San Jose, California Airbnb Market Data 2026

So what does a San Jose Airbnb actually earn, and can you run one without asking the city for permission first? The short answer on the second half is yes, and San Jose asks less of you than the towns right next to it do, so the money question is the one that ends up deciding your deal.

Before the numbers, one thing about the map. The market these figures come from is titled Silicon Valley, not San Jose, and San Jose city limits hold 30.0% of its listings. The rest sits in the other Santa Clara Valley cities, Palo Alto and Mountain View and Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, and then keeps going north and west into San Mateo County, through Redwood City and Menlo Park and Daly City and out to the coast at Pacifica, Montara and Half Moon Bay. Santa Clara County holds 58.5% of the listings and San Mateo County 41.4%. It stops short of Santa Cruz, which is about sixteen miles from the nearest listing in it, and it doesn't cross into the East Bay.

That split matters more than it sounds, because the two halves don't earn the same money and they don't answer to the same city halls. And the market as a whole has been shrinking: listings are down about 17% over the past year while nightly rates are up about 29%, so fewer hosts are charging a lot more per night. Keep that shape in mind, because a shrinking market with rising rates behaves differently from a growing one, and most of what follows turns on the difference.

How Much Do San Jose Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Take the shrinking market first, then, because it sets the level everything else works off. Across the whole Silicon Valley market, the median listing brought in about $37,100 over the trailing twelve months, and its median nightly rate was $312. Inside San Jose city limits that median drops to about $30,200 at $275 a night, while the listings outside the city clear about $40,100 at $324. So a San Jose address sits about a fifth below the median of the market it belongs to, and about a quarter below the listings outside the city. If you're pricing a San Jose property off the market page's headline figures, then, you'll want to knock them down before you underwrite anything.

Those are medians of individual listings, by the way, computed from the same listing pool the market page's own build uses. They sit below the market-wide averages, which is what you'd expect, since a handful of very strong homes drag an average upward while the median sits still.

Nothing shifts that number in this market the way bedroom count does. Here's the ladder, market-wide and then for San Jose on its own, as of September 2026.

Bedrooms	Median revenue, market-wide	Median revenue, San Jose city	Market-wide top quartile
Studio	$21,959	$18,611	$28,767
1	$24,213	$20,535	$32,734
2	$37,634	$29,534	$51,893
3	$50,438	$43,191	$66,857
4+	$76,107	$62,507	$103,750

A four-bedroom in San Jose runs about three times a one-bedroom in San Jose, and the gap widens once you leave the city. The top-quartile column is worth a second look too, since the strongest quarter of two-bedrooms in the market clears more than the median three-bedroom does, which means running a place well is worth roughly a bedroom here.

Is the San Jose Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

Running a place well matters more when nobody new is arriving to compete with you, and that's the situation here. Over the year to August 2026 the market's listing count fell about 17%, which is the opposite of the pattern that makes a market feel crowded. Nobody is flooding Silicon Valley with new short-term rentals.

The one thing I'd flag is occupancy, which slipped about 4% over the same year even as supply came out. Demand didn't grow into the space the leavers left, in other words, so the market got smaller rather than tighter. Nightly rates went the other way and rose about 29%, and a rate move that big usually means the mix of listings changed as well as the prices, since the homes that leave a shrinking market tend to be the cheap ones.

The decline also isn't a one-month event that a chart makes look dramatic. Listings fell steadily through late 2024 and the first half of 2025 and have held fairly flat since the start of this measurement window, so what you're buying into is a market that did its shrinking before you got here and then settled. If you'd rather track it yourself, the thing to watch isn't a headline trend, it's the occupancy of homes that look like yours, rechecked every few months.

I'm leaving revenue trends out on purpose. The stored monthly revenue history for this market crosses a definition change and a reload, so a revenue percentage would be measuring the data pipeline as much as the market. Supply, occupancy and nightly rate survive that test, and they're what every trend I've given you rests on.

When Is San Jose's Peak Airbnb Season?

Occupancy is the figure that fell, so it's worth knowing when it's there and when it isn't. June and July, and it isn't subtle: both months run above 53% occupancy against a December trough near 35%, and June is also the year's strongest month on price at about $422 a night.

Month	Occupancy	Median nightly rate
September 2025	44.4%	$297
October 2025	45.6%	$308
November 2025	40.0%	$310
December 2025	35.4%	$308
January 2026	38.4%	$285
February 2026	39.9%	$336
March 2026	43.5%	$315
April 2026	41.2%	$304
May 2026	47.5%	$331
June 2026	53.5%	$422
July 2026	53.5%	$390
August 2026	50.6%	$354

June's rate runs about 48% above January's, which is the widest seasonal price spread in the table and the reason a flat annual rate leaves so much on the table here. Notice that rates hold up through the fall while occupancy falls away, so the quiet months aren't cheap months, they're empty ones. That's a conference-and-visitors pattern rather than a vacation one.

