Short-Term Rental Revenue Calculator

Short-term rental income has two separate revenue streams that this calculator keeps distinct: nightly rate revenue, which scales with occupied nights (365 days times your occupancy percentage), and cleaning fee revenue, which scales instead with the number of separate bookings — derived by dividing occupied nights by the average length of stay. That distinction matters because two listings with identical occupancy and nightly rate can earn very different cleaning revenue depending on whether guests book long stays or frequent short ones; more, shorter bookings mean more cleaning fees collected even though the nightly income is unchanged. Gross revenue (nightly plus cleaning) is then reduced by a platform/host fee percentage — Airbnb and VRBO typically take a cut in the 3-15% range — to arrive at net revenue.

On the expense side, this model treats mortgage, utilities, insurance, taxes, supplies, and maintenance as flat monthly figures rather than percentages, so all six are annualized (multiplied by 12) and summed into fixed annual expenses, which are subtracted from net revenue to get annual and monthly cash flow. The most common mixup with this style of calculator is conflating gross revenue with take-home cash flow — gross revenue here is only the top line before platform fees and before any expenses at all, so a strong gross number can still net to a loss if fixed costs or the platform cut are underestimated. This is also a single steady-state model: it doesn't account for seasonal occupancy swings, dynamic pricing, or one-time furnishing and licensing costs, so treat it as an annualized average rather than a month-by-month forecast.