Omaha, Nebraska Airbnb Market Data 2026

How much does an Omaha Airbnb actually bring in, and does the City of Omaha make you get a license before you start?

Take the license first, because the answer is odd enough to change how you read the rest. Omaha's municipal code does contain an article headed "Short Term Rental," sitting inside the building chapter since the council enacted it in 2015. Read past the heading, though, and every operative section of it licenses one thing: a bed and breakfast, meaning a single-family home run as a hotel that rents out individual sleeping rooms and where the owner serves the meals. Rent the whole house and put no food on the table and you fall outside that definition, so there's no city license to apply for, no registration, no fee. Serve breakfast to guests in separate rooms and you've walked into a licensing regime with a $1,000 application, a sprinkler requirement and an annual reinspection.

Nebraska sets the ceiling above all of that. State law forbids any city in the state from banning short-term rentals outright, which is why Omaha has never tried. So the practical questions in Douglas County are the ordinary ones: what a house earns, which side of the city limit it sits on, and whether you can carry a January that fills a quarter of its nights.

How Much Do Omaha Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Take the middle listing inside Omaha's city limits and it cleared $19,218 across the twelve months BNBCalc's 2026 listing data covers, against $21,543 for the middle listing everywhere else in the metro. Hold that gap for a moment, because size moves this market further than the city limit does. Within Omaha the middle two-bedroom brought in $17,921, the middle three-bedroom $24,077 and the middle four-plus-bedroom $38,124, which puts a four-bedroom house at roughly three times the $12,366 a middle one-bedroom takes.

That ratio is worth sitting with, because plenty of markets don't work this way. Here the tiers barely overlap: the top quarter of one-bedrooms starts at $14,519, which is still below what a median two-bedroom makes, and the top quarter of two-bedrooms starts at $23,883, a whisker under the median three-bedroom. Buy a bigger house in Omaha and you're not hoping for an edge, you're buying most of one.

The suburbs' apparent lead disappears once you hold size still. Outside the city limits the middle one-bedroom earned $10,826 and the middle two-bedroom $16,698, both behind their in-city counterparts, and the middle four-plus-bedroom earned $32,704 against the city's $38,124. Only at three bedrooms do the suburbs edge ahead, $25,908 to $24,077. So the metro's higher overall median isn't a location premium at all; it's just that the towns around Omaha are full of bigger houses.

The strongest quarter of listings inside the city starts at $31,543 a year, and at four-plus bedrooms it starts at $51,225. That's where you beat your size, in the top quarter rather than in the middle. Aim for it by all means, but build your numbers on the median and treat anything above it as upside you'd still have to go and earn.

One more thing shapes what you're walking into. A large share of the metro's listings sit with professional operators, so the calendar you're bidding against is usually being priced by someone doing it full time.

Is the Omaha Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

It isn't, and the listing count settles it. Competition here has been shrinking, not building.

Metric	Change
Active listings	About 2% lower
Occupancy	About 2% higher
Average nightly rate	About 27% higher
Purchase price	About 2% higher

BNBCalc data across every listing BNBCalc tracks in the metro. Listings, occupancy and nightly rate hold January through August 2026 against January through August 2025, a shorter window than usual because BNBCalc redefined several of the measures it stores for this market with effect from January 2025, so any twelve-month baseline reaching back before that date would be mixing two different definitions. Each measure is averaged on its own, so they don't multiply together. Purchase price comes from a separate twelve-month home-price series that follows homes rather than listings.

Fewer listings and slightly fuller calendars is the combination you want to see before you buy. It means the guests arriving in Omaha are being spread across a field that shrank a little rather than one filling up with new houses, and it's the opposite of what a crowding market looks like.

Now the number that will catch your eye. Average nightly rates ran about 27% higher across those eight months, and that's a big move for a Midwestern market nobody thinks of as volatile. Still, I wouldn't read it as a permanent reset, since a jump that size usually says more about what got listed and when than about what guests will pay all year. The seasonality section shows exactly where this one landed. It landed in one month.

