A good Airbnb occupancy rate is 65-75% for a full-time entire-home listing in a year-round city market, and 45-60% in a seasonal coastal or ski market. Anything above 60% in a city usually beats the long-let alternative on gross revenue. But occupancy on its own is the least useful number in short lets — a listing at 55% and £180 a night earns more than one at 80% and £95, and does 40% fewer changeovers to get there.
The detail
The benchmark that matters is RevPAR — nightly rate multiplied by occupancy — because it prices rate and volume on the same scale. Chasing occupancy in isolation is the most common way new hosts destroy their own margin: you can buy the last fifteen points of occupancy with discounts, but you pay for them twice, once in the rate cut and once in the extra cleans.
Seasonality also makes an annual average misleading. A Cornish cottage running 92% in August and 22% in February averages 55%, which looks mediocre next to a Manchester flat at 65% — but the cottage earns most of its revenue at triple the winter rate, so its RevPAR can be higher. Read the monthly curve, not the annual number.
One practical warning about published occupancy figures: most are calculated against nights the host made available, not against 365. A host who blocks half the calendar and fills the rest shows 85% occupancy and earns very little. When you compare markets, insist on occupancy over the full year.
The numbers that matter
Where this stops holding
Every publicly available occupancy figure — ours included — is a model, not a measurement. Inside Airbnb's published methodology infers bookings from review counts, assumes roughly half of stays leave a review, and caps the result at 70% occupancy. That cap means the method structurally cannot show you a genuinely high-performing listing, and the review-rate assumption makes professionalised listings look worse than they are and neglected ones look better. Treat any scraped occupancy figure as a range with about 10-20 points of uncertainty on a good listing.
Sources
Get this answered for your address
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.