deductions on that same $630 booking and the shape changes. The 10% Genius discount brings the guest's price down to $567, a 15% commission on that takes $85.05, and $481.95 reaches you. You have kept 76.5% of your published price on a contract that names 15%, so the commission and the discount have cost 23.5% between them.
What our own books showed
We ran into the same gap from the bookkeeping side at our apartments in Vienna. We had to invoice each Airbnb stay on what the guest paid, and the platform had already withheld its fee before the payout reached the bank, so across one batch the invoiced total and the banked total sat about €1,006 apart. Nothing in that batch was an error, and the arithmetic above predicts a gap of about that size. After that I went through every channel we sell on to see exactly what each fee was charged against, which is the exercise the table above came out of.
Now price the same stay on your own site
If you take that $630 on your own site, the cost is the card fee. Stripe's published US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents on a successful domestic card payment, so $18.57, leaving $611.43. Against Airbnb's single fee on the same three nights, you keep $79.08 more on one booking. Airbnb's payout page names no separate card processing fee of its own, and the only processing fee it mentions is one your own bank may charge, so on a US booking the 15.5% is the whole of what Airbnb deducts.
Whether you can drop your own price and keep that $79.08 depends on whether you also fund a platform loyalty discount, and both cases are worked through in how deep a direct discount can go. If your direct price somehow comes out higher than the platform price, the cause is usually fixable, and the common ones are here. To run a whole year of your own bookings through the same comparison, use the savings calculator.
Airbnb moved the first wave of hosts onto the single fee precisely because their prices ran through property management or channel software, so read what an Airbnb channel manager can do for a small operator before you buy one expecting it to cut your fees.
A note on the size of property this pays for. Under roughly $350,000 a year of bookings, the commission a direct channel saves you will not cover what it costs to build one properly in the first year, and I would rather say so than sell you the work. Above that, the arithmetic starts to pay. Run your own number first, and if you want a second pair of eyes on it, book a call and we will go through your last three months together.