If you want a saturation number that actually applies to your deal, stop looking at the metro. Pull the occupancy of houses your size within a few streets of the address, then check it again in three months and again in six. No city-wide average can answer whether one particular block has room for another listing, and in a market this size the block is the unit that decides it.

When Is Omaha's Peak Airbnb Season?

June is the peak, and it isn't close on either measure.

Month	Occupancy	Avg nightly rate
Sep 2025	33%	$197
Oct 2025	35%	$194
Nov 2025	32%	$194
Dec 2025	29%	$200
Jan 2026	25%	$177
Feb 2026	26%	$170
Mar 2026	36%	$194
Apr 2026	36%	$213
May 2026	41%	$274
Jun 2026	48%	$418
Jul 2026	44%	$269
Aug 2026	41%	$246

BNBCalc market data across every listing in the metro, one row per month from September 2025 through August 2026. Occupancy and nightly rate are averaged separately, so read each column on its own.

June ran 48% occupancy on an average rate of $418, both the year's high. July comes next at 44% and $269, then May at 41% and $274. Then the floor drops out: January fills a quarter of its nights at $177 and February isn't much better at 26% and $170, the cheapest rate of the year. Losing price and occupancy in the same two months is what empties a reserve account, so put those eight weeks in your model at what they really are instead of letting an annual mean paper over them.

Omaha's June isn't a fluke of one summer, either. The city hosts the NCAA Men's College World Series at Charles Schwab Field, and the NCAA has it scheduled there every June in each year it has published dates for, through 2030. That's a rare thing to be able to plan around. Most markets get one big weekend a year and can't tell you whether it'll be back; if you buy in Omaha, you can build a June into your model and expect it to show up.

Just don't let June do the work of twelve months. Its rate runs more than twice January's, so a spreadsheet that averages the year and calls the result your nightly rate will overstate every other month you own the place.

Between those extremes, what day it is counts for more than what month it is. Saturday nights across the metro fill about 32% better than a typical day and Friday nights about 30% better, while Monday and Tuesday come in around 20% under. Rates don't stretch nearly as far, sitting roughly 23% over the average on Friday and again on Saturday. Demand, in other words, swings harder than price does here, and if you change one thing about your pricing this year, make it the size of your weekend premium.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Omaha?

Before any of those neighborhood numbers help, work out whose rules the address answers to.

About 76% of the market's listings sit inside the City of Omaha's own limits. The rest spread across Bellevue, Papillion, Ralston, Gretna and the unincorporated stretches of Douglas and Sarpy counties, while roughly 8% sit across the Missouri River in Iowa, mostly in Council Bluffs. That matters, because the legal section below is Omaha's own code and it reaches the city plus a three-mile ring beyond it, no further. The Iowa listings answer to another state entirely. Since three-quarters of the market does sit in one city, the ranking starts with Omaha's own neighborhoods and then gives the surrounding towns a second table, each measured on its own boundaries.

Inside the City of Omaha

Omaha keeps a register of roughly 150 neighborhood and homeowner organizations, each one with a mapped boundary, and fifteen of them hold enough listings to rank. Below, I've put those fifteen in order by what the typical listing inside each boundary earns in a year.

Rank	Neighborhood	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	75th-percentile revenue
1	Near South	$30,964	$309	31%	$42,847
2	Little Italy	$27,483	$261	36%	$36,437
3	Old Market	$24,474	$312	23%	$35,591
4	Radial Arts Center	$22,811	$198	30%	$31,178
5	Benson	$22,607	$202	32%	$31,976
6	Aksarben-Elmwood Park	$21,448	$210	29%	$25,251
7	Robin Hill	$20,495	$200	28%	$26,736
8	Dundee-Memorial Park	$19,194	$249	28%	$43,699
9	Hanscom Park	$18,952	$181	30%	$27,716
10	Deer Park	$17,871	$213	30%	$31,796
11	Leavenworth	$17,158	$162	27%	$28,936
12	Morton Meadows	$16,765	$201	28%	$27,757
13	Joslyn Castle	$15,626	$126	31%	$18,384
14	Gifford Park	$13,414	$129	32%	$19,664
15	North Omaha Neighborhood Association	$8,619	$70	35%	$9,143

