Anaheim, California Airbnb Market Data 2026

If you're looking at a house near Disneyland and wondering what it earns as a short-term rental, the honest answer starts somewhere else, because in the City of Anaheim itself you almost certainly can't run one. Anaheim, in Orange County, California, phased the use out: the city stopped issuing new short-term rental permits after August 2016, and what still operates legally is a closed set of permits that can't be created, only inherited with the property they're attached to.

Which makes the market data confusing at first glance, because the dataset that carries Anaheim's name reaches well past the city line. It picks up Fullerton, Garden Grove, Placentia, Orange, Stanton, Cypress and Buena Park, plus a scatter of unincorporated Orange County county islands that no city governs at all. Only 43.7% of its listings sit inside Anaheim's own boundaries. Each of those places wrote its own rule, and they disagree with each other about as much as two neighboring cities can.

So the useful version of your question isn't whether Anaheim works. It's what a comparable listing earns on this side of a given street, and whether the jurisdiction on that side will issue you a permit at all. You can answer both, and the numbers here come from BNBCalc market data pulled on 29 September 2026, covering the twelve months to August 2026.

How Much Do Anaheim Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Market-wide, the median listing took about $56,861 over the trailing twelve months, earning a median $423 a night at occupancy near 40%. The top quarter of listings cleared $82,588. Every figure there is a median taken across the individual listings in our own build rather than a market-wide average, so the two measures won't line up exactly, and the median is what I'd anchor on when you're sizing a single purchase.

Size explains most of the spread. The median listing here has three bedrooms, which is unusual, and it tells you what the demand actually is: families and groups who want one roof near a theme park rather than a couple who want a studio downtown.

Bedrooms	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile revenue
Studio	$22,498	$171	36%	$29,697
1 bedroom	$24,531	$186	38%	$33,090
2 bedrooms	$37,428	$285	40%	$47,174
3 bedrooms	$58,319	$408	41%	$70,548
4+ bedrooms	$80,238	$605	40%	$105,860

Medians of listings active in the twelve months to August 2026, from BNBCalc market data. Studio rows rest on a thin sample and will move between refreshes.

Run your eye down the occupancy column and it barely moves, since every size sits within a few points of 40%. All of the difference is in the nightly rate, where a four-bedroom asks about $605 against a one-bedroom's $186, which is why the four-bedroom median lands more than three times the one-bedroom's while both stay booked about the same share of the year.

So the small end of this market is the weak end, and it isn't close.

A studio's median works out near $22,498 and a one-bedroom's near $24,531, which after cleaning, a management fee and the carrying cost of an Orange County purchase price leaves very little behind. Those rows also rest on thinner samples, so treat them as a direction rather than a forecast. Meanwhile the distance from a median row to its top quartile grows as you climb the table: a four-bedroom's top quartile sits about $25,600 above its median, where a two-bedroom's sits about $9,700 above, which tells you the larger homes are where operating well actually pays you back rather than just keeping you level.

Is the Anaheim Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

No, and the reason is worth understanding because it isn't the usual one. Comparing January to August 2026 against the same months of 2025, active listings dropped by roughly 12% while occupancy climbed about 16% and the average nightly rate about 26%. Fewer rentals, and each one busier and pricier than it was. Nothing in that pattern looks like a market drowning in new competition.

What's squeezing supply isn't demand cooling off, though. It's the permitting, which has been taking listings out of the biggest slice of this market for years now and has no way to put any back, because a phase-out inside the city limits plus a permit cap and a pause in two of the surrounding cities produce exactly this shape. It can persist for a long time, too, since no amount of guest demand unlocks a permit a city won't issue.

And that pattern shows up in the booking behavior as well. Guests are reserving about 27% further ahead than they were a year ago, which is what you'd expect when the supply near a destination people book around fixed dates gets thinner and families stop assuming they'll find something in June if they look in May.

Unfortunately that cuts both ways for a buyer. A supply squeeze you can't join isn't an opportunity, so before you read those rate rises as headroom, make sure the parcel you're looking at can be permitted at all. Once you've established that, the honest saturation check is a narrow one: pull the occupancy of listings your size within a mile or so of the address and look at it again every few months, since a market this constrained can turn on a single council vote.

When Is Anaheim's Peak Airbnb Season?

