Tucson, Arizona Airbnb Market Data 2026

How much does a Tucson Airbnb make, and does the figure you just read apply to the house you're looking at? The first half has a clean answer: the median listing across this whole market cleared about $17,990 in the twelve months ending August 2026, at $188 a night. The second half is where Tucson gets interesting, because the market that carries the city's name is mostly not the City of Tucson. Fewer than half of its listings stand inside the city limits. The others run north into Oro Valley and Marana, east through Tanque Verde, up Mount Lemmon to Summerhaven, and well past Pima County into Cochise and Santa Cruz.

That boundary started mattering a great deal more this year. Since 1 March 2026 the City of Tucson has taxed short-term rentals at 10% under a class it wrote for them, a full point above what a downtown hotel room now pays and four points above the unincorporated county that begins at the end of some of those same streets. Arizona law stops any city from banning you outright, and Tucson never built a short-term rental permit, so money is the whole question here in a way it isn't in Scottsdale or Sedona.

One thing to keep in mind before the numbers start. Everything I've cut below is a median, and Tucson's averages sit well above its medians because a handful of very large foothills homes drag them upward. If you're underwriting a two-bedroom, the median is the figure that describes you.

How Much Do Tucson Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Take the market as a whole first. Its median listing cleared roughly $17,990 across the year to August 2026, at a median rate of $188 a night and 28% occupancy. The top quartile opens around $26,600, so one listing in four clears that and three in four don't.

Size is what separates them, though not in the way most people assume:

Bedrooms	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Studio	$11,182	$119	27%	$14,189
1	$12,972	$132	29%	$17,461
2	$16,322	$173	27%	$21,415
3	$22,645	$239	28%	$30,447
4+	$38,047	$382	29%	$56,133

Medians and 75th percentiles across every measurable listing in the Tucson market, BNBCalc market data, year ending August 2026.

A four-bedroom-or-larger home takes in roughly 2.9 times the median one-bedroom's revenue, and it charges roughly 2.9 times the nightly rate. Occupancy barely moves at all: every size sits between 27% and 29%. So a bigger house here doesn't sell more nights, it sells the same nights for more, which is worth knowing because occupancy is the lever you can pull later with better photos and smarter pricing, while rate is mostly settled the day you sign.

The last column deserves a moment of its own, because the distance between the median and the top quartile widens as the house gets bigger. A studio's upper quartile sits about $3,000 above its median. At four bedrooms and up, that gap runs closer to $18,000. Large homes in Tucson are a wider bet in both directions, which is manageable if you can absorb a soft year and painful if the mortgage assumes the top of the range.

Where the property sits moves the answer nearly as much as how big it is. Inside the Tucson city limits the median listing made about $16,600 on a $169 nightly rate, while outside them it made about $19,010 on $202. Occupancy runs the other way, a shade higher in town, which fits, since city listings are smaller and cheaper and fill more easily. The gap widens at the top end, where the upper quartile outside the city starts near $29,220 against $23,760 inside it.

Hosts running more than one listing account for a large share of this market, so your competition mostly isn't a neighbor who puts the casita up for rodeo week and forgets about it until next February. It's people who reprice every week.

Is the Tucson Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

Mildly, yes, and the pressure is showing up in occupancy rather than in price.

Market-wide, January to August 2026 against the same months of 2025	Change
Active listings	up about 7%
Occupancy	down about 6%
Nightly rate	up about 15%
Booking lead time	about 9% longer

BNBCalc market data, all Tucson-market listings. This market's stored monthly history changes definition partway through, so the only clean comparison runs January through August 2026 against January through August 2025, and those are the months above.

More listings, each one selling a slightly smaller slice of the year, while guests pay meaningfully more a night. That's a market absorbing new competition through price rather than through nights, and the stretching booking window says the same thing from another angle: people are locking in Tucson stays further ahead than they used to, which is what happens when the good dates get harder to find late.

Purchase prices did almost nothing. Measured across the year ending August 2026, the typical price paid for a home here landed within a point of where it had been, so nothing on the acquisition side offsets the occupancy slip.

Unfortunately the dip isn't somebody else's problem. If you're modeling a Tucson property on last year's fill rate, take a few points off, then check the result against the occupancy of listings you would realistically be bidding against rather than against the market as a whole. Make sure to look again in a few months, because a 6% move in one year is small enough to reverse and large enough to hurt if it doesn't.

When Is Tucson's Peak Airbnb Season?

February, and it isn't close.

Month	Occupancy	Average nightly rate
Sep 2025	22%	$177
Oct 2025	30%	$191
Nov 2025	34%	$212
Dec 2025	34%	$218
Jan 2026	41%	$235
Feb 2026	56%	$289
Mar 2026	51%	$260
Apr 2026	35%	$220
May 2026	29%	$210
Jun 2026	26%	$191
Jul 2026	28%	$191
Aug 2026	26%	$186

BNBCalc market data, all Tucson-market listings, the twelve months ending August 2026.