BNBCalc 2026 listing data inside the City of Omaha's registered neighborhood-organization boundaries, trailing twelve months, for listings that also fall inside the city limits. Revenue, rate and occupancy are medians; the last column is the 75th percentile, where a neighborhood's strongest quarter of listings begins. Each column is calculated separately, so they don't multiply. Rows carry the organization's registered name, which is why the last one reads the way it does: it's one association's boundary on the near north side and not the north side as a whole. Neighborhoods with too few listings to measure reliably are left out, and about seven in ten in-city listings fall inside a registered boundary at all. Six umbrella alliance boundaries that span whole quadrants of the city are excluded, while about one in seven in-city listings sits inside more than one of the boundaries that remain, and each of those counts toward the smallest boundary containing it.

Near South tops the list at $30,964, and Little Italy sits behind it at $27,483 with the healthiest occupancy on the table at 36%. Both of them are walkable to downtown and to the ballpark, which is a large part of why they price the way they do.

Old Market is the row I'd have bet against. It's the city's tourist district. Yet no neighborhood here charges a higher median rate, $312, a shade above Near South's $309, and none fills fewer nights than its 23%. A listing there is being bought for a handful of high-rate weekends rather than a steady calendar, and if your financing needs twelve even months, that's a harder house to own than the rate suggests. Little Italy, a few blocks south, fills half again as many nights at a lower rate.

Then look at Dundee-Memorial Park, eighth on the median at $19,194 and first on the table's top quartile at $43,699. No other neighborhood here has that shape. A typical Dundee listing is unremarkable while its strong ones are the strongest in the city, and my read is that the housing stock explains it. Dundee mixes large old homes with small apartments, so what you buy there matters more than where you buy.

Don't read the bottom of the table as weak locations, either. Joslyn Castle and Gifford Park both run on one-bedrooms, and a one-bedroom earns roughly what a one-bedroom earns anywhere in the city. Compare them against the per-size medians above rather than against Near South.

One caution on the occupancy column: those are each neighborhood's own middle listing, not a city average, so they're useful for holding one neighborhood against another and nothing else. None of it tells you what a street feels like to walk up at ten at night, and for that you want the best Omaha neighborhoods for Airbnb.

The Rest of the Metro

Here are the towns beyond the city line, mapped by municipality rather than by neighborhood and sorted the same way.

Rank	City	State	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	75th-percentile revenue
1	Papillion	NE	$22,117	$152	33%	$28,970
2	Omaha	NE	$19,218	$199	30%	$31,543
3	Council Bluffs	IA	$15,207	$186	25%	$20,345
4	Bellevue	NE	$15,153	$191	29%	$26,544

BNBCalc 2026 listing data inside US Census place boundaries in Nebraska and Iowa, trailing twelve months. Only four places in the metro carry enough listings to rank; smaller suburbs and the unincorporated county land between them are too thin to measure reliably. Columns are medians except the 75th percentile, and each is calculated separately.

Papillion outranks Omaha on the median while charging $47 a night less, which is the size effect again rather than a Papillion premium. Council Bluffs is the row to slow down on: it sits about fifteen minutes from downtown Omaha and in a different state, under Iowa's lodging taxes and Council Bluffs' own ordinances, and the section below covers neither. If you're pricing a house on the Iowa side, start with that city's code rather than with anything in this article. Anywhere in unincorporated Douglas County, meanwhile, the county's rules apply instead of the city's, and BNBCalc's Douglas County short-term rental guide is the right place to start.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Omaha?

A hot tub is the one that pays here. It pays across nearly every size, too, since BNBCalc's current amenity model puts hot-tub listings about 33% ahead across the metro, about 18% ahead among one-bedrooms and about 16% ahead among both two and three-bedrooms. Three size bands landing within two points of each other is unusually tidy, and my read is that the winter explains it. January and February are this market's worst months, and a guest who books Omaha in the cold still wants somewhere to sit outside in it.