Summer, and emphatically so, with July leading on both measures at 62% market-wide occupancy and an average nightly rate of $513. And the whole June-to-August stretch sits well clear of everything else.

Month	Occupancy	Average nightly rate
September 2025	41%	$348
October 2025	51%	$408
November 2025	46%	$377
December 2025	50%	$425
January 2026	45%	$372
February 2026	49%	$389
March 2026	56%	$439
April 2026	53%	$414
May 2026	50%	$408
June 2026	58%	$497
July 2026	62%	$513
August 2026	50%	$424

Market-wide monthly figures for the twelve months to August 2026, from BNBCalc market data. Occupancy and nightly rate are averaged separately, so they don't multiply out to revenue.

Rates tell the cleaner story, though, because they swing nearly 50% between the September floor and the July peak. March and April lift too, which is spring break doing its work, while December holds up better than you might expect for a winter month.

Plan your rate calendar around that shape rather than around a single annual average.

Across the week, occupancy on Friday and Saturday runs about 15% over the weekly average, Monday about 12% under it, and Saturday's rate lands roughly 8% above average. That's a gentler weekend skew than most leisure markets show, since a family visiting a theme park books a block of nights rather than a Friday and a Saturday, so don't price your Tuesdays as if nobody wants them.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Anaheim?

The patchwork starts to matter financially as well as legally at this point. Because the market spans nine measurable municipalities and one band of unincorporated county land, two identical three-bedroom houses a few blocks apart can land in completely different rulebooks.

Where	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile revenue
Placentia	$61,451	$439	42%	$83,715
Unincorporated Orange County	$60,972	$430	42%	$83,798
Anaheim	$60,412	$461	40%	$90,185
Orange	$52,214	$447	36%	$71,659
Garden Grove	$51,768	$405	42%	$90,659
Fullerton	$51,691	$371	39%	$69,115
Cypress	$47,397	$412	33%	$73,956
Stanton	$42,070	$346	40%	$71,263
Buena Park	$32,632	$224	37%	$42,881

Medians for listings active in the twelve months to August 2026. Every row is assigned the same way, by testing each listing's coordinates against US Census place boundaries for California; listings that fall inside no city are unincorporated Orange County. Thinner rows near the bottom of the list will move between refreshes.

Three things jump out. Top to bottom, those medians differ by about $29,000 a year, which is a lot for a set of cities you can drive across in half an hour. Anaheim itself posts the highest median nightly rate at $461, which is the Disneyland proximity premium showing up exactly where you'd expect it. And the unincorporated county pockets sit second on median revenue at $60,972, with the market's better occupancy at about 42%, which is a corner most buyers never think to look at.

Those pockets are the genuinely interesting finding here. Small and jagged, they sit mostly west of the city between Anaheim, Stanton and Garden Grove, and they hold 14.4% of the market's listings. They're also, as you'll see in a moment, the one place in this market where a buyer can still apply for a permit and expect to get one.

Which is the sort of thing that never shows up in a listing description.

An address with an Anaheim or a Garden Grove mailing address can sit outside both cities, since postal boundaries and city limits were never drawn to match, and the only reliable way to settle it is to look the parcel up in the county assessor's records and see which jurisdiction it actually reports to, before you write an offer. Get that wrong and you've bought into a ban; get it right and you've bought into a permit queue. It's a five-minute check, and it decides everything that comes after.

Inside Anaheim's limits the median runs $60,412 against $53,301 outside them, so the city premium is real but modest, and it is nowhere near large enough to justify buying into a jurisdiction that won't permit you. If you want the street-level read on who each part of the city suits, our Anaheim neighborhood guide handles that side of it. And to see where this market lands among California's others on gross yield, the best Airbnb markets in California page puts them in order.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Anaheim?

The amenity model here produces one result I haven't seen lead anywhere else: an EV charger is associated with about 26% higher revenue across all listing sizes, the strongest figure the model publishes openly here. Southern California has the car fleet to explain it, and a guest driving an electric car to a theme park for four nights has a real problem that your driveway can solve.

It varies by size, though, and that's where it gets useful. A hot tub leads at one and two bedrooms, worth about 13% and 21% respectively, while at three bedrooms the charger comes back out in front at about 31%. From four bedrooms upward a pool takes over at about 22%, which fits the group-travel demand those homes serve.

