Colorado Springs, Colorado Airbnb Market Data 2026

Can you buy a house in Colorado Springs, list it for nightly stays, and never sleep there yourself? In the city's single-family zones, no, and that's been settled since December 2019. Colorado Springs sits in El Paso County, and since that amendment it has run two separate short-term rental permits: one for an owner genuinely living in the house 185 days a year or more, and one for everybody else. The second kind can't be issued in a single-family zoning district at all, and anywhere else in the city it has to stand 500 feet clear of the next one. So the address settles a great deal here before the spreadsheet ever opens.

The geography has a twist in it too, and it's a bigger one than most buyers expect. What BNBCalc counts as the Colorado Springs market runs from Castle Rock in the north down to Trinidad on the New Mexico line and out east to La Junta, so barely 42% of the listings it measures are inside the city limits. Close to a quarter of them sit on unincorporated county land instead, where the county asks nothing at all of a principal residence someone rents by the night.

That's why the numbers below come in two halves. First what the region earns, cut by town and by ZIP code out of twelve months of individual listing data, then what the city will let you do with a house once your name is on the deed.

How Much Do Colorado Springs Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Take every listing in the market together and the middle one earned $25,396 in the twelve months through August 2026, while the top quarter cleared $38,050. Size does most of the sorting: the median studio earned $15,796, a one-bedroom $16,815, a two-bedroom $22,082, a three-bedroom $30,459, and a home with four bedrooms or more $46,607. Step from two bedrooms to four and the middle listing more than doubles, which is the single biggest lever in this market.

Keep in mind what a median is measuring, though, since it isn't the same thing as the per-bedroom benchmarks BNBCalc publishes for this market. Those benchmarks describe a listing that's performing typically for its size. My medians take every listing that cleared the measurement bar, the badly run ones included, so they land lower by design. If you're underwriting a property you intend to run well, the benchmark is the fairer comparison; if you want to know what a normal house on a normal street here does, that's the median.

The split that catches people out is where those dollars actually sit.

Where	Median revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile revenue
Whole market	$25,396	$227	31.9%	$38,050
Inside the Colorado Springs city limits	$24,410	$206	33.8%	$36,380
Outside the city limits	$26,226	$242	30.5%	$39,502
Unincorporated county land	$28,099	$261	29.9%	$42,289

Medians of every listing in the Colorado Springs market that met BNBCalc's measurement filter, over the twelve months to August 2026, with the city limits taken from the 2020 Census place boundary. Occupancy in this table is each listing's own trailing-year figure, so the middle listing sits below the market-wide average occupancy, which is measured across the market's nights rather than across its listings.

So a house outside the city fills fewer nights and charges more for them, and it ends up ahead. That gap is small in dollars and it won't decide a purchase on its own, yet it does kill the assumption most people arrive with, which is that the city is where the money is and the county is the cheap seats. It isn't, and the rules push the same direction.

Is the Colorado Springs Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

Mildly, yes, although the crowding shows up in nights sold rather than in prices.

Measure	Change
Active listings	up about 4%
Occupancy	down about 4%
Nightly rate	up about 15%
Booking lead time	up about 9%

January to August 2026 against the same months of 2025, across every listing in the market. BNBCalc's stored history for this market changes metric definitions at January 2025, so a full twelve-month baseline would compare two different rulers; these eight months sit cleanly on one side of that break. Each measure is averaged on its own, which means you can't multiply occupancy by rate and land anywhere sensible.

More listings arrived and the average one sold slightly fewer nights, which is the classic shape of a market absorbing supply a little slower than it gains it. What stops this from being a worrying picture is the rate column. Hosts here pushed nightly prices up about 15% over those eight months, roughly four times the size of the occupancy slip, so the pressure on calendars hasn't turned into a price war yet.

