Lexington, Kentucky Airbnb Market Data 2026

How much does an Airbnb earn around Lexington, and can you still get one licensed? Across the whole market, as BNBCalc's listing data measured it in September 2026, the middle listing took in $23,375 over the previous twelve months on a median nightly rate of $219 and median occupancy near 30%. That's the honest center of the market, and the spread around it is wide enough that the median matters more than any headline average.

What decides whether you can buy in at all is the difference between a hosted rental and an un-hosted one. Lexington and Fayette County merged into a single urban county government in 1974, so one rulebook covers all 285 square miles, and under Section 3-13 of the zoning ordinance a hosted rental sleeping ten or fewer is an accessory use across the ordinary residential zones, so no hearing is needed at all. Rent the place out while you live somewhere else and you need a conditional use permit, you can't sit within 600 feet of another permitted short-term rental, and un-hosted rentals can't exceed 2% of the dwelling units within 1,000 feet of you. The Board of Adjustment will hear ten new applications a month at most, so make sure to check the spacing at a specific address before you make an offer, because a perfect property on a full block is still a no.

One more thing before the numbers, since it changes how you should read every table here. The market BNBCalc publishes as Lexington isn't the city. Its listings spread across thirty Kentucky counties, from cabin country in Powell County out to the distillery farms of Anderson County, and only about 41% of them sit inside Lexington-Fayette itself.

How Much Do Lexington Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Start with that $23,375 market median and then split it on the city line, because the result is smaller than most buyers expect. Inside Lexington-Fayette the middle listing earned $24,162 against $22,746 for everything outside the county, a gap of about 6%, and the median nightly rate is practically identical at $221 and $219. Occupancy is where the city does pull ahead, at a median of 31.4% inside against 28.5% outside, which tells you the city buys you steadier bookings rather than better ones.

Size is the variable that actually moves the number. Here's where the medians land by bedroom count across the whole market, with the 75th percentile beside each one so you can see how far the good operators sit above the middle:

Bedrooms	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Studio	$16,466	$168	27%	$19,361
1	$14,919	$148	30%	$20,697
2	$21,721	$201	30%	$26,873
3	$27,924	$273	29%	$37,578
4+	$44,051	$454	29%	$73,443

Medians of individual listings in the Lexington market, from BNBCalc listing data, September 2026. These are medians, and the data module on this page reports averages, so the two sets of figures won't match and aren't meant to: a handful of very strong listings pull an average up and leave a median where it is. Studios are a thin group and their row will move between refreshes.

Read that table down the occupancy column first, because it barely moves. Every size books somewhere between 27% and 30% of the year, so nobody in this market is winning on how often the calendar fills; they're winning on what a night costs. That's why the revenue column nearly triples from a one-bedroom to a four-plus while occupancy sits flat, and it's the single most useful thing to know before you shop here.

The spread inside one size tells you the rest. A four-bedroom at the 75th percentile earned $73,443 against $44,051 at the median, so the top quarter of big houses made two-thirds more than the typical one, and that gap is far larger than anything you'd gain by moving a two-bedroom from one county to another. Keep in mind that a top-quartile result on a five-bedroom means furnishing and running it like a group-stay property, not like a house with extra rooms in it.

Where the city line does earn its keep is at the small end. Narrow the same calculation to listings inside Lexington-Fayette and the median one-bedroom earned $18,502 rather than the $14,919 it managed market-wide, which is roughly a quarter more for the same size of property. Two-bedrooms gain a little ($22,151 against $21,721) and the advantage widens again on larger homes, where a Fayette three-bedroom's median of $31,816 beats the market's $27,924. A university, a hospital system and a convention center keep small units busy year-round in a way that a cabin two counties away never will, so if a one-bedroom or a studio is what your budget reaches, buy it in town.

Is the Lexington Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

The honest answer is that the data can't settle it yet. Saying so is more useful to you than a confident guess would be. Active listings did grow, and nightly rates grew faster, but whether occupancy rose or fell changes with the months you pick, so the one number that would tell you whether the new supply is being absorbed is the one number I won't publish.

