New York, New York Airbnb Market Data 2026

If you're weighing up a New York apartment and trying to work out what it might clear on Airbnb, the number that settles your answer isn't a revenue figure at all. It's a rule. Letting an entire apartment in New York City for fewer than 30 consecutive nights is illegal, and it was illegal long before anyone had heard of Airbnb, so the only short-term rental the city permits is one where you live in the unit, you're there for the whole stay, and you host no more than two paying guests at a time. Unfortunately for most people who go looking for that number, that rules out the business they came to price.

It also changes what the earnings figures describe. They're real money moving through real listings, though they attach to a room in somebody's home, a stay of 30 nights and up, or a building that's legally a hotel, rather than to the whole-unit nightly rental you'd underwrite in Phoenix or Orlando. And they're narrower than the name suggests: when I mapped this market's listings against the city's own boundaries, 98.7% of them fell inside the city limits and almost all of those inside Manhattan, which is New York County. Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island are measured separately, so what follows is a Manhattan picture with a thin sliver of the Bronx.

The other thing worth knowing before you read a single row is that this market shrank hard over the past year, in a way the neighboring markets didn't, while the city's own register of legal hosts grew. I'll come back to it properly, because it's the most interesting thing happening in this market and it's also the claim I'm least willing to put a number on.

How Much Do New York City Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Look at the middle of this market before you look at its ceiling. Of the listings I could measure on 29 September 2026, the median one took $60,425 across the trailing twelve months, charging $545 a night at the median and filling 33.9% of the calendar. Push up to the 75th percentile and annual revenue reaches $110,436, so the gap between a median listing and a strong one is roughly $50,000 a year. The typical listing here is a one-bedroom.

Those are medians, which isn't the same thing as the market averages carried on the New York City market page, since those cover a wider population and get pulled upward by a top end where listings rent at four figures a night. Keep the two apart, and whatever you do, don't multiply one by the other.

One more caveat matters more than either of those, and I'd rather put it here than bury it. What I measured is whole-unit listings, because that's the population the market data is built from, whereas the only short-term rental New York actually permits is a room inside a home somebody lives in. So read these as what a whole New York unit earns when it's let out, legally or otherwise, and not as what your spare bedroom would clear. If a room-share is the business you're considering, expect materially less than any row here and go price a comparable room yourself, because nothing in the figures I have will tell you what it clears.

Size does most of the work, and it does it through price rather than through nights sold:

Bedrooms	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Studio	$39,033	$323	37.0%	$57,757
1	$47,242	$455	33.1%	$62,574
2	$89,170	$757	34.3%	$122,694
3	$124,645	$1,018	34.5%	$175,484
4+	$218,531	$2,022	33.2%	$279,770

Medians across the New York City market's measurable listings, pulled 29 September 2026. Revenue, rate and occupancy are each taken separately, so they don't multiply out.

Follow the occupancy column down and something turns up that most markets won't show you: it barely moves. Studios fill 37% of the year while four-bedrooms fill 33%, and everything in between sits within a couple of points of a third, yet revenue still climbs more than fivefold across that same ladder. Every dollar of the climb comes from the nightly rate, since a median three-bedroom charges more than three times what a median one-bedroom charges and then books about the same share of the calendar.

Within a single size, though, the spread is narrower than you'd guess from a city with this reputation. A median one-bedroom takes $47,242 and a strong one, at the 75th percentile, takes $62,574, so moving from the middle of the one-bedroom pack to the top quarter of it is worth about $15,000 a year. Do the same at three bedrooms and the step is $124,645 to $175,484. Operating well pays, in other words, though it pays less than having a bigger apartment does, which is the opposite of the trade most owners here are in a position to make.

That flat occupancy column changes how you read a spread. Elsewhere I'd tell you a bigger home earns more because it fills better on weekends and holidays; here, it earns more because New York will pay $1,018 a night for three bedrooms and there are only so many of them. Occupancy isn't where I'd look for upside here, so if someone shows you a New York model that reaches a good return by pushing occupancy toward 60%, make sure to ask which listings they think are doing that, because the middle of this market isn't.