The week tells the same story. Saturday is the fullest night, but only about 13% fuller than Monday, and Wednesday and Thursday both sit above the weekly average on occupancy. Prices are where the weekend shows up: Friday and Saturday run roughly 18% above Monday and Tuesday. If you've hosted in a beach or mountain market, that flatness will look strange, and it changes how you run the place. A two-night minimum that works on a lake will cost you real money here, because a lot of this demand is one person arriving Tuesday for work.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in San Jose?

Business travel explains the shape of the week well enough, but it doesn't explain the shape of the map, and the map is where this market gets genuinely strange. Of the 36 places here that carry enough listings to be worth measuring, twelve of the top thirteen by median revenue sit in San Mateo County, while San Jose itself comes in 30th. The coast is where the money is, and the valley floor is not.

Both rankings use one boundary method, US Census place polygons, with every listing assigned by its coordinates. They're split by county because the county line is the finding, not because the method changes.

San Mateo County: the Peninsula and the coast

Place	Median revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile
Moss Beach	$94,501	$739	34%	$121,070
Montara	$74,851	$545	35%	$112,178
Foster City	$64,534	$541	43%	$90,233
Menlo Park	$55,614	$397	39%	$73,604
Pacifica	$54,885	$418	40%	$78,743
North Fair Oaks	$52,347	$392	35%	$59,014
Woodside	$47,942	$481	27%	$81,781
Daly City	$46,684	$335	40%	$72,531
El Granada	$45,518	$388	35%	$66,033
South San Francisco	$44,833	$367	39%	$68,039
West Menlo Park	$44,159	$343	35%	$107,159
Half Moon Bay	$44,033	$368	36%	$63,715
San Mateo	$35,823	$311	37%	$60,117
Redwood City	$34,708	$290	38%	$56,370
San Bruno	$33,709	$251	37%	$38,154
Broadmoor	$33,217	$230	42%	$45,564
San Carlos	$32,201	$239	36%	$39,791
Burlingame	$32,136	$242	37%	$56,292
Belmont	$31,843	$317	31%	$48,312
East Palo Alto	$30,216	$227	40%	$52,687
Millbrae	$30,055	$264	36%	$49,722

Santa Clara County: the valley floor

Place	Median revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile
Los Altos Hills	$44,098	$379	33%	$56,192
Palo Alto	$39,356	$296	36%	$67,259
Morgan Hill	$37,536	$367	30%	$45,060
Mountain View	$37,164	$329	36%	$50,554
Santa Clara	$36,492	$318	33%	$46,784
Milpitas	$33,758	$268	32%	$39,404
Sunnyvale	$33,649	$272	39%	$50,297
East Foothills	$32,701	$335	26%	$78,448
Saratoga	$30,620	$276	31%	$62,577
San Jose	$30,208	$275	34%	$49,258
Cupertino	$27,721	$289	29%	$58,500
Los Gatos	$25,252	$217	33%	$43,472
Campbell	$24,688	$235	34%	$39,760
Burbank (unincorporated)	$21,192	$168	35%	$33,429
Alum Rock (unincorporated)	$17,395	$157	33%	$22,089

Moss Beach and Montara sit at the top on three-bedroom coastal houses renting for $500 to $750 a night, which is a different business from the two-bedroom infill unit that sets San Jose's median. The rows built on the fewest listings will shift at the next refresh, so treat the order near the bottom of each table as a range rather than a ranking, and remember that a high median in a small coastal town is telling you about a handful of large homes, not about every house on the street.

Inside San Jose itself the spread is much narrower than a three-to-one gap between towns might lead you to expect. Across the city's ZIP codes the median lands somewhere between about $21,000 and $59,000, and the top of that band rests on the thinnest slices, while the bedroom ladder for the city runs from about $18,600 to $62,500 on far more solid ground. So when you're shopping inside city limits, the size of the house gives you a more reliable lever than the ZIP code does. For a closer read on where inside San Jose actually suits which strategy, our San Jose neighborhood guide goes at that question directly, while this post stays on the numbers.

One more geographic note, since the market runs right up to the county line. Daly City and South San Francisco are effectively San Francisco's southern edge, and if that's the corridor you're shopping, the San Francisco market data is the other half of the picture and carries a very different rulebook.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in San Jose?

Since the house you buy matters more than the street it's on, the next question is what to put in it. Pooled across every bedroom count, a barbecue is the amenity with the clearest published lift in this market, at about 8%. That sounds small until you pull the figures apart by bedroom, because the pooled number hides the interesting part.

