San Diego, California Airbnb Market Data 2026

How much does a San Diego Airbnb earn, and can you still get a license to rent out a home you won't be living in?

Well, you can, as long as the city still has a license to give you and you don't already hold one. Inside the City of San Diego, renting out a whole home you don't live in for more than 20 days a year takes a Tier 3 license, which the city caps at 1% of its housing units, and as of September 11, 2026 it had 799 of them left. Mission Beach runs a separate capped tier that's already full, and its waitlist isn't taking new names for now. On top of that, each license has to belong to an individual person, and nobody can hold more than one. If your plan was to pick up a few beach condos and rent them all by the night, unfortunately every one of them would need its own host, and you'll want to know that before you make an offer.

If you can get a license, the market you'd be stepping into shrank and got busier over the past year. Across every listing BNBCalc tracks here, supply fell about 7%, and yet occupancy still rose about 4% while nightly rates climbed about 16%. I'm covering San Diego, California, in San Diego County, and although the city's rules stop at its own limits, the market data also reaches into the neighboring cities, which write their own.

How Much Do San Diego Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Once you know which license you'd be going after, the next thing to pin down is what the home itself can bring in, and in San Diego the bedroom count moves that a long way. When I line up BNBCalc's typical figures by size, a four-plus-bedroom listing brings in close to three times the revenue of a one-bedroom, and a studio brings in about half as much as that one-bedroom.

Does that mean you should buy the biggest house you can afford? I wouldn't jump to that, because the range inside each size is wider than the gap between sizes. From one bedroom up, the top of each size's range sits at roughly six to seven times the bottom of it, which tells me the unit and the way it's run matter at least as much as the floor plan.

Gross yield is where I'd look next, and it pulls the sizes back together. One-bedroom through four-plus-bedroom homes all sit less than a point and a half apart, with two-bedrooms narrowly on top and three-bedrooms at the bottom of that group, whereas studios return roughly half as much. I'd put the three-bedroom dip down to how much more those homes cost here, and either way, a yield curve that flat means you don't have to buy big to earn a decent return on the price.

Who would you be competing with? Quite often it's a professional host, since they run a large share of the homes listed in this market, and that can look odd next to a rule that allows one license per person. I don't think it's a contradiction, though, because a management company can manage the home and serve as the local contact while each home's license stays with its own host. If that's the route you're considering, the San Diego property management roundup compares firms that work here.

BNBCalc sets its top-performing listings apart as a separate tier, and on average they earn about twice what the average San Diego-market listing does. It shows what's possible here, though I'd never write it into a budget.

Is the San Diego Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

What a listing earns depends partly on how many others it's up against, and over the latest year there were fewer of them.

Metric	Year-over-year change
Average nightly rate	+16%
Occupancy	+4%
Purchase price	0%
Active supply	−7%

BNBCalc data across all listings BNBCalc tracks in the market, comparing September 2025 to August 2026 with September 2024 to August 2025, rounded to the nearest whole percent. Every measure is averaged on its own, so none of them multiply into another, and purchase price follows home values rather than listings. When this year's data can't say for sure which way a measure moved, it's left out of the table.

No, San Diego isn't oversaturated. Active supply fell about 7% over the year, and yet the hosts who stayed filled slightly more of their nights, with occupancy up about 4%, while the average nightly rate rose by about 16%.

Does that add up to a boom? Not in bookings, because nightly rates did far more of the climbing than occupancy did, and my guess is that some of those extra booked nights came from guests having fewer listings to choose between. So I wouldn't count on another year like this one when you run the numbers on a purchase.

When Is San Diego's Peak Airbnb Season?

That yearly view smooths over a lot of movement from month to month, and San Diego's peak Airbnb season is summer, from June through August, with July on top.

Month	Occupancy	Avg nightly rate
Sep 2025	41%	$388
Oct 2025	44%	$398
Nov 2025	40%	$404
Dec 2025	39%	$418
Jan 2026	37%	$372
Feb 2026	44%	$374
Mar 2026	56%	$441
Apr 2026	52%	$416
May 2026	48%	$442
Jun 2026	58%	$553
Jul 2026	63%	$633
Aug 2026	53%	$511

BNBCalc market data across all listings in the market, one row per month from September 2025 to August 2026, with occupancy and the average nightly rate each worked out on its own.

July was both the busiest and the priciest month of the twelve, booking 63% of its nights at $633 on average, while January sat at the bottom on both, with 37% booked at $372. No month from September through February booked even 45% of its nights, whereas every month from March through August booked close to half of them or more, and none of those six charged less than $416 a night. So if you budget for the same income every month, you're counting on summer's fuller, pricier calendar to carry the winter, when fewer nights book and each one goes for less.

