The Best and Worst Cities For Making Money on Airbnb

Airbnb has revolutionized the way people live when they are away from home, giving everyone an alternative to hit-or-miss hospitality industry mainstays like hotels, motels, and hostels. Travelers can now choose from a variety of unique and comfortable places to stay all around the world with the click of a button. Airbnb has made this process easy for people looking for a place to stay, giving them access to reviews left by previous guests and photos of the spaces in question, while also allowing customers to filter their search results with different criteria so they can find a rental of the right size and price.

While Airbnb has become a go-to resource for travelers, it has also become a source of extra income for homeowners. This made us wonder exactly where in the United States one could profit the most by renting out their home on the platform. Using Airbnb data, we found which of America’s large metropolitan areas feature the highest and lowest rental prices, and compared that data to average mortgage costs from across the country to find out exactly how much profit homeowners can make by renting out their space on Airbnb.

The results of our research are below, showing which cities homeowners should live in and which ones to avoid if they plan on using their home as a money-making machine.

(Before we dive in, we encourage you to check with local authorities if you plan to open your home as a short-term rental. Many municipalities require registering rental properties with city offices for tax or business purposes.)

What’s better than a home that pays for itself? By taking the median monthly mortgage payment in all of the cities included in our study and dividing it by the average nightly price of Airbnb rentals in those cities, we were able to find the cities where it would take the fewest and most nights of renting to cover your mortgage. Residents of Akron, Ohio came out on top, as renting their homes out for just over four days would cover their monthly home payments. Not bad for a few weekends of hosting!

On the flip side, four days is about all the time denizens of Santa Clara, California would have to themselves each month, as they would need to rent out their homes for more than 27 days every single month if they wanted to cover their mortgage through rental income alone!



Need to turn a profit on your rental fast? Your best bet might be to own property on the East Coast. When looking at the difference between daily rental prices and the daily average cost of a mortgage, the three cities producing the most profit on a daily basis — Virginia Beach, Virginia Bridgeport, Connecticut , and Charleston, South Carolina — are all waterside vacation destinations.If you want your home to produce top Airbnb revenue, it would be wise to avoid living west of the Mississippi River unless you go all the way to California. Seven of the worst cities for nightly rental rates all fall in that region of America. On the other hand, they are some pretty affordable places to stay while renting out your own home!

So did your city make any of these lists? How much money do you think your home can make for you? How much money would you need to be able to make to consider moving to a more favorable rental market? Let us know the answers to these questions and anything else related to this analysis in the comments below!

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