Albuquerque, New Mexico Airbnb Market Data 2026

Weighing an Albuquerque short-term rental comes down to two questions you'd want answered before opening a single listing page: what does a property here earn, and will the city actually permit it? Albuquerque's answer to the second is friendlier than its reputation, so let's start with the money.

A quick note on the map, because it decides how you read everything below. This market is the Albuquerque metro, in and around Bernalillo County, New Mexico. About three-quarters of its listings sit inside the Albuquerque city limits and nine in ten sit within fifteen miles of downtown, though the boundary stretches roughly sixty miles at its furthest, north past Bernalillo toward Los Alamos. Santa Fe and Taos are not in it, whatever you may read elsewhere.

The surprise, once I had the numbers in front of me, was that picking a neighborhood in Albuquerque is very nearly a pure decision about nightly rate. Occupancy hardly moves across the city, and where it does move, it leans the wrong way: the areas that book most often are the ones that earn least. That single fact shapes the rest of this piece.

How Much Do Albuquerque Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Over the trailing twelve months the median Albuquerque short-term rental brought in $20,975, charging a median $188 a night. Inside the city limits the median runs a little lower, at $20,758 on a $181 rate, while the listings outside the city earn $21,871 on a $208 rate. Look instead at the strongest quarter of listings and the shape changes: the 75th percentile sits at $29,536 market-wide, so a genuinely good property here clears roughly forty percent more than a middling one.

Size is the strongest single predictor, and because it compounds fast it's worth seeing laid out. These medians cover listings inside the city limits, where most buyers will actually end up.

Bedrooms	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate
Studio	$13,488	$111
1 bedroom	$14,862	$121
2 bedrooms	$18,898	$157
3 bedrooms	$25,584	$224
4+ bedrooms	$38,590	$330

Medians of each listing's trailing-twelve-month revenue and nightly rate, computed over listings inside the City of Albuquerque jurisdiction polygon, as of September 2026. Medians, not averages, so they won't match the market-wide averages this page reports.

Notice how little separates a studio from a one-bedroom, and how much separates a three-bedroom from a four. That jump from $25,584 to $38,590 is the biggest step in the table, and it's the one worth paying attention to, because it isn't a yield story. A four-bedroom costs a lot more to buy, so the extra revenue largely pays for the extra house. This page reports gross yield for each size, and that figure barely shifts between a one-bedroom and a four-bedroom here. So choosing between them is a question of how much capital you want tied up rather than which one is the better deal per dollar.

That flatness is unusual, and it's the first sign of what this market is really like: a place where the obvious levers barely move anything.

Is the Albuquerque Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

No. The number of listings you're competing with is shrinking rather than growing, and hosts are charging noticeably more than they were a year ago.

Measure	Change, Jan-Aug 2026 vs Jan-Aug 2025
Active listings	down about 4%
Occupancy	down about 7%
Nightly rate	up about 18%
Booking lead time	up about 17%

Market-wide, all listings in the market, comparing January through August 2026 with January through August 2025. The way these measures are defined changed in early 2025, so a full twelve-month baseline would be holding two different rulers against each other. These eight months sit on one side of that change. No two of these measures can be multiplied together, since each is averaged separately.

Supply falling by roughly four percent is a gentle slide rather than a retreat, but it's a decline all the same, and it means nobody arriving in Albuquerque this year is walking into a flood of new competition. That's the answer to the saturation question, and it's a fairly comfortable one.

Do keep the occupancy line in view, though. A seven percent slide isn't alarming on its own, especially when the nightly rate climbed roughly two and a half times faster, yet it does tell you that demand hasn't kept pace with what hosts are charging. Guests are paying more and booking slightly less. If you're underwriting a purchase here, that's the tension to model: your pricing power is real, and it has a ceiling somewhere.

The lead-time move is the quiet one, and I'd watch it. Guests are booking about seventeen percent further ahead than a year ago, so you get more warning as the calendar fills and more room to adjust before a soft month lands on you. It also means a last-minute discount buys you less here than it would in a market that fills up at the last moment.

