Tulsa, Oklahoma Airbnb Market Data 2026

Buy a house in Tulsa, Oklahoma, put it on Airbnb, and you've joined a market that is only about half Tulsa. Roughly 54% of what it counts falls inside the Tulsa city limits. The rest run out through Broken Arrow, Jenks and Owasso, and then keep going, 45 to 70 miles southeast, into the lake communities around Eufaula and Tenkiller where a cabin books the way a holiday house books rather than the way a city rental does.

That split is the reason a market-wide average is such an awkward thing to plan against here, and it's also why the legal answer moves with the address. Inside Tulsa the rule that decides everything is a license: the city won't let you advertise or offer a stay of under 30 days until it has issued one, it runs $375 a year, and it expires every June 30 whatever month you bought the place. Drive an hour southeast to the lake and that ordinance doesn't reach you at all.

So the useful way to read this market is one half at a time. What follows is what the middle listing takes in, where the money sits, when the calendar fills, and what the city wants from you before your first booking.

How Much Do Tulsa Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Take every listing in the market that's properly in business, and the middle one brought in $21,321 over the past twelve months, with a median nightly rate of $198. Split it at the city line and the two halves separate: inside Tulsa the middle listing earned $20,068 at $184 a night, while outside the city limits it earned $22,625 at $213. Step up to the top quartile and the gap widens again, to roughly $28,300 inside the city against $33,800 outside it.

Those are medians, and that matters more in Tulsa than in most markets. The mean sits about a quarter above the median, and only around a third of listings clear it, because a handful of large lake houses drag the average upward and leave most owners looking at a number they'll never see. Whenever you read an average for this market, including the ones on this page, keep that shape in mind.

It's worth seeing the whole spread and not just its middle. One listing in ten finished the year under about $11,700, while one in ten cleared about $47,300, and the bottom quarter of the market came in below roughly $15,600. That's a four-to-one distance between a poor year and a good one inside a single metro, and very little of it is explained by which city you picked. It's the house, the fit-out and whoever runs it. Keep in mind that the bottom of that range isn't a rounding error either, because a property taking $11,700 a year isn't covering a mortgage anywhere in this market.

Size is the other lever, and it's a blunt one. Median annual revenue runs near $13,400 for a one-bedroom, $18,408 for a two-bedroom, $22,745 for a three-bedroom and $37,134 once you're at four bedrooms or more, so moving from three bedrooms up to four adds more revenue than the entire climb from one bedroom to three. Studios are the odd group out, since the middle one takes in about $13,994, a shade more than the middle one-bedroom on a slightly lower nightly rate, though there are few enough of them that I wouldn't build a thesis on it.

Now split those bedroom medians at the city line, because the earlier city-versus-lake gap turns out to be almost entirely a big-house story. A two-bedroom outside the limits earns about 5% more than a two-bedroom inside them, and a three-bedroom about 3% more, which is close enough to call a wash once you've priced in the driving. At four bedrooms and up the gap jumps to roughly 18%, since that's the size the lake rents at and the size a midtown block rarely offers. So if you're buying a one or two-bedroom, a Tulsa address costs you very little. If you're buying something big, the two halves of this market really are separate businesses, and you'll want to underwrite them separately.

Purchase prices moved far less than rates did. Median home values across the market rose about 3% in the year ending August 2026, so the earnings side of the ratio did most of the work. If you want to see how that lands against every other Oklahoma market, the state ranking page orders them by gross yield, which sets a year of bookings against what the house costs.

Is the Tulsa Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

Mildly, and only on one measure. Comparing January through August 2026 with the same months of 2025, this is how the market moved:

Measure	Change, Jan to Aug 2026 vs Jan to Aug 2025
Active listings	about +13%
Nightly rate	about +15%
Occupancy	about −3%

Those eight months are the comparison BNBCalc's own series supports cleanly for Tulsa, so they're the ones I'm quoting rather than a full year.