March surprised me. It booked 56% of its nights, more than April or any month from September through February, and at $441 it charged about what May did, so I wouldn't write off spring the way a summer-only budget would. I also noticed that December holds its price better than its bookings, charging $418 a night, more than any other month from September to February, even though only about 39% of its nights booked.

The week has a shape of its own. BNBCalc's current day-of-week figures, taken across all listings, put occupancy 25% above an average day on Saturdays and 23% above on Fridays, whereas Mondays and Tuesdays sit 17% and 18% below it. Nightly rates barely follow that pattern, rising only 8% on Fridays and 9% on Saturdays, so the swing in price across the week is less than a third of the swing in bookings. If I were pricing a San Diego listing, the weekend rate is the first thing I'd test.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in San Diego?

In San Diego, I've found that the license question and the location question end up being the same one, because the city's whole-home rules draw a single line across the map, with Mission Beach on one side of it and every other part of the city on the other.

Almost nine in ten of this market's measurable listings sit inside San Diego's city limits, so I placed each one into the city's official community planning areas, took the twelve areas with the most listings, and ranked those by median annual revenue.

Rank	Planning area	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	75th-percentile revenue
1	La Jolla	$74,430	$643	35%	$123,665
2	Mission Beach	$67,810	$581	36%	$101,495
3	Pacific Beach	$51,775	$436	36%	$73,890
4	Peninsula (Point Loma)	$48,036	$401	35%	$80,091
5	Clairemont Mesa	$45,663	$418	36%	$73,988
6	Ocean Beach	$44,092	$326	38%	$57,897
7	Southeastern San Diego	$40,175	$317	35%	$59,489
8	Uptown	$39,536	$309	39%	$63,640
9	North Park	$35,883	$283	37%	$48,300
10	Downtown	$34,635	$274	36%	$48,765
11	Greater Golden Hill	$34,502	$248	37%	$49,271
12	City Heights (Mid-City)	$28,882	$242	38%	$38,745

BNBCalc 2026 listing data inside the City of San Diego's official community planning area boundaries, trailing twelve months, for the planning areas with the most listings. Revenue, nightly rate and occupancy are medians worked out one column at a time, and the last column is the 75th percentile, the point where each area's top quarter of listings begins.

Those occupancy figures belong to each area's middle listing, so use them to compare one planning area with another, and don't set them against the monthly table.

La Jolla leads on both revenue columns, with a $74,430 median and a 75th-percentile figure of $123,665, although the typical La Jolla listing is a three-bedroom charging a $643 median rate, so part of that lead comes down to house size and price.

Mission Beach is the row I'd look at hardest, and it's also the one I'd be most careful with. Its typical listing has two bedrooms, yet its $67,810 median comes within about 10% of La Jolla's, and this one planning area holds about a fifth of the city's measurable listings. I'd put that concentration down to the ordinance as much as the beach. After all, the city lets its Tier 4 whole-home licenses cover up to 30% of Mission Beach's housing units, against 1% for Tier 3 across the rest of the city, and every one of those Mission Beach licenses was taken as of September 11, 2026. Does that make Mission Beach the place to buy? If you won't be living there yourself, I'd say no, because licenses can't be transferred. That means a Mission Beach home that's rented out today comes to you without its license, and you'd have to wait for the city to reopen applications before you could even join the queue.

What struck me across the dozen is how little occupancy moves, with the median running from 35% to 39%, whereas the median nightly rate runs from $242 in City Heights to $643 in La Jolla. What separates these areas, in other words, is almost entirely what guests pay per night, and hardly at all how often they book.

Point Loma's Peninsula planning area is the quieter row I'd give a second look. Its median trails Pacific Beach's, but its 75th-percentile revenue, $80,091, is the third highest in the table, which suggests a well-run listing there can pull further clear of the middle. Uptown takes in Hillcrest and Mission Hills, and it has the highest median occupancy of the twelve, 39%, although its rate sits in the lower half. Inland Clairemont Mesa, meanwhile, out-earns Ocean Beach on the median with a typical listing that has a bedroom more.

A few smaller planning areas, Carmel Valley and Tierrasanta among them, post higher medians than most of this table, but their samples are too thin to measure reliably and lean on four-bedroom homes, so I've left them out.

The rest of the market sits in neighboring cities and unincorporated communities, and taken together those listings post a lower median than the city's. None of them fall under San Diego's license tiers, because the city's ordinance only applies inside its own nine council districts, and Chula Vista, for one, runs its own permit program, open only to people who live in Chula Vista. Make sure you check the rules for the exact city before you assume a home over the line works the same way.

What a table can't show is what each of these neighborhoods is like to own in, and BNBCalc's San Diego neighborhood guide covers that side.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in San Diego?