Is the New York City Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

No, and I don't think it's close. Whatever is making this market hard, it isn't a flood of new competition, because the number of listings fell over the past year rather than rising.

Measure	Year to August 2026 vs the year to August 2025
Active listings	Down, and the fall is large
Average nightly rate	Up about 36%
Booking lead time	Longer
Occupancy	Not published this cycle

Market-wide, all bedroom counts and all performance tiers, comparing September 2025 through August 2026 with September 2024 through August 2025. Each measure is averaged on its own, so they don't reconcile against each other.

Two of those rows need explaining before I'd let you lean on them.

Occupancy is missing because it won't hold still. Measure it across the twelve months the table uses and it comes out lower than last year, then measure it across a cleaner twelve months that dodges a known break in how these figures were loaded and it comes out higher. A number that changes sign depending on which year you hold it against isn't telling you anything, so I've kept it out, because picking whichever version suited my argument would be worse than printing nothing at all.

The listing count is the row I'm being careful with. I know how big that fall is and I'm deliberately not printing the figure, which needs explaining. Over exactly the period when the listing count dropped, New York City's own count of legal short-term rental hosts went up. The Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement reports active registrations under Local Law 18 every year, and the totals moved from 2,952 on 30 June 2025 to 3,338 on 30 June 2026, with more than 460 new hosts approved along the way. The city's surface and the platform data point in opposite directions, and when the only corroborating source I've got disagrees with me about direction, printing a percentage as though the size were settled would be dishonest. You will find a figure for the change on the market page, and I'd hold it loosely for exactly the reason I've just given.

Look at where the city's registrations sit, though, and the split stops being a contradiction. New York says 68% of active registrations cover one- and two-family houses, and Manhattan is covered by ten council districts, one of which also reaches up into the South Bronx. Between them those ten hold 416 of the 3,338, so roughly one legal host in eight is on this island and the legal market is mostly a homeowner in Queens or on Staten Island letting out a spare room. The market these earnings figures measure is Manhattan apartments. Those two were never going to move together.

What I will stand behind is the shape of the fall, because it's specific to this city in a way a data error usually isn't. It arrives in a single month, it holds for the twelve months after it, and it lands on every borough at once, with Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island all stepping down together. Then you cross the city line and it vanishes: Nassau County's market is down slightly over the same year, the market centered on Newark is actually up, and neither one shows anything like the same break. In my experience data problems don't respect a municipal boundary that precisely, whereas enforcement does.

So my read, offered as a read rather than a finding: a large block of inventory stopped being visible as short-term supply here, the city's own register says it wasn't the legal stuff, and what's left is a smaller pool of listings charging about 36% more per night than a year ago. Some of that rate rise is real pricing power. Some of it is arithmetic, because when the cheap end of a market leaves, the median of whatever remains goes up on its own. Keep in mind that I can't cleanly separate the two, and be suspicious of anyone who tells you they can.

The lead-time row deserves a glance too: booking windows lengthened over the year, which means the average guest now commits earlier than they did. In a market holding this little inventory that reads as scarcity rather than softness, because people book early when they're worried the thing they want won't still be free.

For what it's worth, the practical answer to the saturation question hasn't changed in three years, since competition was never what stops you here.

When Is New York City's Peak Airbnb Season?

Autumn, on occupancy, and December on price. I'd treat those as two separate peaks, because confusing them is how people mis-price a New York calendar.

Month	Occupancy	Average nightly rate
September 2025	51.6%	$479
October 2025	54.2%	$525
November 2025	47.2%	$465
December 2025	45.2%	$615
January 2026	30.4%	$323
February 2026	31.1%	$352
March 2026	37.2%	$407
April 2026	41.2%	$449
May 2026	43.6%	$528
June 2026	45.3%	$592
July 2026	44.8%	$580
August 2026	36.9%	$457

Market-wide monthly figures for September 2025 through August 2026. Compare months within this window only.