Then at four-plus bedrooms the answer flips. There the model puts a pool about 29% ahead, the biggest published lift for any one size here, and the hot tub's own value stops being published separately at four-plus. If you're buying the kind of large house that already carries most of the market's revenue, that's the amenity question worth pricing into the purchase.

Several more register a real signal in the same model, though without a published figure beside them. Lake access is one; so are a sauna and an EV charger, a pool at the smaller sizes, a gym in the larger homes, and then the everyday things, a barbecue, bicycles, a pet policy, internet and a TV. The model also leaves out a handful of everyday fixtures on purpose. When almost every listing in a market already has something, its presence tells you nothing about why one house outperforms the next.

On the cost side, the typical Omaha-area listing that bills a cleaning fee sets it around $109. Average across the whole metro, zero-fee listings included, and cleaning contributes about $1,310 a year to a listing. Almost none of that stays with you once the turnover is paid for, so read the fee as a pass-through.

Is Airbnb Legal in Omaha?

Yes, and Nebraska settled the question for the whole state back in 2019.

That year's Nebraska Revised Statute 18-1758, enacted as LB 57, says flatly that a municipality "shall not adopt or enforce an ordinance or other regulation that expressly or effectively prohibits the use of a property as a short-term rental," and it defines one as a residential property rented for no longer than thirty consecutive days at a time.

Cities do keep real powers under it. They're just narrow ones. A city can regulate for health and safety. The statute spells that out as fire and building codes, health and sanitation, traffic control, and waste and pollution control. It can also require that you name an emergency contact for the property, and it can tax the stay through sales or occupation tax. What it can't do is apply a tougher land-use rule than it would to any comparable property, so zoning, noise and property maintenance all come at you the ordinary way.

One thing the statute never touches is a private agreement. A lease, a condo declaration or an HOA covenant can still say no where the city says yes, so read yours before you buy. The law that protects you from City Hall does nothing about your homeowners association.

So what does Omaha itself do with the room the state leaves it? Almost nothing, and the proof is how little there is to read. Chapter 43, Article XI of the Omaha Municipal Code is headed "Short Term Rental," and when I swept the whole code in September 2026 that phrase turned up in exactly one other place, a section about car rentals. This article is the whole of it. The council enacted it in April 2015 as Ordinance No. 40326, and its own purpose section says what it's for: "to provide for the licensing and regulation of bed and breakfasts in the city or within the three-mile extraterritorial jurisdiction of the city."

Everything then turns on how the code defines a bed and breakfast. It's "a single family residential structure being operated as a hotel ... which may or may not be the owner's primary residence, offering individual sleeping rooms and owner provided meals for transients." A transient, under the same section, is any guest whose stay runs 30 days or less. Read it as a two-part test, because both parts have to be true at once. You're renting out individual sleeping rooms, and you're feeding the guests. Rent an entire house or apartment to one party and serve nothing, which is how the overwhelming majority of Omaha listings operate, and the article doesn't reach you at all. There's nothing to register and nothing to pay.

Cross that line, though, and the cost turns real. Operating a bed and breakfast without a license from the Permits and Inspections Division and the Omaha Fire Department is unlawful, and that applies inside the city or anywhere in its three-mile extraterritorial jurisdiction, and the code prices the license at $1,000 to apply, $250 to renew the certificate of occupancy and $150 a year plus $15 for every sleeping room. Then there's the building work, because every first-time occupancy has to put in an approved 13R sprinkler system on top of a monitored fire alarm, illuminated exit signs, pull stations and battery-backed egress lighting. Miss the annual reinspection and the license voids on its own, which sends you back to a fresh application as though the use were brand new. Operate one unlicensed and the code reaches for a $1,000 civil penalty, another $500 for every day it carries on, and up to a year in jail behind that.