A few other amenities show a measurable signal here, though their values stay behind BNBCalc Markets, so here they are without the figures attached: sauna, barbecue, bicycles, lake access and pet-friendliness all register. Keep in mind that these are associations rather than guarantees, and a hot tub bolted onto a badly located two-bedroom won't rescue it.

Is Airbnb Legal in Anaheim?

In the City of Anaheim, essentially no, and it has been that way for years. The council closed the door in two steps, first with a moratorium on new applications adopted on 15 September 2015 and then with a ban that took effect on 11 August 2016. Since then Chapter 4.05 of the Anaheim Municipal Code has said plainly that short-term rentals "will no longer be allowable uses" on any property in a single-family zone, a multiple-family zone, or any other district where residential use is permitted or conditionally permitted, and between them those categories cover nearly every house in the city.

Two narrow exceptions survived, and neither is available to a buyer today. The first is a set of pre-moratorium permits that the city allows owners to renew: the properties that made it through the phase-out, either as a hardship case, as an owner-occupied home share, or under homeowners' association restrictions. The second covers short-term rentals in the C-G General Commercial Zone that already held a conditional use permit approved before September 2015. Everything else was terminated, and the association-restricted group had to stop operating after 31 December 2022.

The detail that matters most if you're looking at a listed property is that the permit doesn't run with the land. The code makes it personal to the owner it was issued to, renewable each year by 31 July, and it lapses entirely if an owner misses a renewal or the city revokes it. A permit can move to a buyer who acquires the property, but only through a transfer application the city approves, and once a permit lapses that property can never be used as a short-term rental again. So a listing agent's claim that a house "comes with a permit" is a claim to verify with the Planning Director's office in writing before you remove a contingency.

For the survivors that remain, the operating rules are strict. Stays run a minimum of three consecutive nights, and occupancy is capped by bedroom count, at two people for a studio, four for a one-bedroom, seven for a two-bedroom and nine for a three-bedroom. On top of that, quiet hours run from 10pm to 9am, and using a pool, a hot tub or a barbecue outdoors inside those hours counts as a major violation, with fines starting at $1,000 for a first offense and the city able to pull the permit after two.

Then there's the rule most hosts elsewhere have never met.

Before each stay, the owner has to sign a rental agreement with a "responsible person" who must be at least 21 years old, must actually stay in the unit, and is personally liable for whatever the other guests do. The code also makes that person hand over a name, an age, an address and a driver's license or passport number. I went looking for the enacted text on this one because the same 21-and-over claim gets repeated about cities that never wrote it down, and in Anaheim it's genuinely there in the definitions.

Anaheim charges a hotel tax of 15% of rent, which its code calls the transient occupancy tax. The guest pays it, which means it isn't coming off your revenue at all, and where the booking runs through a platform the code makes the platform send the money in rather than you. The state layer sits on top of that, and our California short-term rental tax guide walks through what else applies.

Cross a city line, though, and the answer changes completely.

Start with those county islands, because they're the friendliest ground in the market. In unincorporated Orange County, short-term rentals are permitted in single-family, multifamily and commercial districts, subject to a permit the Director issues and you renew every two years. There are conditions attached, naturally, so an ADU can't be rented out as one, a change of ownership kills the permit, and occupancy tops out at two guests per bedroom plus two more. For the rest of the process, our Orange County regulation guide walks through what the county asks for.

Fullerton, the second-largest slice of this market, allows them with a permit valid for three years, but the City Council caps whole-house rentals at 100 permits citywide and requires 300 feet between any two of them. Hosted rentals, where the owner lives in the house, face no separation rule. On top of that the council adopted an urgency ordinance in May 2025 pausing approval of new short-term rentals while staff rewrote the policy, so check the current status with the city before you count on a permit there; the Fullerton regulation guide tracks where that lands.

Garden Grove takes the hardest line of the group, because its land use code is permissive, meaning anything not listed as allowed is prohibited, and the city treats a residential short-term rental as an illegal hotel, punishable as a misdemeanor with fines running up to $1,000 a day.

Placentia, the top row of the revenue table, went the other way.