More competitors arrived and each of them booked slightly fewer nights, which is what crowding looks like early on. But it's a small slip set against a rate rise several times its size, so anyone who held their pricing nerve came out ahead of where they started.

Read that as a market taking on fresh competition without buckling under it. The thing to keep an eye on is your own patch: pull the occupancy of the ten or fifteen listings nearest yours in size and setting, write it down, and look again in three months. If those listings are filling fewer nights while more of them appear around you, that's the signal that matters, and your own street will register it months ahead of anything published market-wide.

When Is Tulsa's Peak Airbnb Season?

Summer, and the run is short. Here's how 2026 has gone month by month:

Month (2026)	Occupancy	Nightly rate
January	28%	$193
February	23%	$177
March	35%	$216
April	37%	$210
May	41%	$251
June	46%	$266
July	47%	$284
August	37%	$246

June and July are the two months doing the heavy lifting, and July is where nightly rates top out at $284, about 60% above February's $177. February is the floor on both measures, which is worth remembering if you're modeling a purchase that closes in the fall: your first full quarter as an owner will be the worst one of the year, and plenty of new hosts read that as a broken listing rather than a normal January.

The week has its own shape, and it's steeper than the calendar's. Saturday and Friday nights run about a third above an average night on occupancy and close to a fifth above on price, while Monday and Tuesday sit about a quarter below on occupancy and around a tenth below on price. A Tulsa rental that fills its weekends and sits dark midweek is behaving exactly as the market does, so don't over-correct for it. The lever that moves midweek is length of stay rather than price, since a Thursday-to-Sunday guest pays for the Thursday.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Tulsa?

That weekend-heavy pattern gets more extreme the further you get from the city, which brings us back to the split at the top. Because only about 54% of this market sits in Tulsa proper, and about 14% of it sits in unincorporated county land with no municipality at all, the honest way to rank it is by community first and by neighborhood second.

So, the communities. Here's every one of them carrying enough measurable listings to stand up to a median, ranked by what its middle property takes in:

Community	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Carlton Landing	$47,601	$540	26%	$62,168
Texanna	$31,775	$310	28%	$40,940
Broken Arrow	$24,170	$220	31%	$33,162
Jenks	$23,448	$270	32%	$34,564
Eufaula	$20,436	$209	29%	$26,629
Tulsa	$20,068	$184	31%	$28,254
Bixby	$20,056	$187	28%	$27,772
Owasso	$19,893	$188	35%	$24,178
Longtown	$18,265	$179	28%	$35,664
Tahlequah	$17,482	$165	31%	$28,180
Muskogee	$17,404	$145	37%	$26,698
Cookson	$14,089	$123	31%	$16,637

Median revenue, nightly rate and occupancy over the twelve months to August 2026, plus the 75th percentile of annual revenue, from BNBCalc market data pulled 24 September 2026, with each community drawn from the US Census list of incorporated places and census designated places, and with the thinnest rows likely to move between refreshes.

The top of that table is a lake, not a city. That first row, Carlton Landing, is a planned resort town on Lake Eufaula about 69 miles from downtown Tulsa, and its middle listing earns more than twice what the middle Tulsa listing earns, on nearly three times the nightly rate at lower occupancy. Further down, Texanna, Longtown and Cookson tell the same story in smaller print. Unfortunately for anyone hoping that's a loophole, it isn't a Tulsa strategy at all: it's lake-house investing, with lake-house seasonality, lake-house insurance and an hour-plus drive each way every time a cleaner cancels.

Closer in, Broken Arrow and Jenks both clear the Tulsa median on revenue and rate, and Jenks does it at higher occupancy too. Owasso and Muskogee run the other way, filling more nights for slightly less money, and Muskogee does it on the second-cheapest nightly rate in the table. Keep in mind that every one of those suburbs sets its own rules on short-term rentals, which means a Broken Arrow property answers to Broken Arrow's ordinance and not to anything Tulsa ever passed.

