Over a Quarter of U.S. Airbnb Cleaning Fees Rose by the Same 15%

More than a quarter of U.S. homes charging an Airbnb cleaning fee raised it by almost exactly the markup that keeps hosts whole under Airbnb's new fee. Nearly as many left it untouched.

Of 538,717 U.S. entire-home listings that charged an Airbnb cleaning fee in both October 2025 and September 2026, more than one in four raised it by almost exactly 15%, according to AirROI, a short-term-rental data firm. About one in four left it unchanged. Increases just below or just above that mark each drew only a few percent of the listings.

That markup leaves a host's take unchanged when Airbnb's cut moves from the 3% most hosts paid to a single 15.5% fee charged to hosts alone.

The same homes' median cleaning fee rose to $169 from $150 over the period.

U.S. hosts had until Sept. 15 to adjust their prices, and hosts in the European Economic Area and Switzerland face their own deadline on Oct. 13. The fee is meant to pay a cleaner: Airbnb tells hosts to use it for supplies or housekeeping, "not as a way to earn extra money." How hosts handle it decides whether the listed cleaning fee or the host's margin absorbs the new fee.

Airbnb's pitch was that nobody had to lose. "Hosts are able to adjust their prices to maintain the same net earnings and guests will continue to see the full price upfront," the company said in its Aug. 6 shareholder letter.

The cleaning fee sits inside that arithmetic. "The single fee applies to your nightly price and any fees you add, like a cleaning, pet, or extra guest fee," Airbnb's announcement says.

Under Airbnb's host fees before the switch, most hosts paid 3% and guests paid a separate service fee on the same subtotal, cleaning included. Guests always paid most of Airbnb's cut on the cleaning. Now the host pays it, unless the host raises the fee.

So the verdict splits by host.

Those who repriced kept their take, and their guests pay about what they paid before on that line. Those who left the fee alone now pay the whole cut themselves: on the median three-bedroom fee, they keep $25 less per turnover.

The markup came in two waves

The 15% jumps did not build gradually. In a typical month, fewer than one listing in 200 moved its cleaning fee by that much. Two windows broke the pattern, each tied to dates Airbnb set: October to November 2025, and June through September 2026.

The first came between October and November 2025, when about one listing in twenty took the 15% step. Airbnb had told hosts who price through property-management software that they "will switch to a single fee" on Oct. 27, and to make any changes "using your property management software."

Professionally managed listings made up about seven in ten of that wave, against about one in six of the listings whose fee did not move. One software firm, Hospitable, says it raised its users' Airbnb markups automatically when their fee structure changed, and that from Oct. 27 to 29, 2025, those markups applied to all fees, cleaning included.

Airbnb's chief executive, Brian Chesky, said on the company's Aug. 6 earnings call that the single fee made prices more competitive. Software-connected hosts' prices had carried Airbnb's guest fee on top, and "a whole bunch of API hosts were accidentally mispricing," he said.

The second wave was larger and came from a different crowd. Between June and July 2026, the month Airbnb announced the switch for most remaining hosts (July 7), about one listing in eight raised its cleaning fee by 15%. About one in 23 followed in each of the next two months, the second of them the month of the Sept. 15 deadline for U.S. hosts.

The deadline brought no new spike: September's share about matched August's. Like July's group, the later ones were mostly hosts without professional management; only about one in twenty was professionally managed.

Airbnb's price adjustment tool, built for hosts without software, adjusts every price and every added fee, the cleaning fee among them, by one "adjustment ratio" for the next two years of the calendar. It acts only "after the host confirms."

One host saw the result and asked why. "I had set a $150 cleaning fee. With the change to the new fee structure, the cleaning fee is now $172," the host wrote on Airbnb's Community Center forum on July 21. "But why is that applied to the cleaning charge? The $150 is what our housekeeper charges."

At 15.5%, $172 nets the host about $145, what $150 netted under the old 3%.

Ellie Mertz, Airbnb's chief financial officer, told analysts on Aug. 6 that the single fee "has a kind of downward pressure on pricing," and that "approximately half of our active listings are now subject to the single service fee." She said she expects the whole supply base on it by year end.