Once you've narrowed down the area, the fit-out is the next lever I'd pull, and BNBCalc's current amenity model ties a sauna to about 16% more revenue for a San Diego listing, which is the only amenity figure the city's public market page shows. Among four-plus-bedroom homes, the sauna's lift climbs to about 28%, while from one bedroom to three, it's a hot tub that's tied to the biggest gain.

The model also finds a measurable revenue link for a hot tub, a pool, a barbecue, a gym, an EV charger, internet, a TV, lake access and allowing pets. I'm naming those without percentages, because you'd need BNBCalc Markets to see their San Diego figures.

Cleaning fees deserve a look, too. In BNBCalc's current figures, fewer than half of listings (47%) charge one, averaging about $191 where they do, which works out to about $3,100 a year once it's spread across every listing, including those that charge nothing. Most of that money pays for turnovers, so I'd treat it as paying for the cleaning and wouldn't count it as profit. Keep in mind, too, that Tier 3 and Tier 4 licenses require every stay to last at least two nights, which means each turnover has at least two nights of rent behind it.

Is Airbnb Legal in San Diego?

Yes, it's legal with a license, and for an investor the tier you can get matters more than any figure in this article.

As of September 2026, the license in question is the City of San Diego's Short-Term Residential Occupancy license, which you need for any stay of less than a month in any zone. That license comes in four tiers, starting with Tier 1 for renting a home out 20 days a year or fewer. Tier 2 is for sharing the home you live in, as long as you're there at least 275 days a year, and it still lets you rent out the whole place for up to 90 days while you're away. Then come the whole-home tiers, where Tier 3 covers a home you don't live in anywhere outside Mission Beach and Tier 4 covers the same thing inside Mission Beach.

Only those last two are rationed, and I'd call the caps tight: Tier 3 licenses can't exceed 1% of the city's housing units outside Mission Beach, and as of September 11, 2026 the city had issued 4,862 of them with 799 left. Tier 4, meanwhile, is capped at 30% of Mission Beach's housing units, and with all 1,099 issued, its application period is closed and the waitlist held 117 applications as of August 21, 2026. Under the city's lottery rule, the tier doesn't reopen to new applicants until that list is down to 25.

The rule I'd read twice as an investor is the one about who's allowed to hold a license. A host has to be a real person, not a company, and can only hold one license and run one home as a short-term rental at a time within the city. If you own several homes, the city's own answer is that each one needs its own host, such as a tenant whose lease lets them sublet for stays under a month. In practice, a portfolio means a separate licensed person at every address.

Tier 3 and Tier 4 licenses come with conditions of their own, and I'd plan around them before making an offer. Every guest has to stay at least two nights, and you have to use the license at least 90 days a year and file quarterly reports to prove it, with no exception written in for cancellations. What if you'd only rent the place out for a summer? The city says plainly that whole-home hosting for 21 to 89 days a year isn't allowed, so a vacation home you'd rent out for a couple of summer months doesn't fit any tier unless you live in it for the rest of the year. You can't use a granny flat or other accessory unit either, because the city's code bars renting one for less than 31 consecutive days, and only companion units permitted before October 15, 2017 still qualify.

Before you apply, you'll need the city's hotel tax certificate, officially a Transient Occupancy Tax certificate, which costs nothing, plus an active, paid Rental Unit Business Tax account for the property. A host who isn't the owner also needs a business tax certificate and written proof of the right to sublet. A Tier 3 or Tier 4 license costs a $41 application fee plus a $1,129 license fee, none of it refundable, and it runs for two years before you renew at the same price.

Once you're licensed, you'll need a local contact who responds to any complaint within an hour, a notice on the outside of the home showing your license and tax certificate numbers, and both numbers in every listing. Booking platforms aren't allowed to process a reservation for a home without a valid license number on the city's registry, and the city's code enforcement team can assess civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day.

Hotel tax is charged to the guest on top of the rent, not taken out of your share. Since May 1, 2025, San Diego's hotel tax has been 11.75%, 12.75% or 13.75% of rent, depending on the property's tax zone, with the highest rate in the zone closest to the Convention Center, and it replaced the old flat 10.5%. Airbnb says it collects that tax and pays it to the city for City of San Diego listings, although you still need the certificate to apply. Owners who rent out any part of a property for more than six days a year also owe the city's Rental Unit Business Tax, and the California short-term rental tax guide explains why lodging taxes change from one city to the next.

You'll find the application steps, the documents the city asks for and its phone numbers in BNBCalc's San Diego short-term rental regulation guide.

How Does BNBCalc Track the San Diego Airbnb Market?

Everything you'd file with the city is in that guide, whereas BNBCalc tracks the market itself in BNBCalc Markets, which is built to help you decide where to invest before you compare individual homes. Every trend and monthly figure in this article comes from there, too. Picking the area first matters more than usual in San Diego, where a Mission Beach address and a Clairemont Mesa one fall under different license caps. For a US market with enough data, BNBCalc Markets also lists the top ZIP codes by gross yield, which shows the parts of town that earn the most against what homes there cost.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a San Diego Property?