Measure, Jan to Aug 2026 vs Jan to Aug 2025	Change
Active listings	up about 6%
Nightly rate	up about 19%
Booking lead time	up about 10%

Market-wide across every listing in the Lexington market, not a sample. The comparison runs January through August 2026 against January through August 2025, because BNBCalc's stored history changed metric definitions in January 2025 and a full twelve-month baseline would straddle that change. Occupancy is left out on purpose: it reads as flat on this window and as a small decline on the cleanest shorter one, and a measure that can't agree with itself isn't a measure.

So rates did the work. Guests paid about 19% more a night while the number of places competing for them rose about 6%, and a market drowning in new supply does not behave that way, since a glut usually shows up first as owners cutting price to stay booked. The longer booking window points the same direction: guests are committing about 10% further ahead than they were, and people don't book earlier for a property they expect to be available anyway.

That said, I can't tell you occupancy held, and you shouldn't let anyone else tell you either. What you can do instead is check the occupancy of genuinely comparable listings near a specific address, the same bedroom count within a mile or two, and recheck it every few months. Three readings over a year will tell you more about whether a block is filling up than any market-wide percentage, and it costs you an afternoon.

When Is Lexington's Peak Airbnb Season?

Whatever the annual trend is doing, the season inside the year is sharp, and it's driven by rate rather than by how full the calendar gets. April is the month that prices highest.

2026	Occupancy	Nightly rate
January	20%	$204
February	24%	$212
March	32%	$242
April	42%	$313
May	39%	$290
June	42%	$298
July	44%	$277
August	39%	$266

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

April carried a nightly rate of $313, about 53% above January's $204, and no other month came close, as anyone who has tried to find a room in central Kentucky during the Keeneland spring meet will have guessed. What's more surprising is that April wasn't obviously the fullest month, since occupancy in April, June and July all landed in the low forties, close enough together that I wouldn't rank them against each other. The season is a plateau from April through July, not a single peak, and the money separates out because guests will pay a spring premium they won't pay in July.

January is the trough on both measures, at 20% occupancy and the year's lowest rate, with February barely better. If you're modeling a Lexington property, budget two genuinely bad months rather than one soft quarter, and don't plan a renovation for April.

Inside the week, the pattern is the usual one but steeper than you might assume. Saturday and Friday run about 38% and 37% above the market's average occupancy, while Monday and Tuesday sit roughly a quarter below it. Nightly rates follow at a gentler angle, with weekend nights around 22% above the weekly average and midweek nights about 12% below. A property that only fills Friday and Saturday is a normal Lexington property, which is worth remembering before you underwrite five nights a week.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Lexington?

Since the market reaches thirty counties, the first real decision isn't a neighborhood, it's which piece of central Kentucky you want to own. Counties are the only boundary that covers the whole market: close to three in ten of these listings sit outside any incorporated town at all, so a table of towns would quietly drop the cabins and farmhouses that make several of these places interesting.

County	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Grant	$38,032	$290	33%	$43,416
Anderson	$34,083	$329	28%	$46,441
Woodford	$26,833	$276	29%	$34,564
Powell	$26,534	$204	31%	$33,395
Bourbon	$25,783	$243	27%	$27,617
Jessamine	$25,167	$181	31%	$37,120
Garrard	$24,437	$239	28%	$32,113
Pendleton	$24,391	$203	33%	$27,674
Fayette	$24,162	$221	31%	$34,731
Franklin	$24,076	$224	29%	$36,904
Mercer	$23,597	$221	28%	$32,170
Scott	$23,009	$231	28%	$34,712
Boyle	$17,701	$198	26%	$21,486
Madison	$17,392	$175	28%	$23,961
Mason	$16,643	$198	27%	$24,375
Rowan	$15,343	$145	27%	$17,290
Harrison	$15,097	$151	29%	$20,973
Clark	$14,546	$144	32%	$22,942
Fleming	$13,824	$152	33%	$19,740
Bath	$13,180	$148	23%	$16,247

Point-in-polygon against US Census county boundaries for Kentucky, September 2026, one boundary method for the whole table. Counties with fewer than ten measurable listings are left out, and the thinnest rows that remain will still move between refreshes.