Occupancy and nightly rate top out together in February, which doesn't happen in every market and makes that one month worth more than its fill rate alone suggests. The Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase and the Fiesta de los Vaqueros rodeo both land inside that window, and the city treats them seriously enough to require special event business licenses for vendors working them. March holds most of the gain before April hands it back, and then summer turns the whole pattern over.

From June through September the market sits in the twenties on occupancy, with rates in the high $170s to low $190s, which is what a desert city looks like once the daytime high stops being a selling point. Winter listings in Tucson aren't chasing the same guest as summer listings, so a pro forma built on a flat year carries an error of about thirty occupancy points between February and August.

Within the week, Saturday is the busiest night, running about 16% above the weekly average on occupancy, while Tuesday runs about 12% below it. Friday carries the highest rate, roughly 10% above the weekly average, with Saturday a hair behind. Since a Tuesday costs you twice over, on price and on the odds of selling it at all, that's the night a two-night minimum quietly throws away.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Tucson?

Because most of this market sits outside the city, start with the municipalities and settlements rather than with neighborhoods. Here is each place this market reaches that carries enough measurable listings to rank:

Place	County	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Vail	Pima	$29,564	$293	28%	$37,101
Summerhaven	Pima	$27,927	$223	35%	$38,092
Tanque Verde	Pima	$26,841	$271	30%	$50,986
Oro Valley	Pima	$23,603	$274	27%	$32,888
Rio Rico	Santa Cruz	$23,128	$228	30%	$29,321
Sahuarita	Pima	$23,036	$230	29%	$28,107
Marana	Pima	$23,033	$285	27%	$35,689
Corona de Tucson	Pima	$22,936	$214	30%	$27,743
Tucson Mountains	Pima	$22,132	$231	29%	$39,276
Sierra Vista Southeast	Cochise	$21,274	$196	31%	$29,632
Catalina Foothills	Pima	$20,198	$228	27%	$44,935
Sierra Vista	Cochise	$19,444	$170	32%	$23,925
Casas Adobes	Pima	$19,305	$219	27%	$29,153
Sonoita	Santa Cruz	$17,254	$190	26%	$19,402
Tombstone	Cochise	$16,678	$195	26%	$22,213
Tucson (city)	Pima	$16,601	$169	29%	$23,757
Patagonia	Santa Cruz	$16,571	$183	28%	$20,228
Bisbee	Cochise	$16,292	$173	26%	$21,636
Drexel Heights	Pima	$16,178	$189	29%	$23,159
Tubac	Santa Cruz	$16,047	$196	24%	$22,013
Catalina	Pima	$14,185	$151	28%	$20,501
Tucson Estates	Pima	$13,956	$157	27%	$22,181
Flowing Wells	Pima	$13,286	$181	29%	$18,524
Picture Rocks	Pima	$12,091	$132	26%	$16,743
Ajo	Pima	$10,904	$130	27%	$14,168
Green Valley	Pima	$10,154	$134	26%	$14,894
Nogales	Santa Cruz	$7,826	$68	25%	$14,970

Incorporated places and Census designated places across the four counties this market reaches, BNBCalc market data, year ending August 2026. Rows near the ten-listing floor are thin and will move between refreshes.

Read the last column before the first one. Catalina Foothills sits mid-table on its median, yet on its top quartile it ranks second in Pima County, so the upside there is real even though the typical listing never reaches it, usually because that typical listing is a nice house competing against several spectacular ones. Tanque Verde does the same thing more emphatically. Summerhaven, up on Mount Lemmon, is the one place in the county whose occupancy beats everywhere else outright, because a cabin in the pines sells the summer that the valley floor cannot.

The southeastern end of this market is a different proposition again, because roughly 15% of these listings sit in Cochise or Santa Cruz County: Sierra Vista and Bisbee to the southeast, then Tubac, Patagonia, Sonoita and Nogales down toward the border. Median revenue in both of those counties runs below Pima's, near $17,230 in Cochise and $16,530 in Santa Cruz against $18,290 in Pima, and they're separate towns with separate rules and separate tax rates besides. So treat a comparable pulled from down there carefully before you price a foothills house off it.

