Madrid edges ahead of Valencia on higher occupancy (36% vs 30%), stronger RevPAR (£27 vs £20).
Head-to-head metrics
| Madrid | Valencia | |
|---|---|---|
| Median occupancy | 36% | 30% |
| Median daily rate | £94 | £87 |
| Median RevPAR | £27 | £20 |
| Active listings | 16,015 | 6,234 |
| YoY occupancy | — | — |
| YoY daily rate | — | — |
| Regulation risk | — | — |
| Annual night cap | None | None |
| License required | No | No |
Full analysis: Madrid vs Valencia
On the money side of this comparison — what a listing actually earns against the nights it has available — Madrid finishes clearly ahead of Valencia. Revenue per available night — rate and occupancy combined, the figure that actually reaches an owner — is 31.7% higher in Madrid: £27 against £20. Madrid's listings run at 36% occupancy against 30% in Valencia, worth 6 extra points of booked calendar every year. Those gaps are wide enough to survive a normal year's variance.
Madrid takes both halves of the yield equation, which is less common than it sounds. It charges more per night — £94 against £87 — and still fills more of the year, 36% against 30%. A market that leads on price and utilisation at once is normally one where demand has outrun supply, rather than one where hosts are discounting to keep the calendar busy. RevPAR reflects the double advantage at £27 against £20.
That verdict needs a caveat, because Valencia is not simply the weaker market of the two. Valencia is the less crowded of the two — 6,234 active listings to 16,015 — so a well-run property has fewer near-identical rivals to out-rank. Valencia sits at the cheaper end at £87 a night against £94, which lowers the bar for filling shoulder-season dates and usually tracks a lower purchase price too. If your model leans on that dimension, the ordering above can reasonably flip.
Neither Madrid nor Valencia currently has a verified short-term rental regulation record in our register, so the comparison above is a yield comparison only. Regulation is the single largest source of downside in this asset class — an unverified market is an unpriced risk, not an absent one.
The two calendars also behave differently. Madrid peaks in September at 71.3% and bottoms in February at 45.5%; Valencia runs from 64.4% in September down to 36.7% in November. Both swing by a similar amount across the year, so neither offers meaningfully steadier cash flow than the other.
Who each suits, then. Madrid suits buyers who want a conventional, lightly regulated entry. Valencia answers to the same regulatory profile, so the split between them is operational rather than legal. Every figure above comes from the same Inside Airbnb snapshot pipeline on both sides, dated 2025-09, filtered to listings with at least one booking in the last twelve months. Occupancy medians are drawn from 7,469 active Madrid listings and 3,224 in Valencia.
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