Booking windows stretched too, by about 9%, and guests in this market now book an average of 35 days out. Bigger homes book earliest, around 43 days ahead at four bedrooms and up, against about 30 at one bedroom. If you're buying a large house here, expect to be setting rates for a summer you can already see on the calendar, which is a nicer problem than pricing blind a week out.

Don't take the market-wide answer as your answer, though. Saturation is local, and the honest test is to watch the occupancy of the four or five listings you'd actually be bidding against, on your own block and at your own bedroom count, and to recheck them every few months. A four-bedroom in Woodmoor and a one-bedroom off Nevada Avenue are not in the same fight.

When Is Colorado Springs' Peak Airbnb Season?

July, and it isn't close. Here's how the year fell out.

Month	Occupancy	Nightly rate
September 2025	42.2%	$225
October 2025	41.6%	$216
November 2025	35.3%	$210
December 2025	37.7%	$248
January 2026	29.5%	$190
February 2026	28.7%	$181
March 2026	39.3%	$210
April 2026	37.2%	$201
May 2026	43.5%	$255
June 2026	55.8%	$312
July 2026	59.5%	$324
August 2026	47.3%	$272

Market-wide monthly occupancy and nightly rate, September 2025 through August 2026, averaged separately.

July filled 59.5% of available nights at $324, while February managed 28.7% at $181. That's a summer market with a mountain on its doorstep, and the shape of it is unforgiving: June, July and August carry the year, May and September are the shoulders, and everything from October to April is a long flat stretch you have to price for rather than wait out.

December is the odd month worth studying. It fills about as many nights as March or April do, and yet it prices like May, because the people traveling then have a reason to be here and a date they can't move. That's the pattern to copy in the slow months. Rather than discounting into an empty calendar, find the weekends that already have demand behind them, the holidays and the events, and price those properly.

Within a week, Saturday runs about 21% above the average night on occupancy and about 11% above on rate, with Friday just behind it. Tuesday is the floor, roughly 15% below average on nights filled. So a two-night weekend booking is worth chasing harder than three midweek nights at the same headline price, and if you're setting a minimum stay, make sure it doesn't accidentally push a Friday-to-Sunday guest onto someone else's calendar.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Colorado Springs?

North of the city or west into the mountains, on this data. The regional table sorts by median revenue, and the pattern in it is geography rather than anything to do with city services.

Place	Median revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile revenue
Woodmoor	$42,372	$398	30%	$64,965
Gleneagle	$41,474	$431	28%	$64,128
Monument	$37,432	$321	31%	$48,944
Cascade-Chipita Park	$34,573	$306	33%	$61,961
Midland	$34,486	$319	32%	$45,107
Palmer Lake	$34,011	$320	30%	$47,909
Fountain	$29,575	$251	35%	$36,647
Manitou Springs	$28,337	$238	33%	$40,648
Security-Widefield	$27,960	$255	30%	$36,736
Stratmoor	$27,760	$262	36%	$41,139
Green Mountain Falls	$27,524	$254	30%	$39,427
Castle Rock	$27,418	$212	31%	$35,363
Woodland Park	$27,008	$265	30%	$34,501
Black Forest	$25,334	$260	28%	$49,529
Colorado Springs	$24,410	$206	34%	$36,380
Cripple Creek	$24,228	$287	26%	$32,003
Cimarron Hills	$22,649	$161	35%	$36,026
Pueblo West	$19,460	$169	30%	$27,590
Cañon City	$19,078	$187	31%	$27,639
Westcliffe	$16,611	$176	28%	$21,897
Pueblo	$16,398	$129	30%	$21,457
Trinidad	$15,313	$147	30%	$19,784
La Junta	$14,184	$121	31%	$19,977

Medians over the twelve months to August 2026, by US Census incorporated place or Census Designated Place. Places too thin to measure reliably are left out, and the thinnest rows that survive will still move between refreshes.