Inside the city, the picture tightens considerably:

Tulsa neighborhood	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	Top-quartile revenue
Maple Ridge	$33,578	$327	32%	$40,731
Holliday Hills	$28,850	$226	32%	$31,790
Swan Lake	$20,581	$187	31%	$24,793
Terrace Drive	$20,452	$162	30%	$28,772
Turner Park	$20,405	$178	32%	$26,446
Mayo Meadow	$20,268	$212	29%	$27,178
Drillers Landing	$19,966	$174	28%	$21,010
Kendall-Whittier South	$19,179	$149	33%	$27,259
Renaissance	$18,646	$175	34%	$25,244
Cherry Street	$18,631	$221	29%	$25,113
Melrose Place	$18,112	$171	29%	$25,208
Riverview	$17,969	$149	32%	$21,919
Fair Heights	$17,845	$168	34%	$26,226
Crosbie Heights	$16,880	$157	28%	$19,170
Owen Park	$16,221	$152	32%	$47,250
Sunrise Terrace	$15,523	$174	27%	$21,809
Midland Neighbors	$13,036	$151	28%	$17,558

Same window and the same listing data, but a different boundary source: the City of Tulsa's own neighborhood polygons rather than Census places, so the two tables measure different things and shouldn't be read as one ranking. That city layer is a register of neighborhood associations rather than a map of Tulsa, which means some parts of the city have no polygon and get no row here.

Maple Ridge is the only in-city name that earns like a lake property, and it does it the expensive way, on a nightly rate the rest of the city can't charge. Below it and Holliday Hills the spread is narrow enough that the neighborhood you pick matters less than the house you pick inside it, since the whole distance from the next row down to the bottom one is smaller than what a fourth bedroom adds to a three-bedroom anywhere in Tulsa. If you want the feel of these places instead of their arithmetic, the Tulsa neighborhood guide sorts out who each one suits.

One more thing worth reading off those tables. Anyone running more than one listing counts as a professional host, and professional hosts hold a large share here. You can read their weight off any row where the median sits low while the 75th percentile sits far above it: Owen Park's middle listing earns $16,221 while its top quarter starts at $47,250. That distance is usually a few well-run properties pulling away from a long tail of casual ones, and hiring a Tulsa management company is how most out-of-state owners end up on the better side of it.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Tulsa?

Taken across the whole market, the answer is a pool at +20%, measured in September 2026. That's a real number and a modest one, and against a $20,068 median inside the city a pool is a slow thing to pay back.

The trouble with that market-wide figure is that it describes a house you might not be buying, because the winner changes once you ask the same question one bedroom count at a time. At one bedroom the top amenity is a hot tub at +18%, and at two bedrooms it's a hot tub again at +16%, so the pool leads neither of the small sizes and only takes over from three bedrooms up, where it's worth +25% for a three-bedroom and +23% at four or more. That makes the market-wide figure the large-house answer wearing everyone else's name, which squares with everything above about where this market keeps its large houses. Studios are close to a blank: nothing registers at that size beyond a barbecue at +1%, which is another way of saying the amenity lever barely exists down there.

Beneath whichever amenity leads, a longer run of them registers a signal without a published figure, and the roll call is telling by itself: parking, a gym, bicycles, a sauna, lake access, a television and a charger for an electric car. Lake access registering at all is the detail worth noticing, because an amenity only reaches that list when enough listings carry it and enough guests pay for it, and lakefront isn't something a house in midtown Tulsa can offer.

Amenities that are close to universal never enter the model at all, and that's deliberate, since a fixture that sits in every listing can't tell you which of them wins a booking. That's a measurement decision rather than advice, so please don't read a missing basic as permission to skip it. Guests won't pay extra for a working kitchen, though they'll certainly punish you for a bad one.

What that leaves you with is a rule of thumb the pooled number would've talked you out of. Buying small and in the city? The hot tub is the bet the data supports, and it's the cheaper one to install and insure anyway. Buying big, and probably further out? Then the pool earns its keep. Either way, price the fit-out against your own median rather than the market's, because a pool that pays back in Carlton Landing may never pay back in Riverview.