It licenses short-term rentals outright, capping the total at roughly half a percent of the city's housing units, with 300 feet of separation between them, a two-night minimum, and, like Anaheim, a requirement that whoever signs the rental agreement be at least 21 and stay on the premises. Those rules took effect after the council adopted an amending ordinance on 5 May 2026, which also lifted a permit moratorium the city had been running since September 2025.

None of this stays still, and the fines for getting it wrong are large enough to matter. Our Anaheim short-term rental regulation guide keeps the permit conditions and the enforcement detail in one place.

How Does BNBCalc Track the Anaheim Airbnb Market?

That guide is where the rules live, while the figures in this article come from BNBCalc Markets, which is the research side of the product and exists to compare short-term rental markets against each other rather than describe one. Remember the booking window widening by about 27% this year? Markets shows you how far ahead guests reserve in a market and how that splits by bedroom count, which in a place like this is the number that tells you when to stop discounting. If your four-bedroom is still empty inside the window your competitors are filling, you priced it wrong two months ago, not today.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for an Anaheim Property?

Start from the table you can actually use. Find the row for the jurisdiction the parcel sits in, take the median for its bedroom count, and treat that as your base rather than any citywide average, since the citywide average quietly mixes a Buena Park two-bedroom with a Placentia four-bedroom.

Then adjust for what pushes a listing off its median here, which comes down to three things. Walkability or a short drive to the Disneyland resort gate, because that's what most of this market's guests are buying. Whether the house can genuinely sleep the occupancy its bedroom count implies, since group demand is what carries the four-bedroom rate. And the amenities that showed a real signal at that size, which for larger homes means a pool and for smaller ones means a hot tub.

After that, work down from the revenue line rather than across from it. Assume cleaning between stays that average under five nights, a management fee if you won't be local, insurance that covers nightly guests, and the permit and renewal fees for whichever jurisdiction you landed in. If the deal only works at the top-quartile figure rather than the median, you're underwriting a best case, and the Anaheim market page will show you the current spread between the two.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an Airbnb make in Anaheim? The median listing in the Anaheim market earned about $56,861 in the twelve months to August 2026, at a median nightly rate of $423. By size, medians ran $24,531 for a one-bedroom, $37,428 for a two-bedroom, $58,319 for a three-bedroom and $80,238 for four bedrooms and up. The top quarter of all listings cleared $82,588.

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Anaheim? Not as a new operation. Anaheim Municipal Code Chapter 4.05 made short-term rentals an unallowable use in every zone that permits residential use, effective 11 August 2016. Only pre-moratorium permits that survived the phase-out, and short-term rentals in the C-G General Commercial Zone holding a conditional use permit approved before September 2015, can still operate.

Does an Anaheim short-term rental permit transfer with the house? Not automatically. The permit is personal to the owner it was issued to and does not run with the land. A buyer can take it over only by filing a transfer application the city approves, and a permit that lapses or is revoked cannot be reissued for that property.

Is there a minimum age to rent an Anaheim short-term rental? Yes. The person who signs the rental agreement has to be at least 21 years old and has to stay in the unit for the length of the booking, and that person is personally liable for any violations the other occupants commit. Placentia applies the same 21-year-old rule.

What is the hotel tax on short-term rentals in Anaheim? Anaheim charges a transient occupancy tax of 15% of rent. The guest pays it, not the host, and when a booking comes through an online platform the code makes the platform responsible for remitting it to the city.

Which cities does the Anaheim short-term rental market cover? Listing coordinates put it across Anaheim, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Orange, Placentia, Stanton, Cypress, Buena Park and a set of unincorporated Orange County islands. Anaheim itself accounts for 43.7% of the listings, so market-wide figures describe a group of Orange County cities rather than the city alone.

When is peak season for Anaheim short-term rentals? July, with market-wide occupancy at 62% and an average nightly rate of $513 in the twelve months to August 2026. Rates run lowest in early fall, around $348 in September 2025, and lift again in March and April with spring break.

A market where the law caps supply behaves differently from one where the market does, and it's worth naming the difference before you buy into either. When competition is the constraint, a better property or a better price gets you in. When a permit is the constraint, nothing you do to the house matters until you've established which side of that line it falls on, and the line is usually a street rather than a city you've heard of. That's a question to answer with a phone call to a planning counter, well before it becomes a question about occupancy.