Your Airbnb deposited $4,200 last month. So you made $4,200, right?
Not quite. That deposit is your gross revenue — before platform fees, before your cleaner’s invoice, before the paper towels, the broken shower head, and the three extra hours you drove to the hardware store. Once you subtract every real cost, the actual profit for most short-term rental hosts is 20–40% lower than they assume.
This post walks you through a step-by-step short-term rental profit calculator you can run right now, using your own numbers. By the end, you’ll know your actual net margin — and exactly which cost categories are eating into it most.
Why Most Hosts Don’t Know Their Real Profit
The core problem is that Airbnb profitability is easy to estimate and hard to calculate accurately.
Estimating is fast: you look at your payout, subtract the mortgage, and decide whether the number feels good. This approach misses five to eight significant cost categories and leads hosts to believe they’re building wealth when they’re actually treading water.
Calculating accurately takes more work — but only once. Once you have a system, it takes 10 minutes a month. The delta between what you thought you were making and what you’re actually making is worth that investment.
Here’s how to do it.
The Short-Term Rental Profit Calculator: Step by Step
Work through each category below using your own property’s numbers. If you don’t know an exact figure yet, use the benchmarks provided — they’re based on typical short-term rental markets in the US.
Step 1: Start with Gross Revenue
Your number: Total payout(s) from Airbnb and/or VRBO for the month.
This is the starting point — not your profit. Everything that follows gets subtracted from this.
Example property: $4,200 gross revenue for the month
Step 2: Subtract Platform Fees
Airbnb charges hosts a service fee of 3–5% of the booking subtotal. VRBO charges 5% on the nightly rate plus a flat per-booking fee. If you list on both platforms, you’re paying fees on both.
Benchmark: 3.5–5% of gross revenue.
Most hosts overlook this because the payout email shows the guest’s full booking total before Airbnb deducts its cut. The deposit in your bank account is already net of platform fees — but if you’re reconciling against the full booking price, you’re overstating revenue.
Example: $4,200 × 4% = −$168 in platform fees
Running total: $4,032
Step 3: Subtract Cleaning Costs
What you pay your cleaner — or cleaning service — per turnover, times the number of turnovers in the month.
Benchmark: $75–$150 per turnover for a 2-bedroom property, depending on your market.
Don’t confuse the cleaning fee you charge guests with the cost of cleaning. The guest-facing fee is a pricing tool. Your cleaner’s invoice is a real operating expense.
Calculate: (Cost per cleaning) × (Turnovers per month)
If you handle cleanings yourself, assign an honest hourly rate to your time. Your time is not free, and treating it as such inflates your apparent profit.
Example: 8 turnovers × $95/turnover = −$760 in cleaning costs
Running total: $3,272
Step 4: Subtract Supply Costs
This is the category that surprises hosts the most.
STR supplies include everything consumed between stays: toilet paper, paper towels, dish soap, laundry detergent, hand soap, shampoo, conditioner, coffee, sugar packets, trash bags, dishwasher tabs, sponges, air freshener, and anything else your listing promises guests will find stocked.
Benchmark: $70–$130/month for a 2-bedroom property at moderate occupancy.
Most hosts buy supplies reactively — they run out of something, they go get it — and never add up what they’re spending. If you’ve never tracked supply costs over 90 days, the cumulative total will be higher than your instinct says.
Example: −$90 in supply costs
Running total: $3,182
Step 5: Subtract Maintenance Costs (or Your Maintenance Reserve)
Maintenance is the most volatile line item in an STR budget. Some months you spend $0. Other months the HVAC goes down and you’re out $1,200.
Hosts who manage this well treat maintenance as a fixed monthly budget line, even in months where nothing breaks. They build a reserve fund and draw from it when repairs arise. This keeps monthly cash flow predictable and eliminates the panic that comes with unexpected repair bills.
Benchmark: $150–$250/month reserve for a typical 2-bedroom property. Over a 12-month period, most STR operators spend 4–7% of annual revenue on maintenance.
Example: $175/month maintenance reserve
Running total: $3,007
Step 6: Subtract Utilities and Other Operating Costs
Short-term rentals typically run higher utility costs than owner-occupied homes. Guests take longer showers, leave the AC running when they step out, and run laundry for every set of towels and linens. Track your utility bills by property and compare to a baseline — the delta is the STR-attributable cost.