How to read it: the median column tells you what a normal listing does, while the top-quartile column tells you what the ceiling looks like if you buy well and run it properly. Where those two are far apart, the town rewards effort. Cascade-Chipita Park is the clearest example, with a median around $34,573 and a top quarter at $61,961, so the good houses up Ute Pass are earning nearly twice what the ordinary ones do. Black Forest does the same thing more dramatically from a lower median.

A few of these deserve a sentence on their own. Woodmoor and Gleneagle, the wooded subdivisions around Monument, lead the whole region on median revenue and charge the highest rates in it, and they're four-bedroom country, which is where this market pays best anyway. Cascade-Chipita Park is the Ute Pass corridor on the road up Pikes Peak, and no other place in this market holds as many listings, the city aside. Manitou Springs is the postcard town at the foot of the mountain, and it earns well, but hold off before you get attached to it, because its rules are the tightest in the region and I'll come to them below. At the other end, Pueblo, Trinidad and La Junta are genuinely cheap to buy into and the medians show why that's not automatically a bargain.

Inside the city limits the picture flattens out a lot. That's what you'd expect from a place with no ocean, no ski hill, and one very famous mountain sitting just outside its western boundary.

ZIP code	Median revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top quartile revenue
80908	$32,809	$321	31%	$48,090
80923	$31,597	$278	33%	$53,133
80907	$28,760	$228	38%	$39,478
80906	$28,381	$268	31%	$49,735
80917	$26,337	$210	32%	$37,278
80918	$25,362	$238	32%	$42,280
80921	$25,204	$314	28%	$37,604
80905	$24,772	$212	34%	$35,495
80904	$24,044	$198	33%	$35,842
80909	$23,646	$184	35%	$32,814
80920	$22,720	$252	31%	$41,470
80910	$22,526	$204	33%	$29,837
80903	$22,293	$181	35%	$33,543
80919	$21,398	$196	31%	$42,846
80916	$16,881	$199	30%	$28,191
80922	$16,087	$133	36%	$22,097

Medians over the same twelve months, by 2020 Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area, limited to listings inside the Colorado Springs city limits. That's a different boundary method from the one behind the regional ranking, so read the two rankings separately rather than merging them.

Top to bottom that's a spread of about two to one, against roughly three to one across the region, so which town you buy in matters more here than which part of the city. Note 80919 and 80920 on the north side, where the medians are ordinary but the top quartile is among the strongest in the city, and 80904 out on the west side toward Old Colorado City, which holds the largest share of the city's listings and sits right at the city median. For a neighborhood-by-neighborhood read rather than a postal one, the Colorado Springs neighborhood guide goes street by street.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Colorado Springs?

A hot tub, by a distance. BNBCalc's current amenity model puts the revenue lift from one at +26% here, the only amenity whose value it publishes openly for this market, and in a place where guests come off a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain in the dark that shouldn't surprise anybody. Denver sits at +23% on the same model run, so this is a Colorado pattern rather than a Colorado Springs quirk, and the Springs edges it.

Seven more amenities register a real signal in this market without a published number: a sauna, an EV charger, a barbecue, internet, a TV, allowing pets, and bikes for guests to use. Those values are gated, so I'm not going to guess at them. A sauna showing up second, though, tells you something about what the mountain guest is after, and it's a cheaper build than most people assume.

The model also throws out the fixtures that nearly every listing already has, heating among them, because a fixture everybody already owns tells you nothing about which listing wins. That's worth remembering when a contractor tries to sell you on a feature as a revenue upgrade. If everyone on your street already has it, it's table stakes, not an edge.

Then there's the cleaning line, which quietly decides whether a two-night booking is worth having. As of September 2026 the average cleaning fee across this market runs about $138, rising to roughly $248 at four bedrooms and up, and over a year that adds up to something near $2,066 for a typical listing. Guests do compare those fees, so in a market whose calendar is this thin outside summer, a fee that reads as punitive on a Friday-to-Sunday quote will cost you more bookings than it recovers.

Is Airbnb Legal in Colorado Springs?

