Louisville, Kentucky Airbnb Market Data 2026

How much does a Louisville Airbnb earn, and can you actually buy one to run as a business? The middle listing in this market cleared $23,688 over the trailing twelve months, and the thing that moves that figure most isn't the neighborhood you pick. It's how many bedrooms you buy.

Four-bedroom-and-larger houses post a median near $47,200 against roughly $20,400 for a two-bedroom, and almost all of that gap comes from the nightly rate rather than from selling more nights. Which is where Louisville, in Jefferson County, Kentucky, gets awkward for a lot of buyers, because the Land Development Code says a short-term rental has to sit in a single-family house or a duplex, and it adds that the requirement "shall not be waived or adjusted." So the kind of building that earns here is also, in most of the county, the only kind the rules will let you use.

Read every figure in this piece with one caveat attached, though. The market BNBCalc publishes under the name Louisville reaches about fifty counties across Kentucky and southern Indiana, and only around 40% of its measurable listings sit inside Jefferson County at all. I'll split the numbers on that line wherever it changes the answer.

How Much Do Louisville Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Start with that $23,688 market median, then split it on the county line, since the gap is smaller than most buyers guess. Inside Jefferson County the middle listing earned $25,260 against $22,697 for everything outside it, and the median nightly rate runs $242 against $217, while occupancy barely separates them at all, sitting at a median near 30% on either side of the line. So buying in the city gets you a better rate rather than a fuller calendar.

The bedroom count is where the real money sits, and the spread is steep:

Bedrooms	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top 25% revenue
Studio	$11,157	$120	28%	$16,739
1 bedroom	$16,047	$150	30%	$20,421
2 bedrooms	$20,436	$193	30%	$27,118
3 bedrooms	$26,709	$256	30%	$35,127
4+ bedrooms	$47,159	$480	29%	$76,736

Median of every measurable listing in the market, September 2026. Rows are medians rather than averages, so they don't add up to a market total, and the occupancy column is a median of its own rather than the figure you'd get by dividing revenue by rate.

Look down the occupancy column and it hardly moves: 28% at the studio end, 29% at the four-bedroom end, near 30% everywhere in between. Then look at the rate column, which quadruples. That's the whole mechanism in this market, and it's worth naming so I can keep pointing at it: Louisville pays for size, not for nights. A bigger house doesn't get booked more often here, it gets booked at four times the price, and that tells me your underwriting lives or dies on the rate you can hold rather than on how full you manage to keep the calendar.

Inside Jefferson County the same shape runs harder. A four-bedroom-or-larger city listing posts a median of $54,022 and a top quartile of $91,367, against $21,417 for a two-bedroom. Keep in mind those are medians, so half the listings of that size did better and half did worse, and the top-quartile column is the honest picture of what a well-run one looks like rather than a number to plug into a pro forma.

One more thing worth knowing about the competition, since it surprised me. Nobody in this market has real scale. The largest operator in the market runs under 4% of the measurable listings, and the next one down is smaller again, so there's no single manager setting the price everyone else has to answer. That cuts both ways: you won't get squeezed out by a giant, though you also won't be able to lean on anyone else's pricing discipline.

Is the Louisville Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

Mildly, and not in the way the word usually suggests. More places are competing than a year ago and they're each getting a slightly thinner slice of the calendar, but guests are paying enough more per night that the pressure hasn't shown up where a glut normally shows up first, in the asking price.

Measure	Change over the year
Active listings	up about 4%
Occupancy	down about 4%
Nightly rate	up about 16%
Booking lead time	shorter
Purchase price	up about 2%

Market-wide, September 2025 through August 2026 against the same twelve months a year earlier. Every measure is averaged on its own, so they don't multiply out into each other. Booking lead time moved too far between measurement windows for me to put a figure on the size of the change, only the direction.

