Estimate your monthly short-term rental income after occupancy, cleaning, platform fees, and expenses.
This tool turns five numbers you control into a single, honest estimate of what a short-term rental might put in your pocket each month. It does not pull comparable listings, does not know your address, and does not claim to know your local market better than you do. Instead, it takes the assumptions you enter, runs them through a plain formula, and shows you exactly how it got to the number — so you can change any input and immediately see how sensitive your outcome is to that single variable.
Here is what each field actually controls and why it matters more than it looks:
This is the price a guest pays per night, before any fees. It's the single biggest lever in the whole calculation because it's multiplied by every occupied night in the month — a small change here moves your entire result far more than an equivalent change to almost any other input. Hosts commonly overestimate this by using a peak-season or holiday-weekend price as if it applied all year, which inflates the estimate. A more honest number is a blended average across the full calendar, including slower weeks.
Occupancy is the percentage of available nights that are actually booked. This is where most first-time hosts get overly optimistic, because it's tempting to imagine a fully booked calendar. In reality, occupancy is squeezed by seasonality, local competition, how new your listing is (new listings typically ramp up slowly as reviews accumulate), and how aggressively you price relative to comparable stays nearby. The calculator applies your occupancy rate to a 30-day month to estimate occupied nights, then multiplies that by your nightly rate to get rental revenue.
Most guests pay a cleaning fee on top of the nightly rate, and that fee is revenue to the host — but it also has to cover an actual turnover cost (laundry, restocking, a cleaner's time) that hosts frequently underestimate. The calculator assumes an average stay length of four nights to convert your occupied nights into an estimated number of separate bookings, then multiplies that by your cleaning fee to add cleaning revenue to the total. If your actual average stay is much shorter or longer than four nights, your real cleaning-fee income and turnover frequency will differ from this estimate.
This represents the percentage the booking platform keeps from your gross revenue for hosting your listing, processing payments, and providing customer support and marketing reach. Fee structures differ by platform and by host account type, and can also interact with payment-processing costs that aren't broken out separately here. Because it's applied as a percentage of your combined rental and cleaning revenue, it scales automatically as your other inputs change.
This single field is meant to capture everything that costs you money whether or not a single night is booked: mortgage or rent, utilities, internet, streaming subscriptions you provide, pest control, lawn care, supplies, and any recurring software or insurance premium you pay monthly. It is deliberately simple, and that simplicity is also its biggest limitation — see the caveats below.
Using the default values already loaded above — a $145 nightly rate, 65% occupancy, an $80 cleaning fee, a 3% platform fee, and $1,400 in monthly fixed costs — the math works like this. A 30-day month at 65% occupancy comes out to roughly 19.5 occupied nights. At $145 a night, that's about $2,828 in rental revenue. Dividing those occupied nights by an assumed 4-night average stay gives roughly 4.9 separate bookings, and at $80 per cleaning fee that adds about $390 in cleaning revenue, for a gross of roughly $3,218. A 3% platform fee on that gross comes to about $97, leaving about $3,121 after platform fees. Subtracting the $1,400 in monthly fixed costs leaves an estimated net income of roughly $1,721 for the month. Change any one input — a lower occupancy rate in the slow season, a higher cleaning fee to reflect real turnover cost, a bump in fixed costs for a new maintenance contract — and the whole chain recalculates instantly above.
Treating peak-season occupancy as the year-round average. A property that's nearly full during a summer or holiday peak can sit far emptier the rest of the year. Estimating from the busiest month you can imagine, rather than a realistic blended average, is the single most common way hosts overstate what a listing will actually earn.
Underestimating cleaning and turnover costs. A cleaning fee charged to the guest is not the same thing as the actual cost of cleaning, laundering linens, and restocking supplies between every stay. If your real turnover cost is higher than the fee you charge, that gap quietly eats into net income in a way this calculator won't show unless you enter a cleaning fee that reflects your true cost, not just what you charge guests.
Ignoring local short-term-rental regulation risk. Short-term-rental rules — licensing, registration, occupancy limits, zoning restrictions, homeowners association bylaws, and lodging or occupancy taxes — vary enormously from one city or county to the next and change over time. This calculator does not know your jurisdiction's rules and cannot tell you whether short-term renting is even permitted at your address. Always verify current local requirements directly with your city, county, HOA, and a qualified local professional before relying on any earnings estimate.
Forgetting one-time startup and recurring maintenance costs. Furnishing, photography, initial supplies, and periodic repairs or replacements (a broken appliance, worn furniture, a damaged mattress) don't show up in a single month's fixed-cost line but they are real costs of running a short-term rental over time.
Overlooking income taxes and financing details. This calculator estimates net income before income taxes and does not separate mortgage interest from principal, insurance, or property tax escrow — all of which affect your actual after-tax cash flow differently than a single "fixed costs" number can capture.
Assuming this month's numbers will hold steady all year. Short-term rental income is seasonal and demand-driven almost everywhere. A useful practice is to re-run this calculator with a conservative low-season occupancy estimate and a stronger peak-season estimate, then average the two, rather than relying on a single monthly snapshot.
In line with keeping this tool honest rather than falsely precise, it does not attempt address-level comparable pricing, does not model seasonality automatically, does not calculate income tax, depreciation, or mortgage amortization, and does not assess whether short-term renting is legally permitted at your property. It is a starting-point arithmetic tool, not a substitute for local market research, a licensed tax professional, or your own jurisdiction's current regulations. See the methodology page for the full formula and every assumption behind it.