When Is Albuquerque's Peak Airbnb Season?

October, and it isn't close, though the reason is rate rather than how full the city gets.

Month	Occupancy	Median nightly rate
September 2025	44.8%	$192
October 2025	46.7%	$296
November 2025	38.8%	$191
December 2025	39.9%	$206
January 2026	33.7%	$164
February 2026	35.6%	$171
March 2026	46.1%	$196
April 2026	46.3%	$202
May 2026	47.1%	$218
June 2026	48.7%	$214
July 2026	46.3%	$212
August 2026	40.6%	$198

Market-wide monthly occupancy and nightly rate for the twelve months to August 2026. The two measures are averaged separately.

October's nightly rate of $296 runs about 36% above May's $218, which is the next highest month of the year, and roughly 80% above January's $164. The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is why. It runs nine days in early October, the third through the eleventh in 2026, and it pulls in a crowd large enough to reprice the entire metro for the better part of a month. If you buy here, those nine days are a meaningful slice of your year, and mispricing them is the most expensive mistake available to you.

Occupancy tells a gentler story. January is the clear trough at 33.7% and February is barely better, whereas from March through July the market holds between 46% and 49% before easing to 40.6% in August. January therefore runs a good twelve points under the level the city sustains all spring and summer, which is a narrower swing than you'd meet in a beach or a ski market. Albuquerque books reasonably well for most of the year, and that steadiness is exactly why the rate rather than the calendar deserves your attention.

Within the week, the pattern is sharper than the pattern across the year. Saturday nights run about 42% more occupied than Tuesday nights, and Friday and Saturday rates sit roughly 23% above what Tuesday and Wednesday nights fetch. That's a weekend market with a business-travel floor under it rather than the other way around, so if you're choosing between a place that suits couples for two nights and one that suits a family for a week, the two-night version has more of the calendar on its side.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Albuquerque?

The rate-over-occupancy finding earns its keep here. I ranked the city's eleven official Community Planning Areas by how often their listings book, expecting the busiest areas to be the best earners, and they aren't. They're close to the worst.

Community Planning Area	Median booked share of open nights	Median nightly rate	Median annual revenue
Near Heights	57.0%	$147	$17,249
Mid Heights	55.3%	$212	$24,561
Central ABQ	54.6%	$149	$17,802
Southwest Mesa	54.1%	$193	$23,727
Northwest Mesa	53.9%	$236	$27,845
Mesa del Sol	53.2%	$265	$27,642
North Albuquerque	52.8%	$255	$28,855
Near North Valley	51.6%	$151	$17,768
Foothills	49.5%	$217	$25,153
East Gateway	47.9%	$221	$23,146
West Mesa	45.6%	$209	$23,042

Medians by listing, September 2026, for listings inside the City of Albuquerque jurisdiction polygon, assigned to the city's own Community Planning Area boundaries. "Booked share of open nights" counts booked nights against the nights each listing was open for booking, which is a different base from the market-wide occupancy figure this page reports. Areas below the measurement floor are left out.

Read the first and last columns together, because they disagree. Near Heights tops the city on occupancy while sitting dead last on revenue, and North Albuquerque earns the most although it ranks only seventh on how often its listings book. Rank the eleven areas by how often they book and again by what they earn, and the two orders correlate at about minus 0.14, which is to say not at all. Rank them by nightly rate instead and the correlation with revenue is 0.89. In plain terms: what a property can charge decides what it makes here, and how busy its neighborhood runs tells you close to nothing.

The whole occupancy spread is only eleven points wide, from 45.6% to 57.0%, which is why it can't do much work. Rate spans $147 to $265 over the same eleven areas, a gap of nearly two to one. When one variable moves by a factor of two and the other moves by a fifth, you already know which one you're actually buying.

So the practical version. If you want the steadiest calendar and the lowest entry price, the older central neighborhoods around Near Heights and Central ABQ book more often than anywhere else in the city, and they do it on rates under $150 a night, which suits a smaller unit you don't want sitting empty. If you want the revenue, you're looking at the northern and eastern edges, where North Albuquerque and Northwest Mesa carry rates above $235 and medians near $28,000, on bigger houses that cost more going in. Mid Heights is the compromise worth a look, because it holds a 55.3% booked share on a $212 rate, which is the only row in the table that ranks in the top half of both columns.