Then zoning makes it harder still. In residential districts a bed and breakfast inn needs a special use permit, and the supplemental rules attach a condition most houses can't meet: the structure has to be a designated local historic landmark or an integral historical component of a historic preservation district. On top of that you need two parking stalls for the residence and one for each guest room, all on site, and no more than six guest rooms in an R5 district. Between the definition and that zoning condition, Omaha's bed and breakfast license is written for a handful of grand old houses, not for a portfolio.

One thing genuinely threw me while I was checking this. The city's own licensing page doesn't list a bed and breakfast license anywhere, only the building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical and sign licenses. The requirement lives in the code regardless, so don't read a web page's silence as permission.

One rule that sounds like it should apply doesn't. Omaha runs a rental property registration and inspection program, enacted in 2019, that covers landlords across the city and the same three-mile ring beyond it. Its definition of a rental dwelling reaches occupancy "for a duration longer than 30 days," which is the mirror image of a short-term rental, so a place you rent by the night falls outside it. Keep that line in mind if you ever swing a property into 30-day-plus stays, because you'd move from one regime into the other.

As for the rule everyone keeps hearing is coming: the code, as codified through the ordinance the council enacted on August 4, 2026, still contains no short-term rental registration requirement. Council members have discussed adding one. Until something is actually adopted, nothing obliges you to file anything with the city, and the forms, contacts and phone numbers you would need are collected in the Omaha short-term rental regulation guide.

Taxes are the part of Omaha that isn't light. Five separate charges land on a guest's bill inside the city:

Tax	Rate	Who imposes it
Nebraska state sales tax	5.5%	State of Nebraska
Omaha city sales tax	1.5%	City of Omaha
Nebraska state lodging tax	1.0%	State of Nebraska
Douglas County lodging tax	4.0%	Douglas County
Omaha Transient Rental Guest Tax	5.5%	City of Omaha

Rates verified against the Nebraska Department of Revenue's local sales and use tax table effective July 1, 2026, its county lodging tax chronology revised August 2026, and Article XV of the Omaha Municipal Code, all read in September 2026.

Those five add to 17.5%, but that understates it slightly, and the reason is a detail most summaries miss. The state's own guidance on short-term rentals says the sales and lodging tax base "includes any charges imposed by the retailer ... and any local occupation tax imposed by a municipality." So the city's 5.5% goes into the base the other four are charged on, and by my arithmetic a guest paying $200 in rent sees closer to 18.2% on top rather than 17.5%. All of it is charged to the guest, not deducted from what you earn, though each extra point does raise the number a guest sees at checkout.

Airbnb collects and remits all five on Omaha reservations of 29 nights or fewer, charging the city's 5.5% on the listing price including cleaning fees. That relieves you of collecting on those bookings, but only those. Nebraska's own guidance is blunt about the rest: on any sale a marketplace doesn't handle, the owner charges the tax and sends it in. A direct booking does that. So does a repeat guest who pays you off-platform, and so does a listing on a site that doesn't collect Nebraska tax. Check each platform's own tax page rather than assuming they behave alike. The state filing side, including which forms and how often, is covered in the Nebraska short-term rental tax guide.

How Do You Research the Omaha Short-Term Rental Market?

That guide handles the paperwork; the figures in this article came from BNBCalc Markets, which studies whole markets rather than single addresses. One thing it tracks that this article can only summarize is how a market performs day by day across the week, for each size of home. Since Omaha's weekend runs about 30% ahead of its weekdays, it's worth learning whether your own size follows that pattern or flattens it before you price a single night.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for an Omaha Property?

Everything above describes groups of houses, so a single address needs a couple of further moves before any of it is yours.

Begin at the Omaha market page. It carries where revenue, occupancy and seasonality stand right now. Still weighing Omaha against other Nebraska cities? The best Nebraska markets by gross yield puts every one of them in order. Once a real address is in front of you, run it through BNBCalc on the asking price, the loan terms you'd actually get and your real monthly costs, then test the answer it gives you against three things that are specific to this city.