Reading it: what sits at the top is tourism rather than population. Lexington-Fayette holds about 41% of the market's listings and still lands only ninth on median revenue, which is the single most important line in this table. Grant County heads it on a genuinely thin base, since most of its listings sit out in unincorporated country instead of in a town, so treat that row as a signal rather than a promise. Anderson County, where Lawrenceburg and the distilleries around it are, posts the market's steepest median nightly rate at $329, and that's a bourbon-tourism number rather than a housing-cost one. Woodford County does the same thing at a gentler pitch around Versailles and Midway, as does Bourbon County around Paris.

The two biggest pieces of the market outside Fayette are Franklin County and Scott County, and they behave almost like the city does. Frankfort, the state capital, carries nearly all of Franklin's listings and the county's median of $24,076 sits within a hundred dollars of Fayette's, while Scott County around Georgetown comes in at $23,009. Neither is a destination market in the way Anderson or Powell is, and neither punishes you for buying there either, so if you like the Lexington numbers but not the Lexington competition, those two deserve a look before the tourism counties do.

Powell County deserves its own sentence, because it's the one place here that isn't selling the Bluegrass at all. Its median nightly rate is $204, near the bottom third of the table, yet its median revenue lands fourth, which only happens when properties book well and turn over often. That's the Red River Gorge cabin economy, and most of those listings sit outside Stanton in unincorporated land. If that's the market you're drawn to, our guide to investing in Stanton goes at it from the property side.

At the bottom, Rowan, Harrison, Clark, Fleming and Bath counties run medians under $16,000 on nightly rates in the $140s, and none of those places is somewhere a traveler crosses the state to reach. Unfortunately, a cheap purchase price won't rescue those numbers on its own, because a $145 nightly rate puts a ceiling on what the property can ever produce.

What the city limits actually mean here

Now the part that trips people up. Because the 1974 merger made the city and the county the same thing, "inside the city limits" in Lexington covers horse farms and two-lane roads as well as downtown. The line that separates town from country is a different one: the Urban Service Area, first drawn in 1958 and last expanded in 2024, which is where sewer, water and urban zoning stop.

Almost the entire short-term rental market sits inside it. Of the listings in Fayette County, 97.5% fall within the Urban Service Area, and their median revenue of $24,422 is barely above the county-wide $24,162, so the rural half of the county contributes almost nothing to the totals. Only a couple of dozen listings sit out in the Rural Service Area, too few to publish a reliable median for, and zoning is the reason why. Out in the three agricultural zones, an un-hosted rental is flatly banned in two of them, while the third allows one only with a conditional use permit, a property of ten acres or less, a septic letter from the Health Department, and a full mile of clear ground between it and the next short-term rental. Lexington decided some time ago that its farmland isn't inventory, and the rulebook still holds that line, so don't buy a horse farm expecting to rent the guest house out by the weekend.

Inside Lexington-Fayette

For the city itself, the only official neighborhood map Lexington publishes is its register of neighborhood associations, which is a genuinely useful list and also an incomplete one.

Lexington-Fayette neighborhood	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Kenwick	$62,652	$559	33%	$90,978
Picadome	$27,082	$297	29%	$29,541
Northside	$26,884	$203	30%	$35,705
Mentelle	$26,533	$208	33%	$32,285
Castlewood	$24,709	$204	33%	$28,653
Aylesford Place	$20,224	$127	37%	$23,004
William Wells Brown	$19,134	$120	42%	$25,478
Historic Woodward Heights	$17,653	$169	26%	$24,437
Martin Luther King	$15,593	$159	31%	$29,278
Davis Park	$13,167	$148	26%	$21,598

Point-in-polygon against the neighborhood-association boundaries the LFUCG Division of Planning registers, September 2026, a different boundary source from the county table and never to be merged with it. These associations are voluntary registrations rather than a complete map of the city: they cover about 60% of the county's listings and lean toward the older core, so the suburbs simply don't appear. Where a listing fell inside two overlapping association boundaries it was assigned to the smaller one. Rows near the ten-listing floor are thin.

