Airbnb’s 15.5% Host Fee: What It Costs and How to Reprice

As of September 15, 2026, nearly every Airbnb host in the US pays the same fee: 15.5% of the booking subtotal, taken out of the payout. The separate guest service fee is gone.

If you were on the old split fee and left your prices alone, you now net about 13% less on the same listed price, and Airbnb takes its cut of your cleaning fee too.

What changed on September 15?

Airbnb’s host-only fee is a single 15.5% service fee deducted from the host payout. It applies to the whole booking subtotal: nightly rate, cleaning fee, pet fee, and extra guest fee, with taxes excluded. It replaces the split fee, where hosts paid about 3% and guests paid a separate 14.1% to 16.5% at checkout (Airbnb Help Center).

Airbnb moved hosts in waves over about a year.

If you manage your listing directly on Airbnb with no software, this week is your wave. Bookings confirmed before your switch date keep the old fee.

How much does the 15.5% fee cost if you did nothing?

Take a three-night stay at $200 a night with a $215 cleaning fee. The subtotal is $815 either way. What changes is who pays Airbnb.

That is $102 less on one ordinary booking, a 12.9% cut. The guest paid $122 less, and Airbnb’s take barely moved. The fee shifted from the guest’s side of the receipt to yours, and your listed price is the only thing that can move it back.

How much should you raise your Airbnb prices?

About 15%, on every line, including the cleaning fee. Under the split fee you kept 97% of your listed price, so a $200 night paid you $194. Under the host-only fee you keep 84.5%. To get back to $194, the listed price has to be $230, a 15% raise (0.97 divided by 0.845). Raising by exactly 15.5% falls a little short, because Airbnb takes its 15.5% from the raised price. Airbnb’s own price adjustment tool applies about 15% for the same reason.

You will also see 18.3% quoted, and it answers a different question. Divide by 0.845 alone and a $200 night becomes $237, which pays out $200: your full listed price, not your old payout. For a host who listed $200 by hand and kept $194, that is a 3% raise, and the guest’s total goes from about $230 under the old service fee to $237. The number is right for a host who runs a pricing tool and wants the base price in the tool to be the amount Airbnb pays out. We run 18.3% on the homes we manage for that reason, and it is the net-parity markup we covered in our pricing mistakes post. Some hosts on software also carried a 3% markup to absorb the old host fee, and for them 18.3% replaces it and is neutral. If you set one price on Airbnb and want to keep earning what you earned, 15% is your number.

Raise it in one place. If you use a pricing tool or property management software, set the raise there as an Airbnb channel adjustment and leave the Airbnb dashboard alone. Doing both compounds the markup and prices you out of your own comp set.

You may have read that Airbnb wants prices to come down. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, CFO Ellie Mertz said the company wants hosts “as price competitive as possible,” and that “in many cases, that means we encourage our hosts to bring their prices down. In some cases, it means we want to make sure that they’re not leaving money on the table.” CEO Brian Chesky said “a whole bunch of API hosts were accidentally mispricing because they were pricing on other platforms and our guest fee was going on top of that.” He is describing a manager who copied a VRBO rate onto Airbnb and let the guest fee stack on top. A host who repriced correctly, so the guest’s total stays where it was, is not in that group.

Does the 15.5% fee apply to the cleaning fee?

Yes, and that is where hosts who only raised the nightly rate get hurt.

Under the split fee, a $215 cleaning fee netted $208.55, enough to cover a cleaner who charges $200. Under the host-only fee, that same $215 nets $181.68. You now pay about $18 out of your own pocket every time the house gets cleaned. On 80 turnovers a year, that is roughly $1,500.

On a 4-bedroom we manage, it showed up on a September payout line. The host fee on a $378 rent plus $215 cleaning stay came to $91, within a dollar of 15.5% of both together. Marking up the nightly rate alone does nothing for the cleaning fee. You have to raise the fee itself, fold part of it into the nightly rate, or accept the loss in exchange for a lower displayed total.

What are other hosts doing?

When Airbnb moved an earlier cohort last year, about 30% of hosts raised prices enough to fully offset the fee and another 30% raised them partway, according to an AirDNA analysis reported by CNBC on August 22, 2026. Chris Dickey, who has run a home in Moab since 2021, told CNBC he repriced to keep guest totals roughly the same and added: “We are seeing a slow-down of booking, though, so I would suspect that the market has yet to normalize the fee change.”

Any competitor pricing you captured before September 15 is stale for a few weeks, because the listings around you are repricing, or not, on their own schedule. Guests also compare all-in totals before tax side by side in search now, so a $350 cleaning fee shows up as $175 a night on every two-night search.

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