At one bedroom a gym is worth about 19%, which is further than anything else moves any bedroom count here, while at two bedrooms the barbecue takes the lead at about 12%. Go up to three bedrooms and it's a hot tub at about 17%, and at four or more a hot tub again at about 14%, while studios barely respond to any of it and show the barbecue at about 2%.

So read that as two different guests. The one-bedroom renter is here for work and prices a building the way they'd price an apartment they might live in, so the gym downstairs earns its keep. The family taking a three-bedroom for a weekend is buying an experience, and the hot tub is the experience. Make sure to match the spend to the unit you actually own, because putting a hot tub on a one-bedroom spends money on the wrong guest.

Several other amenities show a signal here, though the public page keeps their percentages behind BNBCalc Markets. An EV charger is one, and so are a pool, a sauna, lake access, bicycles, a TV and allowing pets, and their percentages aren't mine to publish.

Still, knowing which ones carry a signal at all is worth something, since an EV charger in this particular metro is nowhere near the long shot it would be somewhere else.

Is Airbnb Legal in San Jose?

Before you spend anything on a hot tub, though, check that you're allowed to rent the place at all, and in San Jose you are. Without a permit, too, which surprises people who've read about California cities. San Jose handles short-term renting inside its zoning code rather than through a licensing scheme. Under the San Jose Municipal Code, Chapter 20.80, Part 2.5, what the city calls "incidental transient occupancy" is an allowed use in a one-family dwelling, a two-family dwelling, a multiple family dwelling, a mobilehome, a live/work unit or a guest house, as long as you meet the criteria in Table 20-165. The council added those sections with Ordinance 29523 on December 16, 2014, and the last time it touched this part was Ordinance 30480 on September 29, 2020, so the rules have been stable for years.

The criteria that decide an investment are these. You get 180 days a calendar year with no host present, and 365 with the host present, where "host present" means someone is on the premises between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Occupancy is capped: with nobody home, two people in a studio, three in a one-bedroom, then two per bedroom beyond the first, up to ten. When the host isn't present you also have to name a local contact person who's reachable twenty-four hours a day and responds to complaints within sixty minutes, and you have to give that name and number in writing to the guests and to every adjacent property. Records go back three years, and the city can ask for them.

Two limits catch buyers out. You can't run an accessory dwelling unit, an ADU, as a short-term rental in San Jose at all, and the council settled that with Ordinance 30353 on January 7, 2020, which closes a door a lot of Bay Area investors expect to find open. State law points the same way, since California's ADU statute lets any city set a 30-day minimum on ADUs, and for the by-right units a city has to approve without a hearing, under Government Code section 66323, it makes that minimum mandatory. And if the home falls under the city's apartment rent ordinance, you can only rent it nightly if you've lived in that unit for at least sixty consecutive days meaning to make it your own home.

Now the tax, which changed this month. San Jose's hotel tax went from 10% to 12% on October 1, 2026. Voters passed Measure A on June 2, 2026 by 67.05% to 32.95%, and the council certified the result on August 11. It's two taxes running side by side, 6% under Chapter 4.72 and 6% under Chapter 4.74. The guest pays it, not you, so don't subtract it from your revenue projection. Do note that the city treats cleaning fees, pet fees, extra-person fees, resort fees and even cancellation and no-show fees as taxable rent, so the 12% lands on more of the booking than the nightly rate. How the state's side of this fits together is what our California short-term rental tax guide is for.

And there's paperwork even without a permit, so don't read "no permit" as "nothing to file". Every operator has to sign up with the city's finance director inside thirty days of starting and hold a transient occupancy registration certificate, and the certificate itself says in so many words that it is not a permit. A platform can pay the tax over for you where it has an agreement with the city, but if it doesn't, the money is still yours to hand in. Renting out residential property also counts as a business under Chapter 4.76, so you'll need a business tax certificate and the annual tax that goes with it, which the code adjusts for inflation each July.

Everything above is San Jose's, and San Jose is 30% of this market, so for the other 70% two guides carry the load. Our Santa Clara County guide covers the county's own rules. Those reach only unincorporated land, places like Alum Rock, Burbank and San Martin, so the guide also lays out how the fifteen cities differ, and they differ a lot. Mountain View is the sharpest contrast, since its Chapter 44, passed in November 2018, caps unhosted stays at sixty days a year and makes every host register with the city and hold a Mountain View business license before they advertise at all. One town over from San Jose, in other words, and the paperwork starts before the first guest. Then there's the San Mateo County side, which holds 41.4% of the listings here and most of the top of the revenue tables. Our San Mateo County guide is the one to read for that half. Neither county's rules reach into San Jose, and San Jose's don't reach out, so make sure you know which city line your parcel falls inside before you rely on any of it.

Where Does BNBCalc Get Its San Jose Airbnb Data?