Inside the city, the registered neighborhood associations rank like this:

City of Tucson neighborhood	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
South Harrison	$27,829	$265	28%	$30,830
Rita Ranch	$23,916	$245	30%	$30,436
Miramonte	$22,314	$204	31%	$32,379
Sam Hughes	$20,979	$212	29%	$32,090
Arroyo Chico	$20,733	$179	29%	$26,830
Armory Park	$19,618	$198	31%	$28,384
Cabrini	$18,819	$165	30%	$22,293
Barrio Viejo	$18,685	$191	27%	$24,327
Jefferson Park	$18,353	$149	31%	$23,601
Iron Horse	$18,104	$150	41%	$35,808
Mountain View	$17,480	$137	33%	$22,893
Palo Verde Park	$17,316	$223	24%	$26,626
Pio Decimo	$17,161	$177	28%	$20,323
Palo Verde	$17,155	$160	34%	$20,429
Catalina Vista	$17,125	$158	32%	$21,613

The fifteen City of Tucson registered neighborhood associations with the highest median revenue, drawn from the city's own polygons. That's a different boundary source from the table before it, so the two never merge into one ranking.

Iron Horse is the row to stare at. It runs the highest occupancy of any neighborhood in the city on one of the lower nightly rates, and it still lands a top quartile above $35,000, which is the signature of a small walkable pocket where the rooms are modest and demand is constant. Sam Hughes, beside the university, arrives at a similar place from the opposite direction, giving up a dozen points of occupancy for a nightly rate more than $60 higher. Downtown, meanwhile, comes in around $13,560 on a $111 median rate, well down the list, so if you've read that downtown Tucson is the obvious place to buy, the listing data hasn't agreed for a while. For the character of each pocket and who it suits, our guide to the best Tucson neighborhoods for an Airbnb does that job properly.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Tucson?

A hot tub, by a wider margin than you'd expect somewhere this warm. BNBCalc's amenity model publishes exactly one Tucson figure in the open right now, and it puts a hot tub at about 17% more revenue. The same run scores a hot tub in Phoenix at about 11%, so the premium here is half again as large as it is two hours up the interstate, which is roughly what you'd expect where guests come for trailheads and cold desert nights rather than for a pool deck. Our Phoenix market data carries that market's own version of this.

Several other amenities register a real signal in Tucson, but their values sit inside BNBCalc Markets instead of on the public page: a television, a pets-allowed policy, lake access, a pool, a sauna, a barbecue and an EV charger. Rather than invent figures for them, I've given you the names and left the numbers where they live. The model also sets aside the fixtures nearly every Tucson listing already carries, which is sensible enough, since something universal tells you nothing about why one property beats another.

Then there's the cleaning fee, which is a bigger lever than any single amenity. Fewer than half of Tucson's listings charge one at all, and among those that do the median is $100, more than half a night at the market's median rate. It scales with the house: roughly $60 on a studio, $65 on a one-bedroom, $150 on a three-bedroom and $200 at four bedrooms or more. Stack that on your nightly rate and then on the tax below, and the number your guest sees at checkout sits a long way from the number you set. If you're going to charge one, find out first whether the listings you compete with are charging nothing.

Is Airbnb Legal in Tucson?

Yes, and there's no separate permit to chase. A.R.S. § 9-500.39 forbids any Arizona city or town from prohibiting vacation rentals, then hands cities a short list of things they may do instead, including requiring a local permit, mandating $500,000 of liability insurance and making you notify the neighbors. Those are powers rather than obligations, and Tucson has picked up almost none of them. The city's own business licensing page sends you to Chapter 19 of the code for privilege taxes, occupational taxes and business licenses, and to Chapter 7 for regulated businesses. Follow the first of those and you'll find no short-term rental permit in it, no occupancy cap and no insurance mandate, while the page itself names no vacation rental license of any kind.

What Tucson did instead was tax. Under Tucson Code § 19-1, a "hotel" is any structure occupied by transients, and a transient is anyone staying fewer than thirty consecutive days, so your house has sat inside the city's lodging tax net all along. Then, on 16 December 2025, the Mayor and Council passed two ordinances, both effective 1 March 2026. The first, Ordinance 12215, added a definition of a "vacation or short-term rental" and set its tax rate at 10%, while Ordinance 12218 lifted the hotel rate from 6% to 9% and cut the old $4-a-night bed surtax to zero. Which leaves Tucson somewhere genuinely odd, and it's worth saying plainly: a short-term rental here is now taxed a point above an actual hotel room.

Here's what a guest's bill carries today:

Charge	Rate	Who sets it
Transient, non-hotel short-term rental	10.00%	City of Tucson
Transient lodging, state and county combined	6.05%	Arizona and Pima County
Total inside the city limits	16.05%

Arizona Department of Revenue rate tables effective 1 September and 1 October 2026, business codes 544 and 025.