Take June out of your own average first. It's the year's best month on both measures by a distance, and a model built on a twelve-month mean will quietly promise you a June every month. Second, check which government the parcel answers to before you check anything else, because Council Bluffs, Bellevue and Papillion each set their own requirements, none of them Omaha's, while unincorporated land within three miles of the city can still fall under Omaha's own code. And price the winter honestly: January and February together fill about a quarter of their nights at the cheapest rates of the year, and that's the stretch that decides whether the property carries itself or you do.

The broader lesson here isn't really about Omaha. Any market with one enormous month and a genuinely thin winter will look better on an annual average than it feels to own, and the only way to find out which one you're buying is to run the months separately and ask whether you could carry the worst two.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Average Airbnb Income in Omaha?

BNBCalc's 2026 data puts the middle in-city listing at $19,218 for the twelve months it covers, and the middle listing in the rest of the metro at $21,543. Both are medians, and a median lands under a plain average here because a handful of strong performers drag averages upward. Size does most of the work: in-city, the middle two-bedroom took $17,921, the middle three-bedroom $24,077 and the middle four-plus-bedroom $38,124.

Do You Need a License to Run an Airbnb in Omaha?

Not for an ordinary whole-home rental. Omaha Municipal Code Chapter 43, Article XI requires a license only for a bed and breakfast, defined as a single-family home run as a hotel that offers individual sleeping rooms and owner-provided meals to guests staying 30 days or less. A whole house or apartment rented to one party, with no meals served, falls outside that definition and needs no city license or registration. A bed and breakfast does, from the Permits and Inspections Division and the Omaha Fire Department, at $1,000 to apply and $150 a year plus $15 per sleeping room to renew.

Is Airbnb Still Profitable in Omaha in 2026?

It can be, provided the price works and you can absorb the winter. Set January through August 2026 beside the same stretch of 2025 and active listings were down about 2%, occupancy up about 2% and average nightly rates up about 27%, with most of the rate move concentrated in early summer. Any single house still answers to its purchase price, its monthly carrying costs and its size, since a four-plus-bedroom home here typically earns around three times what a one-bedroom does.

What Is the Best Month for Airbnb in Omaha?

June, by a distance. It reached 48% occupancy on a $418 average rate, topping every other month on both counts, with July second at 44% and $269. Omaha hosts the NCAA Men's College World Series each June, and the NCAA has it scheduled at Charles Schwab Field in every year it has announced dates for, through 2030. January is the low point, filling 25% of its nights at $177, with February close behind at the year's cheapest average rate.

Which Omaha Neighborhood Is Best for Short-Term Rentals?

It depends which trade you want. Near South posts the highest median at $30,964, and Little Italy follows at $27,483 with the best occupancy of any neighborhood here at 36%. Dundee-Memorial Park owns the table's strongest top quarter, which begins at $43,699, even though its median lands mid-table. Old Market charges the highest median rate, $312, on the lowest occupancy, 23%. All of those come out of BNBCalc's 2026 listing data, as medians and 75th percentiles measured within Omaha's registered neighborhood boundaries. They mix every size of listing together, so look at what a neighborhood's typical house is before you read its median as your own.

How Much Tax Does an Omaha Airbnb Guest Pay?

Five charges apply inside the city: Nebraska's 5.5% state sales tax, Omaha's 1.5% city sales tax, a 1% state lodging tax, a 4% Douglas County lodging tax and Omaha's own 5.5% Transient Rental Guest Tax. The nominal total is 17.5%, though Nebraska treats the city's occupation tax as part of the base the other four are charged on, which works out closer to 18.2%. Airbnb collects and remits all five on reservations of 29 nights or fewer; on any booking a marketplace doesn't facilitate, the owner collects and remits it.

Does Omaha's Rental Registration Program Cover Short-Term Rentals?

No. The registration and inspection program the city enacted in 2019 defines a rental dwelling as one occupied "for a duration longer than 30 days," so a property rented by the night sits outside it. That changes if you move the property into stays of longer than 30 days, which would bring it under the program's registration and inspection requirements.