Kenwick is the row worth pausing on, and not because it's typical. Its median listing is a five-bedroom renting at $559 a night, so what that row measures is a cluster of large group-stay houses, and that one pattern lifts the whole row to roughly 2.6 times the county median. Take it as evidence that a big house close to downtown can clear $60,000 in this city, rather than as evidence that Kenwick addresses do.

Aylesford Place and William Wells Brown sit at the other end and are the most instructive pair here. Both carry the lowest nightly rates in that table, $127 and $120, and both carry the highest occupancy, 37% and 42%, which is the signature of small units turning over constantly. Their revenue still lands mid-table, so the approach clearly works, though you'd be buying a volume business rather than a rate business, and those two want very different underwriting. For the neighborhood-by-neighborhood judgment rather than the arithmetic, our Lexington-Fayette investing guide is the companion piece.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Lexington?

Wherever you land, one amenity outranks the rest in this market and it isn't close. Market-wide, a hot tub tracks with roughly 22% more revenue, and BNBCalc's model puts that figure out in the open, which it doesn't do for most amenities.

The per-bedroom picture is more useful than the market-wide one, because the same feature earns differently depending on what you've bought. Guests pay about 19% more for a hot tub on a one-bedroom, about 22% more on a two-bedroom and about 17% more on a four-plus, so they want one whatever size of place they book. Three-bedrooms are the exception worth knowing about, because there the hot tub's own value sits behind BNBCalc Markets and the open number belongs instead to an EV charger, at about 21%. Since three bedrooms is the size a touring couple or a small family rents while they drive between distilleries, the charger turning up there rather than on a studio makes a certain amount of sense.

Several more amenities show a real signal in Lexington without a number attached to them, so naming them is as far as I can go: a pool, a sauna, a gym, lake access, a barbecue, a TV, internet and bicycles all carry measured value here, and the values themselves sit behind BNBCalc Markets. Notice how many of those are outdoor and how few are indoor comforts. That fits a market where guests spend the day driving out to farms, distilleries and the gorge, then come back in the evening wanting somewhere to sit.

One cost worth sizing before you commit. The typical cleaning fee, where a host charges one, rises from about $55 on a one-bedroom to roughly $194 on a four-plus as of September 2026, and since bigger houses also turn over faster, the cleaning line on a large property is a business decision rather than a rounding error. If you're buying the four-bedroom because the revenue column looks so much better, price the turnovers before you fall in love with it.

Is Airbnb Legal in Lexington?

Yes, both hosted and un-hosted, and Lexington-Fayette has never banned short-term rentals. What it has done is make the un-hosted path narrow, and since the city and county are one government, there's no neighboring suburb inside Fayette County with a friendlier rulebook to move to.

Everything starts with one definition. Lexington counts a home as a short-term rental when guests book it for under thirty days in a row and no meals come with it. That leaves out hotels, extended-stay hotels, bed and breakfasts, boarding houses and farm dwellings. From there the split is simple. A rental is hosted when somebody who lives there stays put while guests are in the house, and un-hosted when nobody does. The Code sets a real test for living there, too. You have to be in the house at least 275 days of the calendar year, and you prove it with a driver's license or voter registration plus a tax document, a bank statement, a vehicle registration or a utility bill.

From there, the zoning ordinance decides what you're allowed to run:

• Hosted, sleeping ten or fewer, in a residential zone. An accessory use in the R-1A through R-5 and Expansion Area residential zones, so no permit hearing. This is the simple path, and it stays simple.
• Hosted above ten occupants, or any un-hosted rental, in those same zones. A conditional use, which means a Board of Adjustment hearing.
• Un-hosted, anywhere residential. Two spacing rules sit on top of the hearing. No conditional-use short-term rental may sit within 600 feet of another one that holds a permit or is a legal non-conforming use, and un-hosted rentals can't exceed 2% of all dwelling units within 1,000 feet. You can ask the Board for relief from either limit, though you'd have to show the proposal won't overconcentrate un-hosted rentals nearby, and the Board grants it only on specific grounds, such as a major road or a natural feature standing between you and the others.
• Agricultural zones. Un-hosted rentals are prohibited outright in the A-B and A-N zones. In A-R they're conditional, capped at ten acres, and no short-term rental may sit within a mile of another in any of those three zones.
• Planned unit developments. Ordinance No. 101-2025 amended Section 3-13(b) to allow short-term rentals in the PUD-1, PUD-2 and PUD-3 zones. The Council passed it on second reading on 20 November 2025 on a 14 to 0 vote, and the change hasn't reached the codified text yet, so if you're looking at a PUD address, cite the ordinance rather than the code section.