Is Airbnb Legal in Tulsa?

Yes, and the zoning question that dominates most cities barely exists here, because Tulsa's council added short-term rentals to the use tables of its residential, mixed-use, commercial and agricultural districts back in March 2020, and the city's own guidance now says plainly that short-term rentals are allowed in all zoning districts. So you get no special exception hearing, no cap per block and no residency test.

The gate is the license instead. Under Title 21, Chapter 26 of the Tulsa Revised Ordinances, no dwelling may be "rented, advertised or offered for rent as a short-term rental" until the city has issued a license to the operator, and that applies whether you plan to host all year or one weekend. The fee is $75 for the license plus a $300 implementation and compliance fee, so $375 in total, and the license expires on June 30 every year regardless of when you applied. It doesn't renew itself, and it doesn't transfer, so selling the house means the buyer applies again from scratch.

A few operating rules come with it, and they're the ones that get people caught. Occupancy is capped at eight people whatever the size of the house, while your license number belongs on every advertisement you run and the license itself has to hang near the front door. On top of that you need a local contact the city can reach at any hour, and once contacted, that person has to reach you inside the hour. Three instances of non-compliance inside twelve consecutive months can cost you the license, with an appeal to the City Council if you file within ten days.

On penalties, the enacted chapter and the city's public guidance don't quite line up, so it's worth knowing both. The ordinance text sets a fine of up to $250 for a first offense and up to $500 for later ones, with each day counting as a separate offense, whereas the page the city publishes for hosts quotes a $1,200 ceiling per violation across the short-term rental ordinances as a whole, on top of civil penalties that can run to $1,000 for every day it continues. Either way the daily accrual is the part that bites, and the city runs a 24-hour complaint hotline specifically so neighbors can start the clock.

Two prohibitions sit further down the chapter, and they catch people who stopped reading at the fee. Parties, meetings, receptions and gatherings of any kind are expressly prohibited at a licensed short-term rental, so the "we'll host a small wedding" business doesn't exist here. And every unit gets its own license, so a duplex, or a garage apartment behind the main house, can't ride on the one you already hold. Fees are non-refundable if you change your mind. The city has also hired a compliance monitoring company to find unlicensed listings and track them, and every licensed property is on a public map, so the odds of quietly operating outside the system are worse than they look.

Tax arrives in four layers, and your own pocket funds none of them. Oklahoma charges 4.5% state sales tax, Tulsa adds 3.65%, and Tulsa County adds 0.367%, for 8.517% combined on a stay inside the county, as of the Oklahoma Tax Commission's chart effective 1 October 2026. On top of that the city levies a separate 5% lodging tax that the guest pays and the operator collects, though only where the unit has five or more rooms in total, counting bathrooms, the kitchen and the dining room rather than bedrooms alone. You file that one monthly, it falls due at the close of the following month, and getting it in by the 15th earns a 3% discount.

Tulsa's city limits reach into two neighboring counties, and the state's chart carries a separate Tulsa row under each: a stay on the Osage County side runs 9.4% in sales tax and one on the Wagoner County side 9.7%, both above the 8.517% you'd pay in Tulsa County proper. Further out, the rates stop resembling Tulsa's at all, since Eufaula charges 9% in lodging tax, Sand Springs 7% and Tahlequah 4%. For who collects each layer and who files it, we have an Oklahoma tax guide for short-term rentals, and the Tulsa regulation guide carries the application, the contacts and the deadlines in full.

Where Does This Tulsa Airbnb Data Come From?

While that guide tracks the ordinances, the earnings and seasonality here were built on BNBCalc Markets, where BNBCalc weighs up a market in full before anyone costs out a single address inside it. One figure it keeps for every market is the booking window, meaning how long before arrival a typical reservation lands. That's what I'd check before I set a minimum stay or wrote a rule for last-minute discounts in a February like Tulsa's, since it tells you which date your calendar ought to be half full by, and you want to discount on a date rather than on a nerve.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a Tulsa Property?