Rates doing sixteen points of work while supply grew four is not what a drowning market looks like, since owners in real trouble discount first and hope volume covers it. The shorter booking window says something similar. Guests are committing closer to the date, which usually means they've stopped assuming a place will still be free when they get around to it.

So the honest answer is that Louisville is getting more crowded at the edges and more expensive in the middle. If you're weighing a purchase on this, the number to watch isn't the citywide listing count, it's the occupancy of properties like yours, same size and same part of town, rechecked every few months. A four-bedroom in the Highlands and a one-bedroom downtown are not in the same fight, and the market-wide figure averages the two into something that describes neither.

When Is Louisville's Peak Airbnb Season?

That warning about averages applies to the calendar too, because Louisville's year has two different shapes depending on whether you're looking at how full it gets or what it charges.

Month	Occupancy	Median nightly rate
September 2025	36.1%	$348
October 2025	39.3%	$281
November 2025	31.9%	$276
December 2025	26.7%	$270
January 2026	22.4%	$233
February 2026	23.9%	$250
March 2026	33.1%	$267
April 2026	35.7%	$354
May 2026	36.4%	$365
June 2026	39.2%	$296
July 2026	44.6%	$320
August 2026	32.5%	$274

Market-wide monthly figures for the twelve months through August 2026. Occupancy and nightly rate are measured separately, and the two columns answer different questions.

July is the fullest month of that stretch at 44.6%, with June and the autumn months clustered behind it, while January is the floor at 22.4%, and none of that should surprise anyone who has spent a summer here. What matters more for a Louisville pro forma is the rate line, where May tops out at $365, about 57% above January's $233, and April sits right behind it at $354. If you know the city at all you already know why: the first Saturday in May is Derby day, and the week around it reprices every spare bedroom in Jefferson County. April earns its spot for the same reason, since Thunder Over Louisville and the rest of the Derby Festival run for about two weeks before the race itself.

The practical consequence is that Louisville's best rate months arrive ahead of its fullest ones, so an owner who prices off last summer's occupancy will leave a lot on the table in spring. Make sure to set your minimum-stay and pricing rules for Derby weekend months ahead rather than the week before, because by then the calendar has usually already filled at whatever you happened to be asking.

The week has a strong shape of its own as well. Across the market, Friday and Saturday occupancy runs about 37% above the weekly average while Monday sits about 26% below it, and Saturday's nightly rate runs roughly 14% above average against Monday's 9% below. That's a sharper weekend tilt than a lot of mid-sized markets carry, and it follows from what brings people here: a race, a distillery weekend, a wedding, a group of eight in a big house for two nights. You'll want to underwrite on a weekend-weighted calendar rather than a flat one, and treat any midweek booking as upside rather than as budget.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Louisville?

Because the market runs so far past the county line, the first decision isn't a neighborhood at all. It's whether you want to be in the city or somewhere in the wide arc of Kentucky and Indiana counties around it. I've drawn the city and the counties with different boundary methods, so the two rankings answer different questions and shouldn't be read against each other.

Inside the city, these are Louisville's own neighborhood boundaries:

Neighborhood	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top 25% revenue
Cherokee Triangle	$35,816	$339	31%	$78,554
Audubon	$34,968	$318	38%	$47,139
Tyler Park	$31,092	$289	27%	$68,400
Bonnycastle	$30,465	$296	27%	$43,398
Phoenix Hill	$30,099	$298	29%	$47,881
Deer Park	$29,874	$337	28%	$37,759
St. Joseph	$27,899	$268	29%	$46,236
Smoketown / Jackson	$26,701	$225	37%	$43,634
Beechmont	$25,870	$272	28%	$41,660
Schnitzelburg	$25,638	$241	30%	$32,500
Butchertown	$24,771	$213	33%	$42,602
Original Highlands	$23,837	$217	31%	$37,297
Shelby Park	$23,550	$249	32%	$39,709
Downtown (Central Business District)	$23,233	$199	28%	$39,831
Germantown	$23,113	$211	32%	$35,714
Old Louisville	$22,779	$214	28%	$33,037

Point-in-polygon against Louisville Metro's own urban neighborhood boundaries, September 2026. Neighborhoods with too few measurable listings to benchmark reliably are left out; the ten further rows that clear the floor run down to about $14,800, and the thinnest of them will still move between refreshes.