Outside the city line the pattern flips again, and the spread gets wider.

Place	Median booked share of open nights	Median nightly rate	Median annual revenue
Albuquerque	53.5%	$181	$20,752
South Valley	53.1%	$133	$15,889
North Valley	53.1%	$157	$17,473
Los Ranchos de Albuquerque	51.6%	$232	$22,550
Los Alamos	51.0%	$204	$21,749
Los Lunas	50.3%	$223	$26,573
Rio Rancho	44.9%	$220	$24,244
Corrales	44.3%	$224	$20,892
Placitas	40.3%	$247	$24,345
Sandia Heights	37.1%	$289	$28,018

Medians by listing, September 2026, assigned to US Census places and designated places across the market, with booked share of open nights again counting booked nights against the nights each listing was open. Because municipalities and designated places are a different boundary source at a different geographic level from the city planning areas, these two tables are separate rankings rather than one.

The further out you go, the emptier and the pricier it gets. Sandia Heights carries the highest nightly rate in the market at $289 and the lowest booked share at 37.1%, and Placitas sits just behind it on both counts. Those are the scenic foothill and mesa addresses, and they trade calendar for rate about as starkly as you'll ever see it laid out. Whether that trade suits you depends entirely on your financing, because a listing that books four nights in ten needs a mortgage that can wait.

One more thing before you shortlist anything out there. Crossing the city line changes your tax and permit position as well as your revenue, and I'll come back to that below. There's also the character of each area to weigh: which streets, which schools, what the drive to Old Town is really like. Our Albuquerque neighborhoods guide covers that ground, which this piece doesn't.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Albuquerque?

One amenity dominates this market, and in a high desert city where the nights turn cold most of the year it won't surprise you: a hot tub, worth about 25% more revenue across all listings, and the only amenity with an open figure published here.

That pooled number hides how much the lift moves with size, though. At one-bedroom listings a hot tub is worth about 44%, easily the strongest amenity effect anywhere in this market, and at two- bedrooms about 41%, while by three bedrooms it has slipped to roughly 27%. At four or more it falls out of the open figures altogether and a pool leads instead, at about 31%.

That gradient makes sense once you think about who's booking. A couple choosing between two small Albuquerque rentals in February has very little to separate them, so a hot tub on the patio decides it. A family of eight booking a big house in July is choosing on beds and a yard, and the hot tub becomes one feature among several. If you're fitting out a smaller unit and you can only afford one upgrade, the numbers here are about as unambiguous as market data gets.

Several other features register a measurable signal here. Lake access does, so does internet, and so do a grill, bicycles, an EV charger, a sauna, a pool, and whether you take pets. Their figures aren't published on this page, so I'm not putting numbers against any of them.

Then there's the cleaning fee, which Albuquerque hosts reach for less often than you'd guess. Barely half of listings carry one, and where a fee does exist it averages $111. Coverage falls as properties get bigger, from around 61% of studios down to about 45% of four-bedroom homes, which is the opposite of what the cleaning workload suggests. Spread across the nights that actually book, the fee adds roughly $13 to the effective nightly rate on a typical listing and about $22 on a four-bedroom. That's real money, and if you're one of the half not charging a fee, you're leaving it on the table for no obvious reason.

Is Airbnb Legal in Albuquerque?

Yes, and Albuquerque is more permissive than its reputation. You need a permit for each unit, but the city doesn't require you to live there and doesn't cap how many permits it will issue. Its zoning rules don't push short-term rentals out of residential areas either: the city's own guidance on the Integrated Development Ordinance says plainly that the IDO doesn't restrict them there, provided the building meets every other zoning standard.

