What minimum price to set on Airbnb, in dollars you keep

The minimum price answers one question: at what price would you rather the night stayed empty? Not the price you would like. Not your average. The one below which a booking costs you money, or sleep. Most hosts type a wish into that box. Then their pricing tool, or Airbnb, spends the whole winter fighting it.

Start with what a booked night costs you that an empty night does not

Only the costs that appear because someone slept there. The mortgage is paid either way. The insurance is paid either way. Those are not in the floor, and putting them in is how a safety net turns into a target.

What is in it, for an ordinary two-bedroom:

• The cleaning shortfall. If your cleaning fee does not fully cover the cleaner after Airbnb's 15.5%, the gap lands here. A $100 cleaner behind a $100 fee is $15.50 short, spread over the stay.
• Utilities that move with guests. Heating, cooling, hot water. Call it $8 a night for most homes, more in a Phoenix August.
• Consumables. Coffee, soap, paper, the shampoo bottle that is somehow always half gone. $5 or $6.
• Wear. Towels, linen, the sofa that ages a little every stay. $10 a night is honest for most listings.

That is roughly $40 on this example. Now add the smallest amount you would accept for the bother of a stranger in the house: the message at 11pm, the check-in that went wrong, the review you will have to write. For many hosts that is another $40. So the floor, in dollars kept, is about $80 a night on this listing.

That number is lower than most hosts expect. It should be. A floor is a safety net, not a target, and if the number surprises you, read what a floor price is for before you move it.

Why the mortgage does not belong in it

Take the same listing with a $1,800 mortgage and put $60 a night of it into the floor. The floor is now $140 kept. In July that changes nothing, because July prices sit far above it. In a slow February week, a guest who would have paid $95 sees $166 listed and books the place down the road. You keep the empty night. The mortgage is still due on the first.

At $80 the night sells for $95, and $95 pays $95 toward the mortgage that the empty night paid nothing toward. Which of those two floors protected you?

Convert kept dollars to the listed price

Airbnb takes 15.5% from the host on every booking, so a kept floor has to be divided by 0.845 to become the number you type in. Round up, always.

• $80 kept is $95 listed.
• $120 kept is $143 listed.
• $150 kept is $178 listed.

If your floor was set before the fee change, it was divided by 0.97, not 0.845, and it is now about 13% low in kept terms. A $150 floor from last year keeps $126.75 today. It is a two-minute fix, and worth doing this week.

A floor is not a season

Hosts who want a "winter floor" and a "summer floor" are using the floor to do the base price's job. The floor is one number, set from costs that do not change with the month. The season lives above it, in the price itself.

If you know something about a month that the market data cannot, a festival that is not on any calendar, a school holiday that fills your town, that belongs in the month's price, not the floor. In Hostomat that is a month plan: a band for that month, set once, with the floor untouched underneath it.

Who actually enforces the number

This is the part that matters more than the arithmetic.

Airbnb's own minimum price only applies while Smart Pricing is on, and even then a discount you set can take a night below it. A pricing tool's floor is enforced by the tool, which means it is only as good as the tool's code, because Airbnb will accept any nightly rate a tool sends it. Nothing on Airbnb's side stops a $60 night from being written to your calendar.

In Hostomat the floor is checked in our own code on every push. Every price, every night, every day, is compared to the floor before it leaves for Airbnb, and a price below it is replaced by the floor. It is not a preference the engine tries to respect. It is a line the write cannot cross. You can type it as the amount you want to keep, and the app stores the listed price that clears it.

Check it twice a year

The cleaner raises their rate. The fee changes again. Electricity goes up. A floor that was right in March is wrong by October, and nobody notices because nothing about it looks broken. Put two dates in your calendar, and on each one redo the list above in ten minutes.

That is the whole method: costs a booked night creates, plus the least you will take for the bother, divided by 0.845, rounded up, enforced by something you trust. If you would rather the enforcing were someone else's job, Hostomat's first month is free on every listing, and nothing is charged for 30 days after you switch pricing on.

Source: Airbnb's help page on service fees, https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1857, read September 21, 2026.