Our Airbnb cleaning fee is $65 on the studios, $85 on the one-bedrooms, and $110 on the two-bedroom, and none of those numbers fully covers what we pay the cleaner. That's on purpose. After four years and seven units we've come to think of the cleaning fee as a pricing decision, not a cost recovery, and getting it wrong cost us more bookings than any other single number on the listing. Here's what we charge, what it actually costs, and the two times we set it wrong.
If you're a guest who landed here wondering why a $140 night has a $95 fee stuck to it, keep reading too. We'll explain what's inside that number, and where hosts are taking advantage.
What does an Airbnb cleaning fee actually cover?
The fee is a one-time charge per stay, set by the host, added on top of the nightly rate. It's meant to cover the turnover: stripping and washing linens, cleaning every surface, restocking soap and coffee and paper goods, resetting the staging, checking for damage. In theory it's what the host pays a cleaner. In practice it's whatever the host wants it to be, which is why guests hate it.
Airbnb takes its guest service fee on the cleaning fee as well as the nightly rate, and since 2023 the search results show total price including the fee by default in most markets. That change mattered more than any other for how we set ours. A fee that looked reasonable as a line item on the checkout page looks very different when it's baked into a per-night figure a guest is comparing against the listing next door.
What our turnovers really cost
Numbers from our books, averaged across 2025. Our cleaner, Rosa, and her one part-timer, charge us by the unit: $70 for a studio, $95 for a one-bedroom, $130 for the two-bedroom. That's for a standard turnover of about two to three hours. A deep clean, which we schedule every fifteenth stay or after anything messy, is roughly double.
On top of Rosa's fee: laundry. We send linens out rather than washing in-unit, because a stacked washer in a studio can't keep up with back-to-backs. It's about $18 per turnover for a studio's sheets and towels, $26 for the two-bed. Consumables restocked at each turnover, the coffee, the dish soap, the little shampoos, run $9 to $14. And the thing nobody counts: our time to inspect, which we do ourselves on about a third of turnovers, twenty minutes each.
So a studio turnover costs us about $97 all in. We charge $65. A two-bedroom turnover costs about $170. We charge $110. The gap comes out of the nightly rate, and that's the whole point.
Why we charge less than it costs
Because a guest booking two nights sees the fee as a per-night tax, and a big one kills the booking. A $95 fee on a $140 studio for two nights is a 34 percent surcharge. The same $95 spread into the nightly rate, so $187 a night with a $0 fee, reads as a $187 room. Same money to us. Very different feeling to a guest scrolling on their phone at eleven at night.
We tested this, badly, in 2023. We had the studio on South Lamar at $118 a night with a $95 fee, which was our true cost at the time. Bookings were fine on stays of four nights and up and terrible under three. We dropped the fee to $55 and raised the rate to $138. Short stays doubled within six weeks. Revenue per available night went from $81 to $104. Rosa got paid exactly the same.
The lesson we took: the cleaning fee should be low enough that it doesn't scare off a weekend, and the rest of your turnover cost lives in the rate, where it's invisible and where it scales with the length of stay. Long stays subsidize short ones a little. That's fine. Long stays are cheaper to host anyway.
The rule we use now: cleaning fee at roughly two-thirds of the true turnover cost, the remaining third folded into the nightly rate. Guests see a fair fee; we still get paid.
How much should you charge for an Airbnb cleaning fee?
Start from what a turnover actually costs you, including laundry and restocking, not just the cleaner's invoice. Then set the fee at 60 to 70 percent of that and put the rest into the rate. Then check what the listings you compete with are charging, and don't be the highest. Airbnb's own guidance is that fees should reflect real costs; the market's guidance is that guests punish anything that looks like a surprise.
Rough ranges from what we see across Austin: studios $40 to $75, one-bedrooms $60 to $100, two-bedrooms $90 to $150, whole houses $150 to $300. Anything above those, in a comparable unit, is either a host who's never looked at the total-price view or a host who's using the fee to discourage short stays without saying so.
Which brings up the other thing you can do with a cleaning fee, which is set a minimum stay instead. If you don't want one-night bookings, a two-night minimum does that cleanly. A $150 cleaning fee does it too, but resentfully, and the guest who books anyway arrives already annoyed with you. We've written about the effect that has on reviews, and it isn't good.
The second time we got it wrong
The two-bedroom, late 2024. We'd had a run of large groups leaving it in rough shape, so we raised the fee to $165 to "cover the risk." Bookings dropped by about a third over the next two months. The groups didn't stop coming; they just haggled more and left worse reviews about value. The couples and the solo business travelers, who never made a mess, stopped booking entirely, because a $165 fee on a two-night stay was more than a night's rate.
