What Your Airbnb Actually Earns After Costs

When someone tells you a two-bedroom in Ponsonby "does $250 a night at 75% occupancy", they have given you a headline, not an answer. That figure is gross booking revenue. Several things come out of it before anything reaches you.

None of what follows is unusual or hidden. But owners who only ever see the headline tend to be disappointed twice: once when the first statement arrives, and again at tax time.

Start with gross nightly revenue

This is the accommodation charge across all the nights booked in the month. It excludes the cleaning fee guests pay, which is passed through to cover the clean rather than kept as income.

Two things move this number, and only two: what you charge per night, and how many nights you fill. Everything a good manager does is aimed at one or the other.

Platform fee

From 15 September 2026, Airbnb moved New Zealand hosts to a single host-only service fee of 15.5%, charged on the booking. Under the older split arrangement, part of the fee was charged to the guest instead.

This looks worse than the change actually was. When guests were paying a fee on top, it suppressed what they were willing to pay for the night itself. Rates across the market adjusted.

Management fee

Ours is a percentage of gross nightly revenue, set by your service tier and stated in your agreement. Whatever manager you use, the question worth asking is what the percentage is calculated on — gross booking value, net after platform fees, or something else. The same headline percentage can mean materially different money.

Cleaning

Cost-neutral in principle: the guest pays a cleaning fee, the cleaner is paid from it. In practice it rarely balances exactly. Long stays mean one clean across many nights, which is favourable. A run of one-night bookings means a clean per night, which is not.

Set the cleaning fee too high and you suppress short bookings, because guests see the total, not the nightly rate.

Utilities

Power, water, internet and any body corporate charges remain yours. Budget for these to run higher than an equivalent long-term tenancy. Guests do not economise the way someone paying their own bill does, and the property is heated or cooled between stays.

Consumables and replacements

Toiletries, coffee, tea, paper goods, and the steady attrition of linen, towels, glassware and utensils. Individually trivial, collectively not. Linen in particular wears out faster under short-stay turnover than most owners expect.

Rates and insurance

Two costs that often change when a property moves to short-stay use, and the two most frequently left out of a projection.

Auckland Council rates a property differently once it is let for short stays beyond a threshold number of nights per year. Separately, a standard landlord or owner-occupier insurance policy will generally not cover short-stay letting. You need a policy written for it, and it usually costs more.

What is left

After all of that you have your net return, and that is what should be compared against what the property would earn on a long-term tenancy. Not the gross figure. The comparison is only meaningful at the same line.

Short-stay usually wins on gross and often on net, but not always, and not in every suburb. A property that would rent easily on a twelve-month tenancy, in an area with little visitor demand, can genuinely do better as a long-term rental.

What we do about it

Our appraisal works through every line above for your specific property, and gives you a conservative case alongside the realistic one. If the numbers do not work, we say so — that is a more useful answer than a projection you cannot achieve.