The Highlands cluster owns the top of this table, and it does so on rate, since Cherokee Triangle, Tyler Park, Bonnycastle and Deer Park all sit within a mile or two of each other along Bardstown Road and Cherokee Park, all charge near or above $290 a night, and none of them is especially full. Cherokee Triangle is the one I'd study hardest, since its top quartile of $78,554 is more than twice its own median, and a spread that wide tends to mean the big restored houses here are running a different business from the small ones.

Audubon and Smoketown / Jackson are the interesting pair at the other end of the mechanism. Both post occupancy in the high thirties, well clear of anywhere else on the table, and both do it at ordinary nightly rates. That's volume rather than rate, and it wants a different kind of underwriting, since a place that turns over constantly carries more cleaning, more turnover risk and more wear than a house that books six Derby-priced weekends and coasts.

Downtown is worth pausing on, since it's the only row on this table built mostly out of one-bedrooms. Its median revenue lands mid-table while its nightly rate is the lowest of any row in the upper half, which is what a stock of small units looks like once you benchmark it against a city full of houses. That matters more than it sounds, because of what Louisville's code says about which buildings are allowed to host at all.

Outside the city, the county line is the only boundary I can draw around all of it, since plenty of this market sits out in unincorporated country that a list of towns would silently leave out:

County	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top 25% revenue
Shelby, KY	$31,888	$338	28%	$53,110
Spencer, IN	$30,626	$267	26%	$38,553
Grant, KY	$28,114	$238	32%	$37,557
Nelson, KY	$27,711	$255	29%	$41,127
Oldham, KY	$27,068	$237	29%	$43,957
Washington, KY	$26,689	$248	29%	$47,459
Spencer, KY	$26,131	$250	28%	$29,478
Jefferson, KY	$25,260	$242	30%	$41,026
Bullitt, KY	$24,447	$216	29%	$29,264
Gallatin, KY	$24,360	$251	32%	$28,205
Breckinridge, KY	$23,799	$206	29%	$32,609
Grayson, KY	$23,540	$246	27%	$35,322
Clark, IN	$23,502	$224	32%	$34,713
Floyd, IN	$23,420	$215	29%	$32,551
Orange, IN	$22,492	$246	26%	$30,355
Bartholomew, IN	$22,398	$173	31%	$28,616

Point-in-polygon against US Census county boundaries for Kentucky and Indiana, September 2026, one method across the whole table. Counties with too few measurable listings to benchmark are left out, and sixteen further rows clear the floor below Bartholomew County, down to about $13,800.

Jefferson County carries roughly 40% of everything measurable in this market and still shows up eighth on that ranking, which is the line I'd want a buyer to sit with. Louisville itself is not where the highest median revenue is, and the counties above it are selling something the city doesn't have. Shelby County tops it on horse farms and the Shelbyville corridor. Nelson County is Bardstown, which calls itself the bourbon capital of the world and prices accordingly. Oldham County is the wealthy commuter belt just upriver. Spencer County in Indiana and Gallatin County in Kentucky both sit on the thinnest bases in the table, and neither one has yet earned the benefit of the doubt.

Grant County is the row that needs explaining, and it's the clearest evidence that this market's name is a convenience rather than a description. It's the second-largest county in the market by listing count, its occupancy sits with the strongest rows on the table, and it lies about 69 miles northeast of downtown Louisville, which puts it roughly twice as close to Cincinnati as to the city this data is named after. If you're buying there you're buying into northern Kentucky's visitor economy, not Louisville's, and you should underwrite it that way.