Yes, with a permit from the city's Planning & Community Development Department, and the permit type you qualify for depends entirely on whether you live in the property.

An owner-occupied short-term rental is one you physically occupy for no less than 185 days each year, and the city's own definition, added by Ordinance 19-101, puts it exactly that way. You can get that permit in any zone where people are allowed to live, so long as the unit is a lawful dwelling, which rules out renting out a shed or a tent. A non-owner-occupied rental is everything else, and this is where the plan most investors arrive with runs into a wall. Applications filed after December 26, 2019 can't be approved in any of the city's single-family zoning districts, and the city lists those as R-E, R-1 6, R-1 9 and single-family planned development zones. Anywhere else, the unit has to stand a clear 500 feet away from another non-owner-occupied short-term rental, measured in a straight line from property line to property line regardless of what's in between.

Since June 30, 2025 there's a second gate. Under Ordinance 25-45, once a property has an accessory dwelling unit on it, nothing on that lot can go out for nightly stays: not the ADU, not the main house, not any other structure standing on it. A property that legally held both a permitted ADU and a permitted short-term rental before that date keeps them as nonconforming uses until the permit lapses or is withdrawn. So if you're looking at a house with a casita or a converted carriage unit, check its permit history before you write an offer, because that one feature can rule the whole lot out.

The rest is lighter than the zoning. There's no cap on how many permits the city will issue, the permit costs $124.95 a year, it runs for one year with no grace period on renewal, and it's issued to you rather than to the house, so it doesn't transfer with a sale. Overnight occupancy is capped by ordinance at two guests per bedroom plus another two per unit, with fifteen the hard ceiling for any one house, and on top of that you'll need a 24-hour contact on file who can answer within an hour, liability cover of $500,000 or more, weekly trash pickup, and a firm no on weddings and other events.

The tax goes onto what the guest pays rather than onto your own gross, and it arrives in layers. A stay of under 30 consecutive days picks up four of them in sales tax alone: the city's own 3.07%, the state's 2.90%, El Paso County's 1.23% and the Pikes Peak Rural Transit Authority's 1.00%. The city publishes those four together as 8.20%, and its 2.0% Lodgers Tax rides on top, so a guest pays 10.20% in all. Colorado Springs is home rule, so it collects its own sales and lodging tax rather than routing them through the state, and marketplace platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo are required to collect and remit the city's sales tax on their own city licenses. Book guests independently and you'll need a City Sales Tax License of your own, and either way every city tax you owe has to be settled before the permit will issue. The filing mechanics are set out in our Colorado short-term rental tax guide.

Enforcement is real but complaint-driven. The city publishes every permitted address on its SpringsView map, so a neighbor who suspects you of operating without one can check in about thirty seconds and report it to Neighborhood Services. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to test their luck, a permit is also revocable for nuisance or for a false statement on the application, and for a non-owner-occupied permit a missed renewal can mean losing your place in the 500-foot geometry entirely.

Cross the city line and the rulebook changes completely, which matters a lot in a market where most listings are outside it. Unincorporated El Paso County has no short-term rental ordinance at all and asks for no permit to rent a principal structure, though it does require zoning approval if you want to rent an accessory building. Manitou Springs runs the opposite regime: its land use code caps short-term rentals at two percent of the city's residential structures, refuses applications once that ceiling is reached, requires every new permit to be owner-occupied on the same 185-day test, and imposes its own 500-foot buffer. Nothing above these town halls harmonises any of it, so each one writes its own rulebook and they don't resemble each other. Before you commit to an address, read our Colorado Springs regulation guide for the city and the statewide Colorado guide for everywhere else in this market.

How Does BNBCalc Track the Colorado Springs Airbnb Market?