October is the fullest month of the year at 54.2%, with September just behind it. That fits a city running on conferences, theater and people who want to walk around outdoors without sweating. Then the calendar falls off a cliff, because January sits at 30.4% and February at 31.1%, so roughly two nights in three go unsold in the dead of winter while the nightly rate collapses with them to $323.

December is the month I'd watch, because it breaks the pattern. Occupancy is already sliding, down to 45.2%, yet the average nightly rate hits $615, the highest reading in the year and nearly double January's. My reading is that holiday visitors will pay almost anything for the last week of the month and very little for the first, and an annual average hides that completely. If you're modeling a December, model two Decembers.

The shoulders are where I think the year is won or lost, mind you. May through July holds between 43.6% and 45.3% occupancy at rates from $528 to $592, which is a long stretch of decent-but-not-spectacular trading, and April at 41.2% is already most of the way there. Get your pricing right across those five months and I'd expect the autumn peak to become a bonus rather than the thing carrying you.

Within the week, demand peaks on Saturday and bottoms out on Sunday, while rates peak on Friday. Weekend occupancy runs about ten points above weekday occupancy, which is a narrower gap than most US markets show, because New York keeps filling rooms on a Tuesday with people who came to work.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in New York City?

Now, that heading carries an assumption this city won't support, so let me deal with it before I show you anything. You can't buy a Manhattan apartment and let it out nightly, because that's the thing Local Law 18 exists to stop. What the neighborhood ranking actually tells you is where a legal room-share commands the best rate, where a 30-plus-night furnished let is priced strongest, and which parts of the island a visitor will pay up for. Those are worth knowing, and they're as far as I'd let these numbers take you.

Neighborhood	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Upper East Side (Carnegie Hill)	$271,859	$3,236	25.9%	$377,859
Upper East Side (Lenox Hill, Roosevelt Island)	$116,190	$741	45.6%	$218,623
Tribeca and Civic Center	$102,704	$836	34.6%	$158,037
East Village	$92,044	$684	39.4%	$102,916
Murray Hill and Kips Bay	$90,356	$646	34.4%	$144,960
Midtown and Times Square	$88,594	$930	25.7%	$156,143
Upper West Side (Central)	$85,917	$921	32.3%	$135,098
East Midtown and Turtle Bay	$76,685	$567	38.9%	$118,319
Hell's Kitchen	$70,664	$544	33.9%	$115,692
SoHo, Little Italy and Hudson Square	$68,058	$620	30.2%	$124,398
Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill	$66,435	$433	39.4%	$92,710
Harlem (North)	$58,793	$527	35.8%	$81,759
Harlem (South)	$57,197	$537	37.6%	$100,950
Financial District and Battery Park City	$55,109	$571	29.6%	$73,370
Lower East Side	$54,007	$534	28.7%	$84,548
Chinatown and Two Bridges	$51,103	$404	38.2%	$89,808
Midtown South, Flatiron and Union Square	$48,663	$365	42.1%	$69,013
East Harlem (South)	$30,319	$369	22.3%	$36,522
Chelsea and Hudson Yards	$24,835	$384	31.4%	$65,674
Gramercy	$22,188	$204	39.2%	$49,268

Neighborhood Tabulation Areas, assigned by point in polygon against the New York City Department of City Planning's 2020 boundaries, one boundary method throughout. Areas too thin to measure reliably are left out.

How to read that ranking: the top row is the least trustworthy in it. Carnegie Hill rests on a handful of measurable listings, most of them full-floor apartments priced for a different planet, so a row like that swings between refreshes and I'd read it as proof that ultra-prime Manhattan exists rather than as a figure to plan around. The rows I'd weight are the thick ones, and in this market those are Midtown and Times Square, Midtown South, the Lower East Side, SoHo, north Harlem, the Financial District and Hell's Kitchen.