Across the river, Clark and Floyd counties are Jeffersonville, Clarksville and New Albany, close enough to downtown Louisville that guests treat them as the same trip while the rules, the taxes and the price per square foot are all Indiana's. For the neighborhood-level judgment rather than the arithmetic, our guide to the best Louisville neighborhoods for short-term rentals is the companion piece to this one.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Louisville?

Whichever side of the river you land on, one feature does more for a Louisville listing than any other, and splitting it by bedroom count tells you far more than the pooled number does, because the same feature pays differently depending on what you've bought.

A hot tub is worth about 21% across the market. Split by size, guests pay about 21% more for one on a one-bedroom, about 26% more on a two-bedroom, about 18% more on a four-bedroom or bigger, and only about 13% more on a three-bedroom. That three-bedroom dip is the odd one, and it's worth a moment, since three bedrooms is exactly the size a couple of families or a group of friends rents. My read is that a group booking a three-bedroom house is already buying the house rather than the extras, whereas a couple booking a two-bedroom for a weekend is choosing between two similar places and the tub breaks the tie. Compare that with the same measurement run in Lexington, where the pattern doesn't dip at three bedrooms in the same way, and you get a sense of how local these answers are.

Plenty of other features carry a measurable signal in Louisville without a published number beside them: a sauna or a pool, a gym, a TV, a barbecue, an EV charger, internet, bicycles, lake access and a pets-allowed policy. Their lift values are gated rather than printed here, so I'll name the features and leave the numbers alone rather than guess at them. The model also leaves out whatever nearly every place already has, which makes sense when you think about it, since a feature everybody offers can't explain why one listing beats its neighbor.

The other lever worth testing is the cleaning fee, and Louisville leans on it less than you might expect. As of September 2026, under half the market's listings charge one at all, and where there is a fee it climbs from about $64 on a one-bedroom to roughly $204 on a four-bedroom-or-larger place. On a big house that fee is doing real work inside the guest's total, so set it deliberately rather than matching whatever the place down the street asks.

Is Airbnb Legal in Louisville?

Yes, though the paperwork is the easy half. Eligibility is the hard one here, which is the reverse of how most cities work.

Every short-term rental in Jefferson County needs an annual registration with Louisville Metro's Office of Planning, and the code is blunt that nobody may own or operate one without it. The fee is $250, it's nonrefundable, and the registration runs one year. You can't renew earlier than thirty days before it expires, and anything filed after the expiry date gets treated as a brand new application rather than a renewal, which matters because operating on a lapsed registration is flatly prohibited. Before you touch that form, register with the Louisville Metro Revenue Commission for a tax reporting number, which you only do once however many properties you end up with.

Then the zoning, which is where deals die. Two rules do most of the work:

• The building has to be a single-family house or a duplex. In every residential and office-residential district, the Land Development Code limits short-term rentals to those two building types unless the property is in one of the named commercial districts, and it says the requirement "shall not be waived or adjusted." A condominium unit can qualify, but only through a conditional use permit, only if it's the owner's primary residence, and only with minutes showing the association's board was notified and voted in favor. An ordinary apartment in a residential zone doesn't qualify at all. Remember that when you look at downtown's numbers, because a good deal of the housing stock down there is exactly what the code excludes.
• It has to be your primary residence, unless you win a conditional use permit. In the residential districts the registration route is open only to owner-occupants, and you'll need to show you've lived there for at least six months with a Kentucky driver's license or ID at the address plus one further document. The code also requires the owner to act as the primary host rather than handing the job to a manager.