Chris Dickey, who runs his own three-bedroom rental in Moab, Utah, raised his listed prices to cover the fee while keeping guests' totals roughly the same, CNBC Make It reported. "I feel like the new 15.5% is more transparent," he said.

What a cleaning fee costs now

Fees climb with every bedroom, and the spread inside each size is wide.

For a host charging the median who has not repriced, the table shows what that fee now nets after the 15.5% cut, and the fee that would restore the old take. These are September figures, after the Sept. 15 deadline for U.S. hosts, and they still include hosts who had not repriced.

On the median three-bedroom fee, the host now pays Airbnb about $31, against about $6 under the old 3% host fee.

With a typical stay of about four nights, the fee runs from roughly an eighth to a seventh of the stay's price before taxes, rising with home size.

Hosts face the same gross-up question on the nightly rate, and how far to raise nightly prices for the 15.5% fee is a separate calculation from the cleaning line.

Fees track place more than pay

Wages track only a small part of the spread. Of the 16 markets in the table below, Honolulu pays housekeepers the most and also charges the most. But beach and mountain towns such as Panama City Beach, Fla., and Sevierville, Tenn., charge far more than San Antonio or Houston at similar or lower wages.

Nationally, maids and housekeeping cleaners earned a median $17.07 an hour in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure covers hotel and household workers too, not only rental turnovers.

The table lists 16 large U.S. markets by three-bedroom fee. Wages are for each city's surrounding metro area; Sevierville uses BLS's East Tennessee nonmetro area.

The labor itself is hard to pin down. Dickey budgets two and a half hours of cleaning between guests, he told CNBC Make It in August, and says the job often runs longer once linens go through the wash.

"Cleaning is always the sleeper," he said.

At the national median wage, that budget comes to about $43 of pay, before laundry, supplies, travel or a cleaning company's margin.

Sébastien Long, whose company Lodgeur runs about 200 furnished rentals in Texas, told NerdWallet in late 2022 that hiring out a two-bedroom clean could cost $175 with laundry and supplies. That is above the median two-bedroom fee today.

Few hosts are folding it in

Airbnb's chief executive once argued against the fee. "If I was a host, I probably would not charge a cleaning fee," Chesky said in a 2023 interview with Alex Kantrowitz, published by Slate in October that year.

By the end of 2023, Airbnb told shareholders, "nearly 40% of our active listings charged no cleaning fee at all." That count covered every listing type worldwide. Among active U.S. entire homes in September, about 6% charged none.

This year the drift has gone toward the fee. Between March and September 2026, about one in 75 of the same U.S. homes added a cleaning fee, while about one in 120 dropped one.

The Federal Trade Commission's fee rule, in force since May 2025, says "the cleaning fee must be included in the total price," and Airbnb has shown guests that total by default worldwide since April 2025. The rule caps no fee.

As under the old split, Airbnb takes the same percentage on a dollar of cleaning as on a dollar of nightly rate.

Within the same city and bedroom count, listings with a fee near the local median did about as well as the typical home there. Those charging more than one and a half times the local median booked about 5 percentage points fewer of their nights, and listings with no fee about 7 points fewer.

That is an association among homes that chose their fees and differ in other ways; the highest-fee homes also charge higher nightly rates.

Dickey sees softness. "We are seeing a slow-down of booking, though, so I would suspect that the market has yet to normalize the fee change," he told CNBC.

Airbnb's May 7 results release credited its raised revenue outlook partly to "improvements to monetization through a simplified fee structure and our insurance programs, which are expected to lift our full-year take rate." In the second quarter, revenue as a share of bookings held at 13.2%, in line with a year earlier.

The EEA and Swiss deadline is Oct. 13

Hosts in the European Economic Area and Switzerland have until Oct. 13 to adjust their prices, and software-connected hosts still on the old split switch to the single fee that day.

Mertz told analysts in August that she expects every Airbnb listing on the single fee by the end of the year.

About the data: Medians and the October–September comparison cover short-term U.S. entire-home Airbnb listings booked at least once in the prior 12 months; monthly waves compare the same U.S. entire homes in consecutive months. Wages: BLS, May 2025, for each city's BLS area.