How do I calculate the profit from one short-term rental stay?

Most hosting math goes wrong in the same few places. A cleaning fee gets ignored, or a guest's deposit gets counted as income, or the mortgage gets added to every stay and to the monthly total. The fix is to decide what counts, count each item once and keep a written list of what you left out.

Income: what counts

• Nightly rate. The total for the nights booked, after any discounts you gave.
• Cleaning fee. This is income. The guest pays it to you as part of the booking.
• Other host fees. Extra guest fees or pet fees you charge.

Not your income

• Refundable security deposits. You hold them and give them back. They are not revenue.
• Taxes the platform collects and remits. In some areas the platform collects occupancy taxes from the guest and pays them to the tax authority. That money passes through. See Airbnb's list of areas where it collects and remits taxes (opens in a new tab). You may still be responsible for other taxes.
• Guest service fees the platform keeps. If the guest pays a service fee to the platform, it was never yours.

Platform fees: be explicit about the base

A platform fee is a percentage of some amount. The question is which amount. Is it applied to nights only, or to nights plus the cleaning fee and other fees? Fee structures differ by platform, by host setup and sometimes by whether you use connected software. Airbnb, for example, has more than one fee structure. See Airbnb's service fee article (opens in a new tab). Look at your own payout details, then write down your fee rate and what it is applied to.

Discounts and refunds, once each

If your revenue figure already uses the discounted price, do not subtract the discount again. If you refund part of a stay, reduce revenue for that stay once, and do not also list it as an expense.

Costs per stay

• Cleaner pay. This is an expense, counted once. The cleaning fee is income, also counted once. They do not cancel out automatically.
• Laundry, consumables and variable utilities. See the turnover cost guide.

Fixed costs: use a visible method

Insurance, internet, software, property tax and HOA dues exist whether or not anyone stays. To show them per stay, pick a method and write it down. A common one is: monthly fixed costs divided by the average number of stays per month.

What this method leaves out

This is an operating view, not a tax return or a full investment analysis. It excludes one-time purchases like furniture, income tax, loan principal, depreciation and the value of your own time. Those matter, but they belong in separate calculations, ideally with a tax professional.

A worked example

These are made-up example numbers.

1. Nights: 3 × $150 = $450.
2. Add the cleaning fee: $450 + $60 = $510 host revenue.
3. Platform fee: in this example, 10% is applied to the full $510, so the fee is $51.
4. Per-stay costs: cleaner pay $50, laundry $12, consumables $9, variable utilities $15, for $86 in total.
5. Contribution: $510 − $51 − $86 = $373.
6. Allocated fixed costs: $90.
7. Estimated operating result: $373 − $90 = $283.

If the same fee were applied to nights only, it would be $45, not $51. That is why the base needs to be written down.