Read those and the pattern I keep coming back to has nothing to do with prestige. Uptown matches downtown on annual revenue while charging a fraction of the nightly rate, because it sells more nights. Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill run a median rate of $433 against SoHo's $620, and land within a couple of thousand dollars of SoHo on the year, since they fill 39.4% of the calendar to SoHo's 30.2%. North Harlem earns more across the year than the Financial District while charging less a night, $527 against $571. Chinatown clears $51,103 on a $404 rate while Chelsea and Hudson Yards clears $24,835 on $384.

Midtown South is the cleanest version of that idea I can find. It carries the lowest nightly rate of any thick row on the island, $365, and the highest occupancy of any of them at 42.1%, which gets it to $48,663 a year. Midtown proper does the opposite: $930 a night, 25.7% occupancy, and $88,594. Both work, as far as I can tell, and they ask for completely different operating temperaments. One of them wants a full calendar and fast turnovers, while the other wants you to hold your price through a quiet February and wait.

Two things sit outside that ranking and I don't want to leave them out. The Bronx piece of this market is thin, thin enough that I'd read it as a direction rather than a measurement, but its median listing earned $35,041 at $283 a night, which is a little under 60% of the market median on revenue and about half of it on nightly rate. A handful of listings also sit north of the city line altogether, around Yonkers and Mount Vernon, and there are too few of them to measure honestly.

So if it's the annual figure you care about rather than the headline rate, the uptown neighborhoods deserve more attention than they usually get. The same holds for the outer boroughs, which is why Brooklyn and Queens are tracked as their own markets: they behave differently enough to have earned it.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in New York City?

Pooled across every bedroom count, one amenity is published openly in the current regression, and it's the least glamorous one available: internet is associated with about 42% higher revenue. Before you file that under obvious, remember what a New York short-term rental legally is. A room in somebody's apartment, often in a pre-war building, often let to someone here to work. My read is that a listing which can't promise reliable internet can't take that booking at all.

Break the same regression out by bedroom count and it stops agreeing with itself, which is the part I find useful:

Listing size	Amenity with the strongest published association	Revenue lift
One bedroom	TV	+57%
Two bedrooms	Hot tub	+22%
Three bedrooms	Hot tub	+20%
Four or more	Pool	+18%

Amenity revenue associations from the current market benchmarks, pulled 29 September 2026. Associations, not causes.

A TV leading one-bedrooms at +57% is a bigger number than the pooled figure, and it's invisible if you only look at the pooled figure. Hot tubs and pools showing up at the larger sizes tells me something about what a four-bedroom Manhattan listing is: not a family home someone let out, but a building amenity package attached to a very expensive unit. You're not installing a pool in a walk-up, so treat those rows as a description of which properties clear the most rather than a shopping list.

Quick detour, because this trips people up. An amenity association isn't a promise that fitting the amenity moves your revenue. Buildings with gyms and pools in Manhattan are newer, better located and more expensive to begin with, so the model is partly reading the building through the amenity. Where the reasoning holds up best is the boring end: internet, a decent television, a listing that works for somebody staying a couple of weeks. Ok, back to the money.

A second group of amenities carries a measured signal here without the public page printing what it's worth: televisions at the pooled level, hot tubs, saunas, EV charging, gyms, pools, lake access, parking, bicycles and barbecues. I'll name them and leave it at that, because inventing percentages for them would be worse than silence. Two more, washing machines and heating, are excluded from the model entirely, so anyone quoting you a figure for those is quoting something that doesn't exist.

Cleaning is the part I see hosts underestimate. The average cleaning fee charged here ran about $142 when I pulled these figures in September 2026, climbing with size from roughly $111 on a studio to $227 on a four-bedroom. That's a fee your guest sees at checkout and weighs against the nightly rate, so what decides whether it hurts you is how many nights it's spread across. On the long bookings this city runs on, $142 disappears into the total. Push the same fee onto two-night stays and it turns into the reason your conversion rate drops, which is worth remembering before you price cleaning off what it costs you.

Is Airbnb Legal in New York City?