All of it lands on what the guest pays rather than on what you keep, so it doesn't reduce your take. What it does is raise what a guest pays for the same nightly rate, and that's why the city line matters to pricing. Unincorporated Pima County levies 6% where Tucson levies 10%, which puts an identical booking at 12.05% a mile outside the boundary, while Oro Valley and Marana land at 14.55%. Our Arizona short-term rental tax guide covers how the filing works, and if you're shopping the foothills or Tanque Verde rather than the city proper, the Pima County guide is the one that applies to you.

On the paperwork itself, Tucson Code § 19-67 gives you thirty days from the day you start renting to register with the city's director of finance, and the transient rental tax license you're issued has to stay posted somewhere conspicuous on the property. The state's transaction privilege tax license comes first, issued by the Arizona Department of Revenue before you collect a dollar. Our Tucson short-term rental regulation guide takes those registrations in order and tracks the council as this moves.

Where Do These Tucson Airbnb Numbers Come From?

That guide handles the licenses and the filing calendar. Measuring is separate work, done inside BNBCalc Markets, which exists to study a market in full rather than one house at a time, and which produced every figure printed above. In US markets where the data supports it, Markets will also sort local postal codes by gross yield, floating the parts of town that return the most for what a home there costs. In a market as far-flung as this one, that sort settles what an article can't: whether Tucson's money is in its expensive corners or its cheap ones.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a Tucson Property?

Three steps, in this order. Open the Tucson market page for current occupancy, rate and revenue levels, since those refresh as new months land and anything written into an article ages. Then pull up Arizona's markets ranked by gross yield to see how Tucson stands against Phoenix, Flagstaff and Sedona once a year of earnings is set beside the price of the house. Then put the address itself through BNBCalc with your own purchase price, financing and expenses, because no market median can tell you whether one specific property clears its mortgage.

Three Tucson-specific thresholds are worth writing into the model before you start. Budget occupancy in the twenties for June through September and don't average the year, because a flat annual assumption hides the shape of this market entirely. Work out which side of the boundary your parcel falls on, since that's a four-point swing on what the guest pays, and it shows up in your conversion rate rather than in your revenue line. And read the CC&Rs before anything else, because the state statute constrains cities and towns, not homeowners associations, and a covenant can forbid stays under thirty days on a property the city would license without blinking.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an Airbnb make in Tucson, Arizona?

The median Tucson-market listing took in about $17,990 in the twelve months ending August 2026, on a median rate of $188 a night and median occupancy of 28%. By size, medians run about $12,970 for a one-bedroom, $16,320 for a two-bedroom, $22,650 for a three-bedroom and $38,050 for four bedrooms or more. A quarter of listings clear roughly $26,600. Figures are BNBCalc market data as of September 2026.

Do you need a permit to run an Airbnb in Tucson?

No. Tucson has no dedicated short-term rental permit, and Arizona law under A.R.S. § 9-500.39 bars the city from banning short-term rentals outright. You do need the state's transaction privilege tax license, issued by the Arizona Department of Revenue, plus registration with the city's director of finance within thirty days of starting to rent, under Tucson Code § 19-67. The transient rental tax license you're issued has to stay posted on the property.

How much tax do you pay on a Tucson short-term rental?

It comes to 16.05% inside the Tucson city limits. The city charges 10% under a "transient, non-hotel short-term rental" class created by Ordinance 12215 and effective 1 March 2026, and Arizona plus Pima County add 6.05% through the same return. Unincorporated Pima County levies 6% rather than the city's 10%, so an identical booking carries 12.05% outside the boundary. The tax is collected from the guest.

When is the busiest season for Airbnbs in Tucson?

February. Occupancy reached 56% and the average nightly rate $289 in February 2026, both the highest of the twelve months ending August 2026, helped along by the Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase and the Fiesta de los Vaqueros rodeo. March stays strong at 51%. From June through September occupancy sits in the twenties and rates fall to the high $170s and low $190s, so a Tucson model built on an annual average will be wrong in both directions.

Which areas around Tucson earn the most on Airbnb?

By median annual revenue for the year ending August 2026, the strongest places are Vail at about $29,560, Summerhaven at $27,930 and Tanque Verde at $26,840, against about $16,600 inside the Tucson city limits. Tanque Verde and Catalina Foothills carry the fattest top quartiles, near $50,990 and $44,940, which means the ceiling in those two is much higher than the typical listing there reaches.

Is Tucson a good market for short-term rentals?

It depends on what you're buying and where. Listings grew about 7% between January and August 2026 while occupancy fell about 6% and nightly rates rose about 15%, so competition is building and the market is clearing on price. Home prices were roughly flat over the same stretch. The bigger consideration is geography: more than half this market sits outside the city, where the median is higher and the lodging tax is four points lower.

Which is the real lesson underneath all of it. A market name is a container somebody drew on a map, and the further the container stretches, the less its average describes anything you could actually buy. Find the boundary that changes your tax bill, your competition or your guest, and measure inside that instead.