If the property isn't your home, the conditional use permit is the only route. Budget $200 for the pre-application, which includes a staff conference and a neighborhood meeting, then $560 for an owner-occupied application or $1,260 for a non-owner-occupied one, and expect roughly six months to a public hearing at the Board of Zoning Adjustment. One condition decides more of these than any other. Your property generally has to stand at least 600 feet clear of any other short-term rental that needed a permit, measured property line to property line, and where the whole of that 600-foot circle is residentially zoned and two permitted rentals are already inside it, the code says the Board may under no circumstance grant relief. Unfortunately for anyone shopping the popular streets, that's a hard stop rather than a negotiation. Owner-occupied homes in Old Louisville and Limerick need a permit too, since those neighborhoods sit in the Traditional Neighborhood Zoning District where every short-term rental is a conditional use.

Jurisdiction catches out-of-town buyers more than anything else here. "Louisville Metro" gets used loosely to mean all of Jefferson County, but nine incorporated cities inside the county run their own zoning. By Metro's own account they've adopted no short-term rental rules at all. Under zoning law that means short-term rentals aren't permitted in any of them: Anchorage, Douglass Hills, Graymoor-Devondale, Hurstbourne, Indian Hills, Jeffersontown, Prospect, Shively and St. Regis Park. Barely 1% of the county's measurable listings sit inside those nine, which I read as the rule working rather than being ignored. Lyndon, Middletown and St. Matthews went the other way and wrote their own rules, different from Metro's. Do check which jurisdiction your parcel actually falls in before you get attached to it, since our Jefferson County guide covers the smaller cities from that angle.

The occupancy ceiling is two people per bedroom plus another two, or plus six if the lot runs over two acres, and where that formula allows more than twelve people, no more than twelve of them can be over the age of sixteen without the Planning Director's agreement. Beyond that, the code wants a smoke alarm, a carbon monoxide detector, a charged fire extinguisher on every habitable floor, an operable escape window in every sleeping room and a posted evacuation plan, and your registration number belongs in every ad you post.

The tax stack is a guest expense, never a deduction from what you earn. Louisville Metro charges 8.5% in transient room tax, and that 8.5% is five separate levies bolted together, each authorized by its own state statute and earmarked for something different, from convention center bonds to the Kentucky Center for the Arts. Kentucky then puts 1% of statewide transient room tax and 6% of sales tax on the same rent, which lands a guest at roughly 15.5% above what the night itself costs. The ordinance puts the room tax on you, though a platform that has signed an agreement with Metro Government can collect it and pay it over for you. Book someone in for thirty consecutive days or more and the room taxes fall away entirely, which is worth knowing if you ever take a corporate stay. For how and when to file, including the occupational license tax that does come out of your side, our Kentucky short-term rental tax guide is the one to read.

As for enforcement, it's complaint-driven, though that doesn't make it toothless. Failing to register draws $125 for a first offense, then $250, $500 and $1,000, with each day counted separately after notice, and advertising an unregistered rental adds $125 a day. Two or more substantiated civil or criminal complaints against a property within twelve months gets the registration revoked, and a revoked owner can't register anything new for a full calendar year, which is a heavier consequence than the fines. Metro can also require a platform to pull a listing within ten business days when the registration number attached to it is invalid, and the Code Enforcement Board can subpoena a platform's booking records for a specific address. One thing that hasn't changed, in case you've heard otherwise: a 2026 bill in Frankfort that would've barred Kentucky cities from requiring a conditional use permit never left its first committee, so the permit is still the law here. For the forms, the contacts and the full procedure, our Louisville short-term rental regulation guide sets it all out in order.

Where Do These Louisville Airbnb Numbers Come From?

Paperwork is that guide's department. Every number in this article comes from somewhere else, namely BNBCalc Markets, the research side of BNBCalc, the part you'd use to decide which market deserves your money before you start looking at houses in it. Open Louisville there and you can read the week the way a pricing tool reads it, night by night, which is the view that matters most in a city this weekend-heavy. Since Friday and Saturday carry so much of the year here, seeing exactly how far ahead of Monday they sit is what tells you whether a midweek discount is worth running at all.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a Louisville Property?