Working out which city line your parcel sits inside is step one, and everything after that is arithmetic, which is the job BNBCalc Markets exists to do. It watches what homes in a place have been doing on price at the same time as what they've been doing on bookings, so an entry cost and a revenue line sit on one screen instead of in two browser tabs. In Silicon Valley that pairing is the whole argument, since purchase prices moved about 2% over the past year while nightly rates moved about 29%, and those are the two numbers I'd set beside each other before anything else.

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

Start with the entry price, because in this market it's the number that decides everything else. As of September 2026, BNBCalc market data puts the median home price across Silicon Valley at about $946,000 for a two-bedroom, about $1.52 million for a three-bedroom and about $1.95 million for four or more. A one-bedroom runs about $582,000.

Now set that against the bedroom medians from earlier. A median three-bedroom in this market clears roughly $50,400 a year on a home near $1.52 million, and a median two-bedroom clears roughly $37,600 on a home near $946,000. Those ratios are thin by national standards, which is why the state's gross yield rankings for California markets put Silicon Valley where they do, and why almost nobody buys here purely on cash flow.

So the honest sequence for a specific address looks like this. Take the bedroom-count median as your base, adjust for the city rather than the metro, since a San Jose address runs about a fifth below the market median, then decide whether you're buying the median or the top quartile, because the gap between them is roughly the difference between an extra bedroom and a better-run version of the same house. Then subtract the 180-day ceiling if you won't be living there, which is the step people skip. A home that would earn $50,000 running all year doesn't earn $50,000 on 180 nights, and the shortfall is bigger than the day count suggests, because the nights you're allowed to sell and the nights people want to book aren't the same nights.

Keep in mind that none of this survives contact with a property you haven't seen. Two houses on the same street with the same bedroom count land in different quartiles for reasons a market average can't see, so you won't know which of the two you're looking at until you model that particular address.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Average Airbnb Income in San Jose?

The median listing inside San Jose city limits earned about $30,200 over the trailing twelve months, charging $275 a night at the median. Across the wider Silicon Valley market the median is about $37,100. Size drives most of the variation: a median one-bedroom in the city earns about $20,500 and a median four-bedroom about $62,500.

Is Airbnb Still Profitable in San Jose in 2026?

It depends far more on your entry price than on your bookings. Revenue is healthy in absolute terms, but median home prices near $946,000 for a two-bedroom and $1.52 million for a three-bedroom make the ratio thin, so most buyers here are counting on appreciation and treating the nightly income as carrying cost.

What Is the Best Month for Airbnb in San Jose?

June. Occupancy peaks above 53% in June and July, and June is also the strongest month on price at about $422 a night, roughly 48% above January's. December bottoms out near 35% occupancy.

Do You Need a Permit to Run an Airbnb in San Jose?

No. San Jose treats short-term renting as an allowed use under Chapter 20.80, Part 2.5 of its Municipal Code rather than a permitted activity, so there's no application or license. You do have to register with the city's finance department for a transient occupancy tax certificate, and renting residential property counts as a business, so a business tax certificate applies too.

How Many Nights Can You Rent an Airbnb in San Jose?

180 days a calendar year when the host isn't present, and 365 when the host is. "Host present" means being on the premises between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. during the stay. Occupancy is also capped when nobody's home: two people in a studio, three in a one-bedroom, and two per bedroom beyond the first, to a maximum of ten.

How Much Is the Airbnb Tax in San Jose?

12% of the rent, as of October 1, 2026, split between two municipal code chapters at 6% each. Voters approved the increase from 10% as Measure A in June 2026. The guest pays it. Cleaning fees, pet fees, extra-person fees and cancellation fees all count as taxable rent.

Can You Run an ADU as an Airbnb in San Jose?

No. San Jose's zoning code excludes accessory dwelling units from short-term renting outright. California's ADU statute runs the same direction, allowing cities to require 30-day minimum stays and requiring them for the ministerial by-right units.

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

Inside the city the differences between ZIP codes are smaller than the difference between a two-bedroom and a four-bedroom, so bedroom count is the better lever. Across the wider market the picture changes completely: the San Mateo County coast, Moss Beach and Montara in particular, sits far above anything on the valley floor.

Is the San Jose Airbnb Market Shrinking?

Yes, on listing count. The market lost about 17% of its listings over the year to August 2026, with occupancy down about 4% and nightly rates up about 29%. The contraction happened mostly through late 2024 and the first half of 2025 and has been roughly flat since.

A market that loses a sixth of its supply in a year is telling you something, and it usually isn't that the guests left. Costs rose, or rules bit, or owners found a better use for the asset, and the ones who stayed got to charge more for it. That's a pattern worth recognizing anywhere, because the moment to look hardest at a place is rarely when everyone is arriving.