RentDue Stays · Calculator

Short-term rental profit calculator

13 August 2026 · 6 min read

There is no shortage of calculators that estimate what a short-term rental could earn. Almost none of them work out the other side, which is the side that decides whether the whole thing is worth doing: what it costs you to keep the place open. This one does that.

Describe the month as it really is — or as you think it will be — and below you get the profit, the profit per booked night, and the one number that genuinely compares channels: how much you keep out of every 100 the guest pays.

What does this short-term rental calculator work out?

The RentDue calculator turns a nightly rate into the money left at the end of the month: it takes off the channel commission, what each clean actually costs you, and the bills that run whether or not anyone stays. Three numbers come back — monthly profit, profit per booked night, and what you keep out of every $100 — and none of them is gross revenue.

Commission applies to the whole amount the guest pays, cleaning fee included, which is how the platforms charge it: Airbnb sets out its two fee structures on its service fees page and Vrbo explains its per-booking model in its help centre. That produces one counter-intuitive effect: raising your cleaning fee also raises what you hand the channel.

Why is gross revenue so misleading in short-term rentals?

Gross revenue on a holiday let contains money that is not yours and work you pay for. The cleaning fee you charge sits inside the commission base, the tourist tax gets handed on, and the clean itself has a real cost. Between the figure the platform celebrates and your bank balance sits a gap almost nobody sizes correctly.

On the example figures above, the same property produces these two months depending on where the bookings came from:

Twelve points of margin separate those two columns and the listing is identical. That is why the useful question is not “what did I bill?” but “how much do I keep out of every $100, and which channel did it come through?”

Which costs get left out of the sum almost every time?

The three most forgotten costs are small ones: what a clean really costs you — rarely the same as what you charge — the consumables every arrival eats, and the empty off-season months that still pay service charge and insurance. The RentDue calculator asks for each separately precisely because nobody carries them in their head.

• The clean you charge for is not the clean you pay for. Charging $55 and paying $45 is not $10 of profit: commission applies to the $55 too.
• Consumables. Coffee, soap, paper, light bulbs, batteries for the remote. None of them hurts on its own; together they are a night a month.
• The closed months. Service charge, insurance and local taxes do not know it is November. If your season is six months long, divide the annual fixed costs by twelve, not by six.

What happens if occupancy drops by two nights a month?

Two fewer nights a month do not shave a little off the profit: they remove the variable side while every fixed cost stays exactly where it was. At $100 a night and 15 booked nights, losing two nights costs $200 of income and saves only a fraction of one clean. Move that one box and watch the annual figure.

That experiment is why occupancy outranks nightly rate as soon as your fixed costs are high, and why one direct seven-night booking in the shoulder season can beat two expensive platform weekends.

What does this calculator not do?

A calculator estimates, it does not do your books. It multiplies by twelve a month you described, so the year comes out flat with no high or low season; it knows nothing about your tax position, excludes mortgage and depreciation, and stores nothing — the numbers never leave your browser. Use it to decide, not to file.

The flat year is the simplification worth keeping in mind. If your business is seasonal, run a peak month and a quiet month separately and weight them: the honest answer usually sits closer to the bad month than anyone expects.

How do you get from an estimate to the real number?

An estimate becomes data the moment every booking and every expense goes down with its channel and its date. RentDue Stays does that from the phone — booking in seconds, receipt photo attached, net per place and per channel — without an account and without a connection, because the data stays on the device.

If you would rather see how the free tiers of the usual expense apps compare first, the guide to Airbnb expense tracking without a subscription lays out where each one stops, RentDue Stays included.

Read next: Short-term rental app: bookings and real profit · Do you need a channel manager for two properties?