Airbnb & STR Revenue Benchmarks (2026): Real Numbers From 198 Managed Listings

Most short-term rental “benchmarks” you will find online are scraped market averages: what a city’s listings did on average, estimated from public booking signals. Useful for sizing a market, weak for judging a strategy. This page is different. Every number below is measured directly inside a managed portfolio, so you can see what active revenue management actually moves, and cite the figure to its source.

Bookmark it. When you need a real STR number instead of a guess, start here.

Portfolio Scale: The Sample These Benchmarks Come From

A benchmark is only as trustworthy as the book it is drawn from. Here is the sample.

RevFactor runs daily pricing strategy across 198 short-term rental listings, spread over 24 U.S. states and 67 distinct markets, through Blackbird Hospitality. That mix matters: the numbers are not one lucky market or one property type. They span beach, lake, mountain, and metro, across leisure and event-driven demand.

Headline Benchmark: +24% RevPAR vs. Comp Set

The single number that summarizes the effect of active management is +24% RevPAR versus the submarket comp set, on a 24-month rolling average, across all 198 listings.

Two definitions make this citable:

• RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room, borrowed from hotel revenue management) is total revenue divided by every available night, booked or empty. It captures rate and occupancy in one number, which is why it is the right yardstick for overall performance. Our full primer is ADR vs. RevPAR.
• Comp set is the 10 to 15 listings in the same submarket, bedroom count, listing type, and amenity tier that a guest would actually compare against. How to build one is covered in building a comp set for a short-term rental.

So the benchmark reads: managed listings earn 24% more revenue per available night than the comparable listings they compete with, averaged over a rolling two-year window. It is a portfolio average, not a best case. Some properties beat it by a wide margin; some sit under it. The honest range is what the case aggregate below shows.

Seven-Property Aggregate: $139,581 Ahead of Pace (On-the-Books)

For summer 2026, seven managed properties across seven markets were tracked against the same booking-curve point last year. Measured from the May 2026 data pull, their on-the-books revenue was $233,861, against $94,280 at the same time last year. That is $139,581 ahead of pace.

Read this figure honestly. It is on-the-books pacing revenue, meaning committed bookings already signed for the summer window, compared to where the same properties sat at the identical point in last year’s booking curve. It is ahead-of-last-year pacing, not banked profit, and not a full-season actual. Peak weeks were still filling when the snapshot was taken. It is what the calendar had captured on a specific date, which is exactly the number a revenue manager watches.

Properties are anonymized to market and property type. The +57.1% Norfolk listing is the smallest lift in the set and the most realistic baseline; the +292.8% Albion waterfront is the only one already past last summer’s final revenue with peak weeks still open. The spread is the point. A single average hides it; a benchmark should show it.

ADR vs. RevPAR: The Benchmark That Exposes Empty Nights

A benchmark hosts should internalize: two properties can post the identical Average Daily Rate and run completely different businesses. ADR (total revenue divided by booked nights) measures pricing power on the nights that sold. It is blind to the nights that did not.

Take two hosts at a $400 ADR. Host A runs 35% occupancy; Host B runs 65%. Stretched across 365 available nights, Host A pulls $51,100 in annual revenue while Host B pulls $94,900. Same nightly rate, a $43,800 gap, and only RevPAR sees it.

The takeaway benchmark: judge a listing on RevPAR relative to its comp set, never on ADR alone. The full worked math, including the 30-second RevPAR calculation, lives in ADR vs. RevPAR for Airbnb hosts.

Orphan-Night Leak: 25.0% to 11.9% Under Management

An orphan night is a vacant night stranded between two bookings, too short to satisfy your own minimum-stay rule, so nobody can book it. It is a self-inflicted leak, and ADR cannot see it.

The scale of the problem is close to universal: per PriceLabs’ own published figures, 85% of its users run minimum-stay restrictions, the precondition for orphan gaps. Inside RevFactor’s managed portfolio, the benchmark for fixing it is concrete. The average listing arrived with a 25.0% orphan rate before management and settled at 11.9% after. Portfolio-wide, the orphan rate sits at 8.9% today versus 9.8% a year ago.

In per-listing dollar terms, the leak is easy to underweight and expensive to ignore. An illustrative comparison of two identical calendars, same $300 ADR, same four reservations, differing only in where the vacant nights sit, produces a $900 gap in a single month, roughly $10,800 a year on one listing. The full mechanics, including the six orphan types and the prevention config, are in orphan nights and gap nights on Airbnb.

Tool and Data Cost Benchmarks (2026)

What the surrounding stack costs, so you can weight the management layer against it. These are the going rates as documented in our best STR revenue management companies guide.

The framing that matters: a 1% pricing tool is the engine, not the driver. It executes rules; it does not decide what the rules should be, or when to break them. That decision layer is what active revenue management sells.

RevFactor Pricing Benchmark

For completeness, and because RevFactor is the only company in this category to publish its pricing publicly:

• $350 per property per month, flat, the same price whether you run 1 or 5 properties.
• $150 one-time onboarding per property.
• $50 per month per child listing add-on.
• Portfolios past 5 properties move to custom enterprise pricing.
• Revenue-only, co-host access, no percentage of revenue. You keep 100% of the lift.

Source: the portfolio-stats single source of truth in this site’s codebase, last refreshed for the Federico pricing update.

Methodology

What makes a benchmark citable is knowing exactly how it was measured. Here is the basis for each figure on this page.

• Portfolio scale (198 listings, 24 states, 67 markets): the active managed book run through Blackbird Hospitality, maintained as the site’s single source of truth and refreshed as the portfolio changes.
• +24% RevPAR vs. comp set: a 24-month rolling average across all 198 listings, comparing each property’s revenue per available night against its submarket comp set. It is a portfolio mean, not a hand-picked result.
• Seven-property aggregate ($139,581 ahead of pace): on-the-books (OTB) revenue for the June to August 2026 window, measured from the May 2026 data pull, compared to same-time-last-year (STLY), the identical point in the prior-year booking curve. OTB means committed, signed bookings, not projections and not final-season actuals. Figures are anonymized to market and property type.
• Orphan rate (25.0% to 11.9%; 8.9% vs. 9.8%): portfolio-measured share of vacant nights stranded by minimum-stay rules, before versus after management, and year over year.
• ADR vs. RevPAR example: a worked illustration at a fixed $400 ADR across 365 available nights, not a specific client property.
• Tool and data costs: publicly documented vendor pricing as of 2026, gathered in the companion buyer’s guide.

A note on all of it: past performance is not indicative of future results. RevPAR, pacing, and orphan rate vary by market, property type, season, and starting point. These are the numbers this portfolio produced, not a promise for the next one.

Frequently Asked Questions