How to price your Airbnb cleaning fee
The cleaning fee is the one price on your listing that most hosts set once, by gut feel, and never revisit. That was survivable when guests only compared nightly rates. It stopped being survivable when Airbnb started showing everyone the full price up front and ranking listings by it. This guide gives you a way to set the fee from your actual costs, check it against market benchmarks, and understand why an oversized fee now quietly costs you bookings.
What the cleaning fee is on Airbnb
Airbnb defines the cleaning fee as "a one-off charge that's set by the host for cleaning a home," and it forms part of the total price the guest sees (Airbnb Help Center, article 2812). Two platform mechanics matter before you pick a number:
- It is nonrefundable after the stay. Airbnb states that cleaning fees are not returned to guests once a trip is completed (Airbnb Help Center, article 58).
- Special offers skip it. When you send a guest a special offer, the cleaning fee is not automatically included, so you have to factor it in yourself (Airbnb Help Center, article 58).
Step 1: build the fee from your real costs
Your cleaning fee has a floor, and that floor is what a turnover actually costs you. Add up three components:
- Labor. What your cleaner charges per turnover, or your own hours at an honest hourly rate if you clean yourself. If your cleaner charges by the hour, multiply hours per turnover by the rate.
- Consumables. Supplies replaced every turnover: toilet paper, soap, coffee, sponges, trash bags, cleaning products. Take a month of receipts and divide by the number of turnovers that month.
- Laundry, amortized. Whether you pay a laundry service per load or run your own machines, spread the cost per turnover. If you replace linens and towels on a schedule, spread that too: divide the replacement cost by the number of turnovers the set survives.
Example: your cleaner charges $70 per turnover. Consumables run $60 a month across 5 turnovers, so $60 ÷ 5 = $12 each. A $400 linen set lasts roughly 80 turnovers, so $400 ÷ 80 = $5, and laundering runs another $10 per turnover. Your true cost is $70 + $12 + $5 + $10 = $97. Any fee below $97 means your nightly rate is subsidizing cleaning, which is fine if you chose it on purpose and a slow leak if you did not.
Note that the platform takes its cut of the cleaning fee too, since host fees apply to your whole booking subtotal. Our guide to Airbnb host fees walks through that arithmetic.
Step 2: check the number against the market
Cost gives you the floor. The market tells you what guests in your area tolerate. To sample it, search your own neighborhood on Airbnb as a guest for a typical stay length, open the 10 to 15 listings closest to yours in size and quality, and note each one's cleaning fee from the price breakdown. You are looking for the range, and for where your cost floor sits inside it.
For a wider reference point, AirROI analyzed 2.4 million active Airbnb listings across 20 countries, including 685,000 US entire-home listings with occupancy above 20%. Globally, 73% of listings charge a cleaning fee, and the US average is $188 against an average daily rate of $288 (AirROI, Airbnb Cleaning Fee Economics). Their US averages by size:
| Listing size | Average US cleaning fee |
|---|---|
| Studio | $83 |
| 1 bedroom | $102 |
| 2 bedrooms | $156 |
| 3 bedrooms | $210 |
Treat these as reference points rather than targets. Averages hide huge regional spread, and your local sample of 10 to 15 comparable listings will always beat a national number.
Step 3: sanity-check the fee against your nightly rate
The same AirROI study found the fee-to-rate ratio matters as much as the dollar amount. Across their dataset, the average cleaning fee equals 55% of the average daily rate, with a median of 48.1%. But the revenue sweet spot sits lower: listings charging 25% to 50% of ADR earned an average of $64,405 per year, which is 72% more than no-fee listings and 13% more than listings in the most common bucket of 50% to 75% (AirROI). In the same analysis, listings with a cleaning fee earned $57,000 to $64,000 per year on average versus $37,474 for no-fee listings.
The honest caveat: this is correlation from observational data. Bigger, better-run properties tend to charge fees and also tend to earn more. Still, the pattern is a useful sanity check. If your fee lands above 50% of your nightly rate, ask whether some of that cost belongs in the rate instead.
Example: your nightly rate is $180 and your cost floor is $97. The 25% to 50% band is $180 × 0.25 = $45 up to $180 × 0.50 = $90. Your floor sits just above the band, so you either charge $97 and accept being slightly heavy, or move roughly $10 to $15 of cleaning cost into the nightly rate and set the fee near $85.
Why high fees now cost you visibility
Guests used to discover a big cleaning fee at checkout. That changed in stages. Airbnb implemented total price display including taxes in the EU in 2019, then introduced an optional total-price toggle in the US and more than 200 other markets in November 2022 (Rental Scale-Up). As of April 21, 2025, guests worldwide see the total price of a listing, including nightly rate, cleaning fee, and service fees, by default in search results (Rental Scale-Up).
The bigger change for hosts happened under the hood. In November 2022 Airbnb also adjusted its search algorithm to rank listings by the best total price rather than simply the nightly rate (NerdWallet). A padded cleaning fee stopped being invisible and started hurting your position in search.
Hosts responded fast. In its Q4 2023 financial results, Airbnb reported that nearly 300,000 listings removed or lowered their cleaning fees, and that 40% of active listings eliminated the fee completely (as reported by Entrepreneur). For context on how heavy fees once were, a June 2022 NerdWallet analysis of 1,000 US reservations found a median cleaning fee of $75 for a one-night stay, with cleaning fees making up about 25% of the total price paid (NerdWallet).
Common pricing mistakes
- Using the cleaning fee to pad revenue. Some hosts keep the nightly rate low for the search thumbnail and stuff margin into the fee. Since the algorithm ranks by total price, this trick now works against you in the exact place it was supposed to help.
- Charging one flat fee for every stay length. On a $150-a-night listing, a $150 fee is 10% of a ten-night booking and 50% of a two-night one, so it silently repels your shortest stays. Airbnb has a built-in fix: a short-stay cleaning fee that lets you charge guests booking 1 or 2 nights less than your standard fee (Airbnb Help Center, article 58).
- Forgetting the fee in special offers. As noted above, special offers do not include it automatically. Hosts who forget effectively give discounted guests a free clean.
- Never rechecking costs. Cleaner rates, laundry prices, and supply costs drift up. A fee set in 2023 from 2023 costs can be underwater by now without you noticing.
Track cleaning as its own profit line
The only way to know whether your fee is right over time is to track both sides of it. That means recording, per booking, the cleaning fee you collected, and recording, per month, what you actually spent on cleaners, laundry, and supplies. When fee income and cleaning spend sit in the same books, the check takes one glance: if collected fees consistently run below cleaning costs, your nightly rate is quietly covering the gap, and if they run far above, you may be carrying a fee that is dragging your search rank for margin you could move into the rate. Our guide to tracking Airbnb income and expenses covers the setup, and cleaning costs are generally deductible business expenses, so clean records help at tax time too (see Schedule C vs Schedule E for where they land).