Only in one narrow shape, and the rule that decides it is older than the city's registration system, which is the part I find most people have backwards.

Under New York's Multiple Dwelling Law section 4(8)(a), a class A multiple dwelling "shall only be used for permanent residence purposes", and the statute defines permanent residence as occupancy by the same person or family for thirty consecutive days or more. Check what class A sweeps in and you'll see why that matters so much here, because the statute itself lists tenements, flat houses, apartment houses, studio apartments and "all other multiple dwellings except class B multiple dwellings". Your building is on that list. It then carves out the only exceptions there are: people staying fewer than 30 days while "living within the household of the permanent occupant", meaning house guests, boarders, roomers or lodgers, and unpaid occupancy while the permanent occupant is away. Everything the city has built since then sits on top of that.

What the city built is Local Law 18 of 2022. It began life as Int 2309-2021, the Council approved it on 9 December 2021, and it became law on 9 January 2022 after the Mayor returned it unsigned, which under the City Charter is enough. It wrote a new chapter into the city's Administrative Code, called any letting of a dwelling unit shorter than 30 consecutive nights a short-term rental, then made it unlawful under section 26-3102 to offer, manage or administer one unless that unit holds a currently valid registration number. The Office of Special Enforcement started taking applications on 6 March 2023 and started enforcing the verification requirement on 5 September 2023.

Three requirements fall out of that, and no amount of paperwork moves any of them:

• You have to live there and be there. The city's rules for registered hosts say a host must maintain a common household with the guest, and that a registered host "shall not offer, arrange for, or allow the short-term rental of an entire registered dwelling unit".
• Two paying guests, and no more. That ceiling comes from the Housing Maintenance Code's definition of a family, which is a person "maintaining a common household with not more than two boarders, roomers or lodgers".
• Your guest gets the run of the apartment. A common household is deemed to exist only where every member of it, guest included, can reach all parts of the unit. A lock that lets a guest secure their room behind them defeats it. Privacy locks that stop someone walking in on you are fine.

Count the nights carefully too, because the city treats check-in as day zero, which means a 29-night booking is a short-term rental and needs a registration while a 30-night booking is permanent occupancy and doesn't.

What I'd want you to understand about enforcement is that it doesn't arrive as an inspector at the door. It arrives as a booking that never happens, because the platforms have to verify a registration before they process the transaction, and a booking service that takes a fee on an unverified one is liable for up to $1,500 per transaction under section 26-3203. Hosts themselves face a civil penalty of up to the lesser of $5,000 or three times the revenue generated, per violation, and the city has now started pulling registrations back as well: in the year to June 2026 it revoked 17 and opened revocation actions against 15 more.

Then there's tax, where three charges and one fee can attach to a stay and two different governments collect them. The city's hotel room occupancy tax runs 5.875% of the rent plus a flat charge per room per day that tops out at $2.00, and the Department of Finance collects it, though most legal hosts here never owe it: there's no hotel tax where you let only one bedroom of the home you live in, or where a year's lettings come to 14 days or fewer. Separately, since 1 March 2025 the state's sales tax and the local sales tax both reach short-term rental occupancy where the rate tops $2.00 a unit per day, alongside a $1.50 per unit per day fee inside the city, and booking services now register as state tax vendors and collect both on your behalf. Every one of those charges lands on the guest's checkout total instead of your side of the ledger, so don't subtract any of them from the revenue medians. The New York state tax guide goes further on the filing side, and the New York City short-term rental regulation guide walks through registration document by document.

How Does BNBCalc Track the New York City Airbnb Market?

The registration paperwork belongs in that guide. What this article is built on instead is BNBCalc Markets, which exists to research markets rather than individual deals, and its submarket ranking is the feature that earns its keep in a city this uneven, because it sorts a metro's parts against each other on the measures that decide a deal instead of handing you one citywide average. With Gramercy and Carnegie Hill sitting at opposite ends of the same island, that's the view I'd want open before forming any opinion about "New York".

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a New York City Property?