Either way the occupancy ceiling is the same: two per bedroom, plus two more, or ten people, whichever comes out lower, and anyone living in the house during the stay counts against it. Private events are limited to that same occupancy figure, none may run between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., and commercial events are banned outright.

The license is separate from the zoning, and you need both. A short-term rental special fee license comes from the Division of Revenue and costs $200 a year for your first rental and $100 for each one after that, with a single license covering everything one owner holds.

Before Revenue will process it, though, you need a zoning compliance permit from the Division of Planning, and the application also wants a site and floor plan showing legal off-street parking, proof of general liability insurance of at least $1,000,000 per occurrence that stays in force the whole time you're licensed, a septic letter if the property is on a tank, and affidavits on safety and code compliance. The license expires on 31 December following your most recent renewal, and earlier than that if you sell, if you switch between hosted and un-hosted, or if a conditional use permit is revoked. Every advertisement has to carry your local registration number and the maximum occupancy.

There's one thing about the register that no ordinance will tell you, and it's the single fact I'd want before making an offer here. Lexington publishes its licensed short-term rentals as open data, and as of 25 September 2026 it listed 738 of them in Fayette County, of which 623 were un-hosted. Rentals that were already running before 11 July 2023 were allowed to continue, so a large part of that un-hosted total is grandfathered, and each one of those addresses still blocks 600 feet around it for the next applicant. The easy legal path in Lexington is the hosted one; the popular path was locked in before the rules arrived.

Taxes sit on the guest's bill rather than yours. Lexington charges a local transient room tax of 8.5%, built from a 4% base plus 2% for the Lexington Center and 2.5% for the convention center expansion, and Kentucky adds a 1% state transient room tax and its 6% sales tax on top, so a guest pays 15.5% above the rent. Lexington's ordinance puts the job of collecting all of it on the booking platform, and the Kentucky Department of Revenue says plainly that Airbnb and Vrbo already do, which means you won't need your own state room tax account at all if you rent only through them. Stays of thirty days or more are exempt from the room taxes entirely.

One tax is genuinely yours, though. The urban county government charges a 2.25% occupational license fee on net profits, so it lands on what you keep rather than on what the guest pays. For the filing mechanics, our Kentucky lodging tax guide covers them.

Enforcement has teeth. Operating without the special fee license carries a $500 civil penalty per offense, other violations of the short-term rental article run $125, $250, $500 and $1,000 as they repeat, and every day a violation continues after notice counts as a fresh offense. The city can put a lien on the property for fines you don't pay, the Division of Revenue can refuse or cancel a license outright, and once a license is cancelled that home can't apply again for a year. Rules across the county line are a different matter again: Powell County's towns, for instance, run their own ordinances, so read the Stanton short-term rental regulations before you assume a gorge cabin works like a Lexington one. For the full Lexington procedure, the forms and the contacts, our Lexington-Fayette short-term rental regulation guide is the document to work from.

Where Does This Lexington Airbnb Data Come From?

Procedure is that guide's job. Every figure here traces back instead to BNBCalc Markets, which is the side of BNBCalc you'd use to weigh one short-term rental market against another. It ranks them on gross yield, and gross yield is the honest comparison in central Kentucky, since a Woodford County farmhouse and an infill house off Main Street can post similar revenue against wildly different purchase prices. Ranked that way against Frankfort, Georgetown and everything else nearby, Lexington resolves into one answer rather than a long county table.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a Lexington Property?