The rules live in Article 19 of Chapter 13 of the city code, adopted as Ordinance 2020-038, which the Council passed on 5 October 2020 and the Clerk published on the 23rd. It hasn't been amended since. Here's what it asks of you:

• A short-term rental permit for every unit, $120 for the first year and $90 for each renewal, valid for twelve consecutive months.
• A city business registration, separate from the permit.
• Short-term rental insurance of at least $250,000 per unit, covering both damage your guests cause to other people and injuries to guests.
• The permit displayed inside the unit, and the permit number on all your marketing.
• A current Good Neighbor Agreement posted inside, which the Planning Department issues each year.
• A name, phone number, email and business address for you or an agent, reachable around the clock every day of the week to answer complaints.

That last one is worth pausing on, because it's widely misreported, including in the previous version of this article. The ordinance does not require a local contact, since there's no residency rule, no mileage radius, and nothing stopping an out-of-state owner from answering their own phone. A local property manager was indeed proposed, in a 2023 bill that would've capped the city at 1,200 permits and held anyone to three, but the Council voted that bill down in August 2023. Two later attempts to add spacing requirements between permits failed as well, the most recent in February 2026. So if you've read that Albuquerque caps permits or demands a local manager, you've read about bills that never became law.

Occupancy is capped, though even here the real rule turns out to be more generous than the version that keeps getting repeated. The allowance is two adults per bedroom and then two more on top for the unit itself, which puts a two-bedroom house at six adults and a three-bedroom at eight. Anyone over twelve counts as an adult, and gatherings can run to twice your overnight occupancy or twenty people, whichever is smaller, so long as they break up by 10 p.m.

Three tax layers stack on a short Albuquerque stay, and not one of them is yours to absorb. The city charges a 5% lodgers' tax and a 1% hospitality fee on the rent, and the state charges gross receipts tax, which inside the city limits runs 7.625% as of July 2026. Airbnb and Vrbo handle the city's two for you, acting as your agent, although you still owe the city a monthly report by the 25th whichever way the money moves. All of it rides on top of the room rate as a line the guest pays, not as a slice off your gross. All three also stop applying once a stay reaches thirty consecutive days, which matches the ordinance's own definition of a short-term rental as twenty-nine days or fewer. For the filing mechanics, see our New Mexico short-term rental tax guide.

Enforcement runs on complaints rather than patrols, and it's slower than the headline penalty suggests. A zoning officer mails a notice, you get at least thirty days to fix whatever it is, and only after that grace period does the $500-a-day civil assessment start running. Three or more violations inside twelve months, though, and the permit is revoked for two years. The Planning Department can also inspect a permitted unit without telling you first.

Two practical notes matter more to a buyer than anything else in this section. A permit dies with the sale: the ordinance terminates it the moment ownership transfers, so buying an operating short-term rental gets you the house and a fresh application, not the seller's permit. And none of this follows you past the city line. Rio Rancho, Corrales, Los Ranchos and unincorporated Bernalillo County each answer to their own rules, so Albuquerque's permit and its two city charges stop at the boundary and whatever that jurisdiction does instead takes over. Even the state rate shifts: gross receipts runs 6.1875% in the unincorporated county against 7.625% inside the city. Don't assume the Albuquerque stack travels with you, and check the receiving jurisdiction before you model anything. If your shortlist reaches past the boundary, read the Bernalillo County guide alongside our full Albuquerque short-term rental regulation guide, which goes through the permit application document by document.

Where Does BNBCalc Get Its Albuquerque Airbnb Data?

Permits and taxes belong in that guide. What's measured here was built instead from BNBCalc Markets, where BNBCalc measures and compares short-term rental markets for people deciding where to put money. Working out that Albuquerque's busiest corner is also its cheapest took setting places beside each other on how full they run, which no single citywide occupancy figure will ever show you. That side-by-side is where I'd start if two addresses across town are competing for the same budget.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for an Albuquerque Property?

Start wide, then narrow, and only put a number on a specific house at the end.