Those guides carry the permits themselves. Every number in this article, meanwhile, was pulled out of BNBCalc Markets. That's the corner of BNBCalc you'd open while you're still deciding which town to buy in, before any one address is on the table, and one of the things it reports is the booking window bedroom by bedroom, instead of a single figure pooled across the whole market. In a market as seasonal as this one I'd check that early, because it tells you the date your summer is effectively sold and how long before it your rates need to be right.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a Colorado Springs Property?

Start wide and narrow down, never the other way round. Open the Colorado Springs market page for current earnings, occupancy and seasonality, then see where this market lands against the rest of the state on Colorado's markets ranked by gross yield, which weighs a year of bookings against what a home costs there. Only once that holds up should you put a specific address into BNBCalc, using the price you'd really pay, the loan you'd really sign and what the place really costs to run, because a median describes a market and never forecasts a house.

Three local thresholds are worth holding in your head while you do it. A three-bedroom that can't beat about $30,000 is doing worse than the middle of its size class here, and a four-bedroom needs to clear roughly $46,600 to say the same. Anything you're modeling above about $38,000 puts you in the market's top quartile, so ask what specifically gets you there, whether that's the hot tub, the pass, the view or a manager who prices better than the neighbors. And since property values in this market slipped about 1% over the past twelve months, don't let appreciation quietly carry a deal the bookings can't.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a three-bedroom Airbnb earn in Colorado Springs?

The median three-bedroom listing in the Colorado Springs market earned $30,459 across the twelve months ending August 2026, with a median nightly rate of $274. The top quarter of three-bedrooms cleared $40,599. That's a median across every measurable three-bedroom in the market, city and county together, so a well-run house in a strong location can sit well above it and a poorly presented one well below.

Do you need a permit to run an Airbnb in Colorado Springs?

Yes. Any property listed on a hosting platform inside the city needs an active Short Term Rental permit from the Planning & Community Development Department. It costs $124.95 a year, runs for one year with no grace period on renewal, and is issued to a specific owner rather than to the property, so it doesn't transfer when the house sells. Listing two separate units on one lot means two permits and two fees.

Can you run a Colorado Springs Airbnb if you don't live there?

Only in some zones. A non-owner-occupied permit can't be issued in the city's single-family zoning districts, listed as R-E, R-1 6, R-1 9 and single-family planned development zones, and in every other zone the unit must keep 500 feet of separation from another non-owner-occupied short-term rental. Owner-occupied permits, meaning you live there 185 days a year or more, are allowed in any zone where residential use is permitted.

What taxes do guests pay on a Colorado Springs short-term rental?

Stays under 30 consecutive days carry 10.20% in total: 2.90% state sales tax, 1.23% El Paso County, 1.00% Pikes Peak Rural Transit Authority, 3.07% City of Colorado Springs sales tax and a 2.0% city Lodgers Tax. The city publishes the first four as a combined 8.20% sales tax rate. Marketplace platforms are required to collect and remit the city's sales tax on their own city licenses; hosts booking independently need a City Sales Tax License.

Which months are slowest for Colorado Springs Airbnbs?

January and February. Over the year to August 2026, February filled 28.7% of available nights at a $181 nightly rate and January 29.5% at $190, against July's 59.5% at $324. November through April is one long quiet stretch on occupancy, though December is the exception on price, holding a $248 nightly rate on 37.7% occupancy.

Does the Colorado Springs Airbnb market include Pueblo and Manitou Springs?

Yes. BNBCalc's Colorado Springs market covers a wide stretch of southern Colorado, including Manitou Springs, Pueblo, Cañon City, Woodland Park, Trinidad, Alamosa and La Junta, and only about 42% of its listings sit inside the Colorado Springs city limits. Every one of those towns writes its own rules for short-term rentals, so a market-wide figure describes the region and not any single jurisdiction.

A market that spreads across this many town halls asks you a question most markets don't. Before the spreadsheet, before the comps, you have to know which rulebook the address answers to, because the same house on two sides of a line can be a licensed business or a code violation. Work out what you're allowed to do first, then find out what it pays.