The highest Airbnb occupancy rates by city, and why the benchmark can mislead you

Search for the highest Airbnb occupancy rates by city and you are really asking a different question: what number should my listings be hitting. It is a reasonable thing to want. It is also where a lot of good operators take a wrong turn, because a city occupancy average is one of the least useful numbers you can benchmark a specific listing against. Here is why, from people who used to read whole markets from the inside.

What a “city occupancy rate” actually is

A city occupancy figure is an average of averages. It blends studios and six-bedroom villas, permanent professional operators and someone renting a spare room twice a month, peak-season coastal demand and flat mid-week urban demand, aggressive minimum-stay strategies and none at all. By the time all of that is averaged into one percentage for a city, the number has smoothed away everything that would let you act on it.

It is a fine fact for a headline and a poor target for a business. The city at the top of the list is not telling you what your listings should do. It is telling you that, on average, across wildly different properties, that market filled a certain share of nights. Your building is not the average.

Why the highest-occupancy cities can earn the least per property

Here is the trap. Occupancy on its own says nothing about money. A market can post very high occupancy precisely because operators there compete on price, filling nights cheaply. A market can post moderate occupancy and out-earn it because the booked nights are all at strong rates in a short, high-demand season.

A coastal market that runs 45 percent for the year, with those nights at premium peak pricing, can be far more profitable than an urban market that runs 75 percent on thin nightly rates. If you chase the high-occupancy city’s number by dropping your price to fill more nights, you can raise your occupancy and lower your revenue in the same move. Occupancy without your rate beside it is half a number, and it is the less important half.

What operators should benchmark against instead

For a real read, drop the city average and compare against two things you can actually verify.

Your own history, first. This listing, this month, against the same month last year. Same property, same season, real signal. It is the cleanest comparison there is and the one you can check without trusting anyone’s model.

Then a named, dated set of comparable listings in the same submarket: similar size, similar location, similar quality tier. Not the city. Not a national figure. A handful of properties a guest would actually consider instead of yours. That is the only “benchmark” that tells you whether a soft calendar is a you problem or a whole-market problem.

Third-party city and market estimates have their place for spotting whether an entire area is softening, but they are modeled, not measured, and they should never be the referee for whether one of your specific listings is underperforming.

Where occupancy is genuinely useful

Occupancy earns its keep not as a target but as a symptom. When a listing’s occupancy drops below its own history and below a fair comparable set, that gap is a signal that something upstream is leaking: the listing is not being seen, the search card is not earning the tap, the page is not converting, or a quality pattern is suppressing it. The number tells you there is a problem. It does not tell you which one, and it certainly does not tell you to cut price, which only helps one of those causes and quietly hurts your revenue if the real leak was somewhere else.

Put your own gap in money, then read it

Rather than benchmark against a city you do not operate in, put a figure on your own gap. Our free Empty-Nights Calculator turns the distance between your current occupancy and where a comparable set runs into a monthly and yearly number, at your own nightly rate. It is a gross estimate, not an Airbnb figure, but it makes the stakes real in about thirty seconds.

And when you want to know which upstream leak is actually costing you those nights across a book of properties, that is a Portfolio Diagnostic: every listing scored, every problem ranked, read the way the platform reads it. We will not hand you a target occupancy, because the honest number depends on your market and your rate. We will show you where yours is leaking.

Rental Growth Advisors is run by ex-Airbnb Market Managers. We read the whole listing the way the platform does, and we never promise a ranking.