A median for a whole planning area can't tell you what one particular condo on one particular street will do, so how do you narrow it down?

Start with the San Diego market page to see the current revenue, occupancy and seasonal figures. If you're still weighing other cities, California's markets ranked by gross yield shows where San Diego lands in the state. Once you have an address, run the asking price, your financing and the running costs through BNBCalc to see how that one property holds up.

Before I'd trust whatever comes back, I'd test it against how San Diego works. The license comes first. Unless you'll live in the home, anything beyond 20 rental days a year depends on getting one of the Tier 3 licenses still available, because Mission Beach's are gone, and a seller's license never transfers with the sale. Then look at the calendar, where the 90-day use requirement and the two-night minimum shape how you'd book it, and only 37% of January's nights booked, against 63% of July's. Keep in mind that guests pay 11.75% to 13.75% in hotel tax on top of whatever you charge, so set your rates with their total bill in view. And keep this year's jump in rates in proportion, because occupancy rose far less than rates did, so if your estimate counts on nightly rates climbing about 16% again, it's asking a lot.

Wherever a city caps how many licenses it hands out, the license becomes part of the price of getting in, so the first thing to find out about any market is whether you'd be able to get one at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Average Airbnb Income in San Diego?

BNBCalc listing data puts the median measurable listing inside the City of San Diego at $48,586 in revenue for the latest twelve months in 2026. La Jolla had the highest median of the city's busiest planning areas at $74,430, followed by Mission Beach at $67,810. Earnings spread widely within each bedroom count, and BNBCalc's top performance tier averages about twice the revenue of the average San Diego-market listing.

Is Airbnb Still Profitable in San Diego in 2026?

For a host who can secure a license, it can be. Across all listings, active supply fell about 7% from September 2025 to August 2026, while occupancy rose about 4% and the average nightly rate about 16%. Tier 3 licenses are capped, Mission Beach's Tier 4 licenses are full, and a specific home's profit hinges on its purchase price and running costs.

What Is the Best Month for Airbnb in San Diego?

Across all listings, July 2026 was the strongest month, with 63% occupancy and a $633 average nightly rate. The weakest month was January, with 37% occupancy and a $372 average nightly rate, the lowest of the twelve on both. Every month from March through August booked close to half of its nights or more, and Saturdays and Fridays book the most nights.

Do You Need a License to Run an Airbnb in San Diego?

Yes. The City of San Diego requires a Short-Term Residential Occupancy license for any stay of less than one month, in four tiers: 20 days a year or fewer, home sharing where the host lives, whole homes outside Mission Beach, and whole homes in Mission Beach. Hosts also need a Transient Occupancy Tax certificate and a paid Rental Unit Business Tax account. Licenses last two years, and Tier 3 and Tier 4 cost $41 plus $1,129.

Can You Buy an Investment Property in San Diego and Run It as an Airbnb?

Beyond 20 days a year, only with a Tier 3 license outside Mission Beach, which the city caps at 1% of housing units, with 799 left as of September 11, 2026. Mission Beach's Tier 4 licenses are all issued, and its waitlist is closed to new applications. Each license must be held by a person, not a company, and a host can hold only one. Tier 3 and Tier 4 licenses require at least 90 days of use a year and two-night minimum stays, and no license transfers with a sale.

Which San Diego Neighborhood Is Best for Short-Term Rentals?

It depends on the license you can get. Among the city's planning areas with the most listings, La Jolla has the highest median revenue, $74,430, and the highest 75th percentile, $123,665, with a typical three-bedroom listing. Mission Beach follows at $67,810 with a typical two-bedroom, but its whole-home licenses are all taken. Pacific Beach comes third at $51,775. All three figures are medians for 2026, taken from BNBCalc listing data grouped by the city's community planning areas.

How Much Is the Airbnb Tax in San Diego?

Guests pay the City of San Diego's transient occupancy tax of 11.75%, 12.75% or 13.75% of rent, depending on the property's tax zone, with the highest rate nearest the Convention Center. The zoned rates took effect May 1, 2025, replacing a flat 10.5%. Airbnb says it collects and remits the tax for City of San Diego listings. Owners who rent any part of a property for more than six days a year also owe the Rental Unit Business Tax.

How Many Short-Term Rental Licenses Does San Diego Allow?

Tier 1 and Tier 2 licenses are unlimited. Tier 3 whole-home licenses are capped at 1% of the city's housing units outside Mission Beach, and Tier 4 licenses at 30% of the housing units in Mission Beach. As of September 11, 2026, the city had issued 4,862 Tier 3 licenses with 799 remaining and 1,099 Tier 4 licenses with none remaining. Each host can hold only one license at a time.