Other operating costs to include:
- STR insurance premium (above standard homeowners policy)
- Property management software subscriptions
- Smart lock maintenance and battery replacement
- HOA fees specific to short-term rental operation
- Welcome amenities (coffee, snacks, welcome notes, local guides)
Benchmark: $80–$180/month total for utilities and miscellaneous operating costs.
Example: $110 utilities + $45 STR insurance add-on + $20 smart lock/misc = −$175
Running total: $2,832
Step 7: Your True Net (Before Debt Service)
True Net Profit = Gross Revenue − Platform Fees − Cleaning − Supplies − Maintenance − Utilities & Other
Example summary:
Category Monthly Amount Gross revenue $4,200 Platform fees −$168 Cleaning −$760 Supplies −$90 Maintenance reserve −$175 Utilities & other −$175 True net (pre-mortgage) $2,832 That’s a 67% net margin before mortgage — solid, but $1,368 lower than the raw deposit suggested.
If you’re carrying a mortgage, subtract that to get your monthly cash flow. The goal isn’t just to break even on the mortgage — it’s to generate meaningful cash flow after all operating costs are covered.
What Your Number Is Telling You
Once you’ve run the calculator, your result falls into one of a few buckets.
Strong margin (55%+ net before mortgage): Your property is well-optimized. The focus at this stage is growing revenue — higher rates, better occupancy, possibly adding a second property.
Moderate margin (40–55%): You’re profitable, but there’s meaningful room to improve. Look at your two largest cost categories and identify one specific change to each.
Thin margin (below 40%): The property may still be cash-flow positive, but you’re working harder than you should for the return. This is usually a combination of underpriced rates + high cleaning frequency + above-average maintenance costs. Fix the biggest lever first.
Negative: Rare in healthy STR markets, but it happens — usually from below-market pricing plus aggressive cleaning schedules. Before giving up, determine whether the issue is structural (the market, the property) or operational (pricing, cost management). Most hosts in this situation have an operational problem, which is fixable.
The Problem with Doing This in a Spreadsheet Every Month
Running this calculator manually once is useful. Running it every month across two, four, or eight properties in a spreadsheet is where hosts burn out and stop tracking.
The data lives in too many places: Airbnb payouts in one email thread, cleaner invoices in another, supply receipts in a folder (or not at all), maintenance costs remembered but not recorded. Pulling it together takes more time than it’s worth, so most hosts stop doing it.
This is exactly what StayReady’s profitability dashboard is built to solve.
StayReady pulls your Airbnb and VRBO payouts automatically, then lets you log cleaning fees, supply costs, and maintenance expenses in the same place. The dashboard calculates your true net per property — updated in real time, every month, without a spreadsheet in sight.
Try StayReady free — one property, no credit card required →
If you’re managing more than one property and still doing this in a spreadsheet, you’re not saving time — you’re just deferring the cost of not knowing.
Running the Numbers on Multiple Properties
Once you’ve calculated true net for one property, the picture gets more interesting when you do it across your portfolio.
Multi-property hosts almost always find that one or two properties are significantly outperforming the others — and one is underperforming. Without property-by-property data, you can’t see this. You’re averaging the good and the bad together and making decisions based on a blended number that doesn’t reflect any individual unit.
When you can see performance per property, you can:
- Identify the outlier and investigate why (pricing? turnover cost? maintenance history?)
- Replicate what’s working from your top performer across the portfolio
- Make a real decision about a consistently underperforming property — not just a gut feeling
The hosts who scale successfully aren’t the ones with the most properties. They’re the ones who know exactly what each property is generating, net of every real cost, and use that data to make decisions.
Start With This Month
You don’t need a perfect system to start. Run the calculator above using last month’s numbers — even rough estimates for some categories. You’ll have a directional answer in 15 minutes, and you’ll know which cost category deserves the most attention.
Then set up a simple tracking method — whether that’s a spreadsheet or StayReady — so next month’s calculation takes five minutes instead of fifteen.
The math is not complicated. The hardest part is making yourself do it. The hosts who do it consistently are the ones who end up with real margins, not just the feeling of being busy.
StayReady tracks Airbnb revenue, cleaning costs, supply spend, and maintenance expenses per property — so your profitability dashboard is always current, without manual data entry. Start free at stayready.company →