Work outward from the market and inward to the address, in that order. Start on the Lexington market page for the current bedroom bands, then see where Lexington lands among the best Kentucky markets by gross yield, which tells you fast whether this is the state's strongest bet or merely its safest. Only then should the actual address go into BNBCalc, using the price you would genuinely pay, the financing you would genuinely be offered, and a cleaning cost somebody has quoted you rather than one you assumed.

Three numbers belong in your head throughout, and each one is peculiar to this market:

1. Occupancy near 30% is normal, not broken. Every bedroom size here clusters between 27% and 30%, so a model that needs 55% to work is a model that needs a different city.
2. Spring carries the pricing. The nightly rate peaks in April well above the winter floor, so a spread that assumes twelve even months will overstate January and understate spring by roughly the same amount.
3. Check the 600-foot radius before anything else. If you're planning an un-hosted rental, the density rules can kill a deal that pencils perfectly, and you'll want that answer from the Division of Planning before you spend money on an inspection.

Do that and the figure you take to a lender is one you can stand behind, rather than an average lifted off a page.

A merged city and county is an unusual thing in American local government, and Lexington shows you what it does to a market. There's no next town over with looser rules, no county pocket outside the city limits, and no line to cross when the rules tighten. Every market has a rule like that somewhere in it, whether it's a boundary, a cap or a calendar, and the investors who do well are the ones who go find it before they go find a property.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an Airbnb make in Lexington, Kentucky?

The middle listing across the Lexington market earned $23,375 in the twelve months to September 2026, on a median nightly rate of $219. Inside Lexington-Fayette itself the median was $24,162. Most of the difference comes down to size, since the median one-bedroom earned $14,919 and the median four-plus-bedroom earned $44,051, while occupancy stayed near 30% at every size.

Do you need a license to run an Airbnb in Lexington-Fayette?

Yes. Every short-term rental in Fayette County needs a special fee license from the Division of Revenue, costing $200 a year for the first rental and $100 for each additional one, with one license covering all of an owner's properties. You also need a zoning compliance permit from the Division of Planning first, plus general liability insurance of at least $1,000,000 per occurrence. Operating without the license carries a $500 penalty per offense, and each day counts separately.

Can you run an un-hosted Airbnb in a Lexington neighborhood?

Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the address. An un-hosted rental in a residential zone is a conditional use, so it needs a Board of Adjustment hearing, and it can't sit within 600 feet of another permitted or legal non-conforming short-term rental. Un-hosted rentals also can't exceed 2% of dwelling units within 1,000 feet. The Board hears at most ten new applications a month, and relief from those limits is granted case by case.

What taxes do you pay on a Lexington short-term rental?

Guests pay 15.5% on top of the rent: an 8.5% local transient room tax, a 1% Kentucky transient room tax and the 6% state sales tax. The booking platform collects and remits all of it, and stays of thirty days or more are exempt. Separately, the urban county government charges an occupational license fee of 2.25% on net profits, which is assessed on your profit rather than on the guest's bill.

Is Lexington a good place to buy a short-term rental?

That turns on what you're after. Lexington-Fayette offers steadier occupancy than the surrounding counties, at a median of 31.4% against 28.5%, but its median revenue runs only about 6% higher. The strongest medians in the market sit in tourism counties such as Grant, Anderson and Powell rather than in the city. Lexington suits a hosted or already-permitted un-hosted property; the surrounding counties suit a destination purchase.

Which month is busiest for Lexington Airbnbs?

April through July all run occupancy in the low forties, so the season is a plateau rather than a single peak. April commands the highest nightly rate of the eight months measured, at $313 in 2026, around 53% above January's $204. January is the clear trough on both measures at 20% occupancy. Within the week, Friday and Saturday carry the bookings, while Monday and Tuesday run roughly a quarter below average.

Does the Lexington market cover only the city?

No, and this matters when you read any figure labeled Lexington. The market's listings sit across thirty Kentucky counties, and only about 41% of them are inside Lexington-Fayette. Frankfort in Franklin County and Georgetown in Scott County together hold a sizeable share, and the market reaches as far as the Red River Gorge area in Powell County. A market-wide average therefore describes central Kentucky, not the city.