Every figure here describes a market, and you're buying a single house inside it, so treat all of it as backdrop rather than forecast.

Start with the size and the side of the line: a three-bedroom inside the city has a different middle outcome entirely from a three-bedroom on Lake Eufaula, and the medians in this article are the ones I'd anchor on rather than any average. Then check the current position on the Tulsa market page, which carries this year's occupancy and rate curve. Then price the house itself, putting your purchase price, loan terms, the $375 license, cleaning, insurance and management if you're not local through BNBCalc.

Make sure to model February, not July. A Tulsa property that works on a February at 23% occupancy works all year, and one that only works in June is one bad summer away from a problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an Airbnb make in Tulsa, Oklahoma?

Measured to the end of August 2026, the median Tulsa listing took in $21,321 at a median $198 a night. Inside the Tulsa city limits the median falls to $20,068, and outside them it rises to $22,625, because the market includes lake communities 45 to 70 miles away that charge far more per night. Median revenue by size runs from about $13,400 for a one-bedroom to $37,134 for a four-bedroom or larger.

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

Yes. Tulsa's Title 21, Chapter 26 requires a city short-term rental license before a dwelling is rented, advertised or offered for any stay under 30 days, with no grace period and no exemption for occasional hosting. The cost is $375 a year, made up of a $75 license fee and a $300 implementation and compliance fee, and every license expires on June 30 regardless of the application date. Renewal has to be started by the license holder.

Does the Tulsa license apply outside the city limits?

No. Title 21, Chapter 26 is City of Tulsa code, so it reaches addresses inside Tulsa's limits and nowhere else. That matters because barely half this market's listings sit inside those limits: Broken Arrow, Jenks, Owasso, Bixby and the lake towns each write their own rules, and roughly 14% of the market sits on unincorporated county land no city ordinance reaches. So check the rules that govern the exact address, not the ones that govern the metro, and check them before you make an offer.

Are short-term rentals allowed in residential neighborhoods in Tulsa?

Yes. Tulsa amended its zoning code in March 2020 to add short-term rental as a use in residential, mixed-use, commercial and agricultural districts, and the city states that short-term rentals are allowed in all zoning districts. No special exception hearing is needed. A traditional bed and breakfast is a separate use category with its own approval path, and private covenants still bind, since city code officers can't enforce a neighborhood association's rules.

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

A guest staying inside Tulsa County pays 8.517% combined sales tax, made up of 4.5% state, 3.65% city and 0.367% county, plus a separate 5% City of Tulsa lodging tax. Those are charges on the guest's bill that the operator collects and remits, not deductions from what the property earns. The county portion changes where Tulsa's limits reach into Osage or Wagoner County, taking the sales tax to 9.4% and 9.7% respectively, and the lodging tax applies only to units with five or more rooms in total. Stays of 30 consecutive days or more are exempt from lodging tax.

How many guests can stay in a Tulsa short-term rental?

Eight, at any one time, regardless of the size of the unit. The cap is written into the ordinance's definitions and repeated in the operator's responsibilities, and for an accessory-use rental the residents count toward it if they're present. Units are also bound by the square-footage occupancy limits in Title 55, Section 404, which can set a lower ceiling than eight for a smaller floor plan.

When is the best month to buy an Airbnb in Tulsa?

Whenever the numbers work, though it helps to know what you're walking into. A purchase closing in the fall hands you January and February first, and those are the weakest months of the Tulsa year on both occupancy and nightly rate. Buy in the spring and you get March through July, which flatters a first season and can teach you the wrong lesson about what the property does.

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Markets shaped like this one aren't rare, they're only rarely labeled. Any time a metro's data reaches an hour past its suburbs, the average stops describing anything anyone can buy, and the useful work is finding out where the line sits and which side of it you're standing on. Find that line first, and every number after it means something.