The Albuquerque market page gives you the current levels: what the average listing earns, how occupancy and rates are sitting right now, and how the year has moved. Then check where New Mexico lands against everywhere else on the best Airbnb markets in New Mexico by gross yield ranking, because gross yield is what tells you whether Albuquerque's revenue is worth its purchase prices or merely looks good in isolation. Only then, with a specific address in hand, model it in BNBCalc using that property's own figures: the real mortgage, the real insurance quote, the permit, the cleaning cost.

While you're doing that, three Albuquerque-specific tests are worth holding the property to.

Price the nine days in October separately. If your model applies an annual average rate to the Balloon Fiesta window, it's understating that month badly, and October is doing more for your year here than any other month.

Don't pay a premium for a busy neighborhood. You've seen what the occupancy spread is worth in this city. If a listing agent prices a place on how well the area books, the data doesn't support the premium, and the rate the property itself can command is the number to argue from.

Budget the insurance before you budget the furniture. A $250,000 short-term rental policy is mandatory here, it's a different product from a landlord policy, and quotes vary enough that it's worth having one in hand before you commit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a license to run an Airbnb in Albuquerque?

Yes. You need a short-term rental permit from the Planning Department for each unit you rent out, which costs $120 for the first year and $90 for each renewal and runs for twelve months. You also need a separate City of Albuquerque business registration and at least $250,000 of short-term rental insurance per unit. The permit ends at the closing table, so a buyer applies fresh instead of taking over whatever the seller held.

Does Albuquerque limit how many Airbnbs can operate?

No. Nothing in Albuquerque's Short Term Rental Ordinance caps the number of permits the city will issue, limits how many one person can hold, or requires spacing between them. A 2023 bill proposed a 1,200-permit ceiling and a three-permit-per-person limit, and the Council rejected it in August 2023. Two later bills adding separation requirements also failed, the most recent in February 2026.

How much can you make with an Airbnb in Albuquerque?

A median Albuquerque short-term rental brought in roughly $20,975 over the trailing twelve months, while the strongest quarter of listings reached about $29,536. Size drives most of the difference: inside the city limits, median revenue runs from roughly $13,488 for a studio to $38,590 for a four-bedroom. Gross yield barely shifts between a one-bedroom and a four-bedroom, so bigger mostly means more capital tied up rather than a better return.

Do you need a local contact person for an Albuquerque short-term rental?

You need a contact who's reachable around the clock, but not a local one. The ordinance asks for a name, phone number, email and business address for the owner or a designated agent who can respond to complaints at any hour on any day. It sets no residency requirement and no distance limit. A mandatory local property manager was proposed in 2023 and voted down.

What taxes do you pay on an Albuquerque short-term rental?

Stays of twenty-nine days or fewer carry a 5% city lodgers' tax and a 1% city hospitality fee on the rent, plus New Mexico gross receipts tax, which is 7.625% inside the Albuquerque city limits as of July 2026. Those charges sit on top of the room rate as a line the guest pays. Airbnb and Vrbo handle the city's two for you, and you still owe a monthly report by the 25th regardless.

When is the busiest time for Airbnbs in Albuquerque?

October is the most valuable month by a wide margin, because the Balloon Fiesta lifts the median nightly rate to roughly $296, about 36% above the next highest month. On occupancy the year runs flatter: January is the clear low at 33.7%, while from March through July the market holds between 46% and 49%. Within any week, Saturday nights run about 42% more occupied than Tuesdays, and weekend rates sit around 23% above midweek.

Which Albuquerque neighborhoods are best for short-term rentals?

It depends on what you're optimizing for, and the answer isn't what most people assume. Near Heights and Central ABQ book most often, above 54% of the nights they're available, but they carry the lowest median revenue in the city on rates under $150. North Albuquerque and Northwest Mesa earn the most, near $28,000, on rates above $235. Mid Heights is the only area ranking in the top half on both.

Whatever market you end up in, the lesson from Albuquerque travels. It's tempting to shop for the neighborhood where places stay full, because a full calendar feels like proof that you picked right. But occupancy is the easiest number to move and the least worth paying for, and a property that books four nights in ten at a rate nobody else can match will quietly beat one that books six at the going rate. The question worth asking of any address, anywhere, is not how often it fills. It's what it can charge when it does.