My advice is to work from the outside in, so don't start with the property.

Open the New York City market page for the current levels first, then widen out to New York's markets ranked by gross yield and see where the city lands against the rest of the state, since I've yet to see it win a yield comparison and watching it place low in a ranking sticks with people better than reading it in a sentence. Once you've got a rate and an occupancy you believe, put the specific address into BNBCalc and feed it your own purchase price, financing and cleaning costs instead of a rule of thumb.

Then run what comes back past three thresholds this city imposes and no spreadsheet knows about:

1. Can you legally do it at all? If you don't live in the unit, the nightly model is off the table, and your comparison is between a 30-plus-night furnished let and an ordinary lease. Price that, not an Airbnb.
2. Will a third of the year cover it? Median occupancy here is 33.9%, and it doesn't climb much with size. If your model only works above 50%, it doesn't work.
3. Can you survive January? Occupancy drops to 30.4% and the average rate falls to $323. Whatever carrying cost you've got, two months of the year have to come out of the other ten.

If your answer to the first one is no, I'd call that a different deal rather than a dead end. Much of what left Airbnb here after 2023 moved into furnished lettings of a month and up. That's a real business, with its own numbers, its own tenant law and none of the registration burden, but it isn't the business these medians describe, so don't carry a nightly rate across into it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an Airbnb make in New York City?

The median measurable listing in this market earned $60,425 over the trailing twelve months as of September 2026, at a median nightly rate of $545 and 33.9% occupancy. The top quartile reached $110,436. By size, medians run from $39,033 for a studio to $218,531 for a listing with four or more bedrooms. Revenue, rate and occupancy are averaged separately and won't multiply out.

Do you need a license to run an Airbnb in New York City?

You need a registration rather than a license. Local Law 18 of 2022 makes it unlawful to offer a rental of fewer than 30 consecutive days unless the unit holds a valid short-term rental registration number from the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement. Booking platforms must verify that number before they process a transaction, so an unregistered listing generally can't take a booking at all.

Can you rent out a whole apartment in New York City on Airbnb?

Not for fewer than 30 nights. New York's Multiple Dwelling Law limits class A multiple dwellings to permanent residence purposes, defined as occupancy by the same person or family for thirty consecutive days or more, and the city's rules for registered hosts bar offering an entire registered unit as a short-term rental. Stays of 30 nights and up aren't short-term rentals, so they need no registration.

How many bedrooms should a New York City short-term rental have?

The typical listing in this market is a one-bedroom, and occupancy barely varies by size, sitting between 33% and 37% at every bedroom count. Revenue scales through price instead: a median three-bedroom charges $1,018 a night against $455 for a one-bedroom. Larger units earn more per year, though the legal shape of a New York short-term rental caps you at two paying guests.

What is the busiest month for Airbnb in New York City?

October, at 54.2% occupancy, with September close behind at 51.6%. January and February are the quietest at 30.4% and 31.1%. Nightly rates peak in a different month: December averages $615, the highest of the year, while occupancy is already falling. Figures cover September 2025 through August 2026 and should only be compared within that window.

Why did the number of Airbnb listings in New York City fall?

The count dropped steeply between the year to August 2025 and the year to August 2026, in a single step that held, and it hit every borough at the same time while neighboring markets in Nassau County and northern New Jersey carried on as normal. Over the same period the city's own register of legal hosts grew, from 2,952 active registrations on 30 June 2025 to 3,338 a year later, so what left was inventory the city had not registered.

Is New York City a good market for short-term rentals?

Not for the whole-unit model most investors mean by the question, because that's illegal here. For a resident letting a room in the home they live in, the rates are among the highest in the country and the middle of the market earned $60,425 last year. Treat it as an income supplement attached to a home you already occupy, rather than as an asset class.

New York is the clearest example of something that shows up in smaller doses everywhere: the binding constraint on a short-term rental usually isn't demand, and it isn't competition either. It's whoever gets to decide what your building is for. Most markets let you forget that for a few years at a time. This one never does.