Work outward from the market before you work inward to the address. Start on the Louisville market page, which carries today's levels and the shape of the season, then see how Kentucky's markets stack up on the best Airbnb markets in Kentucky by gross yield ranking, since yield is the honest comparison when a Bardstown farmhouse and a shotgun house in Germantown can post similar revenue against purchase prices that sit worlds apart. Then take that exact address to BNBCalc and load in your own numbers, the price on the contract, the loan you can get on it and what one turnover costs you in practice, because a market median describes the middle of a very wide spread and says nothing about your particular house.

Three things are worth settling in Jefferson County before an offer goes in:

1. Confirm the building type before anything else. A single-family house or a duplex in a residential zone is straightforward. A unit in an apartment building is not eligible, and a condo needs a permit plus its association's recorded approval, so find that out before the inspection rather than after.
2. Run the 600-foot check in the neighborhoods you have your eye on. The rule bites hardest exactly where demand is highest, and if two permitted rentals already sit inside that circle in a fully residential block, the Board can't help you.
3. Underwrite on a weekend calendar and a spring rate. With Friday and Saturday running so far above the rest of the week and May's rate sitting well above January's, a flat annual assumption will flatter a weak deal and punish a strong one.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

You need an annual registration with Louisville Metro's Office of Planning, not a license as such. It costs $250, it's nonrefundable, and it lasts a year. Register with the Louisville Metro Revenue Commission for a tax reporting number first, since the planning form assumes you already have one. Depending on your zoning and whether the property is your primary residence, you may also need a conditional use permit on top of the registration.

Can you run an Airbnb in a Louisville apartment or condo?

Not in an apartment, in most of the county. Jefferson County's Land Development Code limits short-term rentals in residential and office-residential districts to single-family houses and duplexes, and says that requirement can't be waived or adjusted. A condominium unit can work, but only through a conditional use permit, only as the owner's primary residence, and only with board minutes showing the association was notified and voted in favor. Commercially zoned buildings are treated differently.

How much does a Louisville short-term rental conditional use permit cost?

The pre-application, which includes a staff conference and a required neighborhood meeting, costs $200. The formal application that follows costs $560 for an owner-occupied property or $1,260 for a non-owner-occupied one, and Louisville Metro says the process typically takes about six months to reach a public hearing at the Board of Zoning Adjustment. You still have to register the property within thirty days of approval, or the permit becomes void.

What taxes does a Louisville Airbnb guest pay?

About 15.5% above the rent. Louisville Metro's transient room tax is 8.5%, built from five separately authorized pieces, and Kentucky adds 1% of statewide transient room tax plus its 6% sales tax. All three ride on the guest's folio, and none of them is deducted from what the host takes home, though the host is the one legally answerable for the room tax unless a platform handles it under an agreement with Metro Government. Once a single booking runs thirty consecutive days, the room taxes no longer apply.

Which Louisville neighborhood earns the most per listing?

Cherokee Triangle, at a median of $35,816 a year on a median nightly rate of $339, as measured in September 2026. Audubon and Tyler Park follow it. What makes Cherokee Triangle worth a closer look is the spread rather than the median: its top quartile sits above $78,000, more than twice the middle of its own range, which points to a neighborhood where the larger restored houses run a different business entirely from the smaller ones.

Is the Kentucky Derby enough to build a Louisville Airbnb around?

It shapes the year without paying for it. May carries the market's highest median nightly rate at $365, roughly 57% above January's, and April sits close behind on the Derby Festival. Even so, July is the fullest month at nearly 45% occupancy, and the strongest listings earn across the whole spring-to-autumn stretch. Treat Derby week as the part of your year that rewards pricing discipline, not as the reason the deal works.

Markets like this one reward the buyer who reads the constraint before the opportunity. Almost every place has a number that looks good from a distance, and almost every place has a rule sitting underneath it that decides who is allowed to go and get it. Find that rule first, and the arithmetic afterwards is just arithmetic.