We'd punished our best guests for the sins of our worst. The fee went back to $110, we added a two-night minimum on weekends and a note in the listing about maximum occupancy, and we dealt with the actual problem through the house rules and the security deposit request. Bookings recovered in about five weeks. The cleaning fee is a blunt tool. It's not the tool for group damage.
Cleaning fee by length of stay, and the 28-night problem
One thing the flat fee can't handle on its own is the long stay. A monthly guest, twenty-eight nights or more, pays the fee once, and we clean once at the end, but a unit lived in for a month needs more than a standard turnover. The oven's been used thirty times. The grout has opinions. We schedule a deep clean after every stay over fourteen nights and eat the difference, because a $110 fee on a $3,900 booking isn't the place to squeeze.
Airbnb lets you set a different fee for short stays than for longer ones, and we use that on two units: $65 for stays of one or two nights on the studio, $55 for three and up. It nudges people toward the third night without a minimum-stay rule, and it's the closest the platform gives you to pricing the fee per night without actually doing it. Small lever. Worth pulling.
What we tell Rosa, and what she tells us
The cleaning fee and the cleaner's pay are two different numbers and it's worth keeping them that way in your own head. Rosa gets paid the same whether we charge $55 or $165, and she gets paid the same on a one-night turnover as a seven-night one, which means the one-nighters are where she earns the most per hour and the long stays are where she earns the least. We adjusted for that last year by adding a flat $20 to any turnover after a stay of ten nights or more. She noticed. It's the kind of thing that keeps a good cleaner for four years, and a good cleaner is worth more to a listing than any number on the checkout page.
She also tells us things the fee can't. Which guests left it spotless, which unit's shower needs recaulking, which lamp has a wobbly base. That intelligence is why we'd never go to a cleaning service that rotates staff, even though one quoted us 15 percent less. The fee covers the clean. The relationship covers everything else.
Should you charge a cleaning fee at all?
Some hosts fold the whole thing into the rate and list a $0 fee, and in the total-price era that's a legitimate choice. We tried it on one studio for a quarter. It photographed well in search, "no cleaning fee" got a few comments in reviews, and the booking rate ticked up a little. But it also pulled in more one-night stays than we could turn over cheaply, because the rate didn't rise enough to cover a one-night turnover at Rosa's price. A one-night stay at $150 with a $0 fee paid us $150 and cost us $97 to clean. A one-night stay at $138 plus $55 paid $193.
So we went back to a modest fee. For studios in a walkable neighborhood where one-night stays are common, we think a small fee is right. For a house that mostly books four nights and up, a $0 fee with a higher rate probably wins. Know which one you are.
What guests should know about the fee
If you're the guest: the fee isn't the host pocketing money for nothing, usually. On our units it doesn't even cover the cleaner. What it does mean is that shorter stays are relatively more expensive, so if you're deciding between two nights and three, the third is cheaper than it looks. And if a listing has a fee that's more than a night's rate, ask yourself what the host is really telling you. Sometimes it's "we don't want you," and it's better to know.
You also don't have to clean before you leave. Strip the beds if the host asks, take out the trash, don't leave dishes in the sink, but the fee paid for the cleaning. We've had guests scrub the bathroom before checkout and it's kind and unnecessary and Rosa cleans it again anyway.
How the fee shows up in search, and why that matters more than the number
Since the total-price display rolled out, the fee doesn't live on its own line for most guests anymore. It's blended into the nightly figure they see while scrolling, divided by however many nights they searched for. So the same $85 fee looks like $42 a night to someone searching two nights and $12 a night to someone searching a week. The short-stay guest is the one who feels it, and the short-stay guest is the one who's comparing eight listings at once.
We check our own listings in the search results once a month, logged out, searching two nights on a weekend, and look at where our blended price lands against the units around us. Twice we've found a fee that looked fine on our side pushing us two rows down the results. Both times we shaved $10 off the fee, added $5 to the rate, and moved back up. It's not a science. But it's the only view of the fee that matters, because it's the one the guest sees.
What a cleaning fee can't fix
A unit that's hard to clean. If your turnover takes three and a half hours because there are eleven throw pillows, a rug with fringe, and glass shelves, no fee in the world makes that cheap. We went through every unit two years ago and pulled everything that added minutes to a turnover, and we wrote it up in the turnover systems post. Wall-mounted lighting was a big one. A pair of plug-in sconces instead of two table lamps means two fewer things to dust, two fewer cords to straighten, and a nightstand that wipes in one pass. Over a hundred turnovers a year, minutes matter more than the fee.
Get the unit fast to clean first. Then the fee can be small, the rate can carry the rest, and the guest never feels either one. That's the whole trick, and it took us four years and two wrong turns to find it.
Shop this post: plug-in wall sconces that free up the nightstand and cut minutes off every turnover.
