What is the Airbnb cleaning fee
The Airbnb cleaning fee is charged by hosts to cover expenses related to cleaning. The fee is not mandatory. Hosts can choose not to have a cleaning fee. If a host does choose to have a cleaning fee, they decide how much to charge. The fee is applied once for the entire stay not on a per night basis. The host receives the majority of the cleaning fee with about 3% going to Airbnb for their service fees.
Introduction to the analysis
For the analysis we’ll use data from Inside Airbnb, an activist project with the objective to provide data that quantifies the impact of short-term rentals on housing and residential communities. The dataset contains 250k listings in the US from April 2020.
First, we’ll determine the percentage of listings that have a cleaning fee. Next we’ll focus in on what hosts charge for a cleaning fee. To do this we’ll limit the data set to listings with a minimum cleaning fee of $1 and maximum cleaning fee of $1,000 as well as a maximum nightly rate of $1,000 to remove outliers. We’ll also only include listings with minimum nights < 30 days for reasons that will become clear later. These criteria limit the sub set to 168k listings.
Do all Airbnb listings have a cleaning fee
Not all listings have a cleaning fee. Since the cleaning fee is optional, many hosts opt not to have one. In analyzing all listings in the data set, 19% of Airbnb listings did not have a cleaning fee. Conversely, 81% of listings did have a cleaning fee.
What is a typical Airbnb cleaning fee
The average Airbnb cleaning fee in the United States is $93. However, to put this into perspective we should have a look at the data. Below is a histogram of analyzed cleaning fees. A histogram is a chart that shows data grouped into ranges making it easier to visualize distribution. In looking at the distribution of cleaning fees, we can see that the data skews to the right. This means there are some listings with very high cleaning fees pushing the average up.
Since there is skewness in this data, another way to look at how much hosts charge is to use the median. The median is the number that occurs in exactly the middle of a dataset. The median Airbnb cleaning fee is $75. We can use these two data points to make a generalized statement. The typical Airbnb cleaning fee in the United States is between $75 and $95.
Cleaning fees compared to listing price
We can also answer the question of how much hosts charge for cleaning by looking at cleaning fee as a percentage of the listing price. Since a lot of hosts have a minimum number of nights on their listing, it’s only fair to take this into account in the calculation. For example a $20 cleaning fee on a $20 per night listing would be substantial (100% of the price). But if the minimum night stay is 5 days, then it makes more sense to calculate the cleaning fee as a percentage of the minimum nights x nightly rate. In the above example that would be a $20 cleaning fee for $100 paid in nightly fees. In this new calculation, cleaning fees are only 20% of the listing price. Below we’ll refer to minimum nights x nightly rate as the listing price.
The cleaning fee to listing price ratio was calculated across all listings in the subset. When we put this data into a histogram chart, we can see that most cleaning fees are less than 40% of the listing price. However there is skewness in this data as well with some hosts charging a high cleaning fee proportional to their listing price. Given the skewness, it’s appropriate to use the median for this data set as well.
What do most hosts charge for cleaning
Most hosts set their cleaning fee to 25% of the listing price. 25% is the median of the above data set and represents what most hosts who have a cleaning fee charge. However, this is also just a rule of thumb derived from data analysis. It’s up to each individual host to consider their own circumstances when setting a cleaning fee.
Key Takeaways
- 19% of Airbnb listings don’t have a cleaning fee
- The typical Airbnb cleaning fee is between $75 and $95
- Most hosts set the cleaning fee to 25% of the listing price
