A typical two-bedroom entire-home listing in a mid-sized UK city grosses £18,000-£28,000 a year and nets £11,000-£16,000 before mortgage. Central London grosses more — £30,000-£45,000 unconstrained — but the 90-night planning cap means most hosts without change-of-use permission can only legally capture £13,500-£17,000 of it. The arithmetic is always the same: nightly rate, times 365, times occupancy, minus roughly a third.
The detail
Work a real example. A two-bed in Manchester at a £115 average nightly rate and 62% occupancy grosses £26,000. Take off the Airbnb host service fee (3% on the split-fee model, or 14-16% if you are on host-only pricing, which is what most channel-managed listings use), the cleaning shortfall your guest cleaning fee doesn't cover (£600-£1,200), utilities and broadband (£2,400 — guests use noticeably more energy than a tenant), linen and laundry (£1,100), specialist short-let insurance (£400), a furnishing replacement fund (£1,200) and council tax (£1,800). That leaves about £17,500 self-managed, or about £13,600 if you hand it to a full-service manager at 15%.
Two variables move that number more than anything else. The first is average length of stay: at a two-night average you run around 118 changeovers a year, at a five-night average you run 47, and the difference is £3,000-£5,000 of cleaning and laundry on identical revenue. The second is pricing discipline — the gap between a listing on flat pricing and one on properly tuned dynamic pricing is routinely 12-20% of annual revenue in the same building.
Scale changes the shape but not the maths. Managed portfolios buy cleaning and linen cheaper and fill shoulder season better, but they pay for that with staff. The per-property net rarely improves much beyond the fourth unit.
The numbers that matter
Where this stops holding
These are market medians, and the spread around them is wider than the difference between markets. In a single postcode the top-quartile listing routinely earns 2.5-3x the bottom-quartile one at the same size and specification: photography, review count, minimum-stay policy and pricing tooling explain most of that gap, and none of them are visible in a market average. Median figures also assume a mature listing. A new listing with no reviews typically runs 30-50% below market for its first four to six months while it builds ranking.
Sources
- Inside Airbnb — city data snapshots
- GOV.UK — business rates for self-catering and holiday-let accommodation
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A HostPal Invest report runs the real occupancy, nightly rate, RevPAR, regulation risk and a buy / wait / avoid verdict for one specific property or drawn area, in any of 117 markets — not a national average. Street-Level reports from £29.