Dallas, Texas Airbnb Market Data 2026

How much does a Dallas Airbnb earn, and are you even allowed to run one?

Well, the money half has a quick answer: on BNBCalc's 2026 listing data, the middle listing inside Dallas city limits took in $24,294 across the last twelve months, while the middle listing across the whole Dallas market took in $26,876. The legal half is stranger, since Dallas adopted two short-term rental ordinances on June 14, 2023 and a court froze both on December 6, 2023, before either could bite. One would've kept short-term rentals out of single-family neighborhoods, whether they rent a whole house or part of one, while the other built a registration and inspection regime around them. The city hasn't managed to unfreeze them since, so you can host in Dallas today, in a house you've never lived in, on a block the zoning ordinance was written to close.

That market-wide figure matters because the Dallas market stretches far beyond the city limits. Only about three in ten listings BNBCalc can measure sit inside Dallas itself, while the rest are spread across Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Frisco, dozens of smaller cities and some county land outside any city, and several of those places enforce rules Dallas can't. So when I write "Dallas" I mean the city, and "the Dallas market" means everything BNBCalc measures around it. Keep in mind that nothing froze the tax either: Dallas charges 9% on every short-term stay inside the city, Texas adds 6%, and the city says in writing that no booking platform collects its share for you.

How Much Do Dallas Airbnbs Earn in 2026?

Start with the middle of the market. The median listing inside Dallas made $24,294 over the trailing twelve months, the median listing outside the city line made $28,179, and across the whole Dallas market the median came to $26,876, with the top quarter of listings starting at $40,857. Those are medians, drawn from BNBCalc's 2026 listing data, so a handful of very high earners can't inflate them as they would an average.

Break the market down by bedroom count and the striking thing isn't the steps between sizes, it's the spread inside them. The strongest one-bedrooms finish ahead of what a typical three-bedroom pulls in, which tells you size sets the ceiling while the address and the operator decide where inside that range a listing lands.

Switch to gross yield and the order flips. One-bedrooms return the most on what they cost and four-bedroom-plus homes the least, though only a couple of points separate them, while studios trail everything at roughly half the yield of the other sizes. So keep that in mind before stretching for a bigger house, because it earns more and ties up more of your money to do it.

That leaves the question of who you'd be competing with on price. A large share of listings across the Dallas market sit with professional hosts, which at this scale usually means management companies running homes for owners who live elsewhere. If handling turnovers yourself doesn't appeal, BNBCalc's roundup of Dallas property managers weighs up the local firms, although their fee comes out of the same revenue these figures describe.

Is the Dallas Airbnb Market Oversaturated?

Whether a listing reaches that top quarter depends partly on how many others are chasing the same guest, so the next fair question is whether this market holds too many listings. Dallas won't answer that one cleanly.

Metric	Year-over-year change
Average nightly rate	+18%
Purchase price	−1%
Booking lead time	Down
Occupancy	−3%

BNBCalc data across all listings BNBCalc tracks in the Dallas market, for September 2025 to August 2026 set against September 2024 to August 2025, with every change rounded. Booking lead time carries its direction without a figure, since the size of that move isn't settled. The count of active listings is left out because the two ways of measuring this year disagree on whether it rose or fell. Purchase price tracks home prices rather than listings. Each figure is calculated on its own, so they don't multiply together.

So I can't tell you whether the Dallas market is oversaturated, and I'd rather say so than guess, because the one number that would settle it for the market as a whole, the listing count, points up on one reading of the year and down on the other.

What the year does show is a market charging more per night and filling slightly fewer of them. Average nightly rates across the Dallas market ran about 18% higher than a year earlier while occupancy gave back about 3%, and before you read the first of those as demand catching fire, remember what came to town. AT&T Stadium in Arlington hosted nine FIFA World Cup matches between June 14 and a semi-final on July 14, 2026, under the name Dallas Stadium, and both of those months fall inside the year that 18% is measured over. So a rate jump that size, in a year like that, isn't one I'd carry into next year's budget.

Bookings are also landing closer to the stay than a year earlier, though the table only gives that move a direction. The level is easier to pin down, since across the latest twelve months the average booking landed about 27 days before check-in, so don't set a minimum-notice rule or an early-bird price that shuts out someone deciding four weeks ahead.

How do you tell whether you're walking into a crowd, then? Track occupancy on the homes you'd be up against, the same size in the same corner of the market, and look again every few months. That's the reading that matters for your house even in a year when the market-wide count is clean, since a house added in Frisco isn't taking bookings from a condo downtown.

When Is Dallas's Peak Airbnb Season?

That check gets easier once you know what an ordinary month in the Dallas market looks like, and the honest answer is that most of them look alike.

Month	Occupancy	Avg nightly rate
Sep 2025	32%	$229
Oct 2025	38%	$248
Nov 2025	37%	$260
Dec 2025	35%	$253
Jan 2026	32%	$218
Feb 2026	31%	$213
Mar 2026	39%	$248
Apr 2026	39%	$241
May 2026	39%	$262
Jun 2026	43%	$379
Jul 2026	40%	$340
Aug 2026	34%	$250

BNBCalc market data across all listings in the Dallas market, one row per month for September 2025 through August 2026. Each figure is calculated on its own, so they don't multiply together.

Occupancy barely moves, with every month landing between 31% and 43%, so there's no stretch of the year when the calendar fills itself. Nightly rates move more, yet only two months clear $300 a night, June at $379 and July at $340, while every other month tops out at $262. So the Dallas market doesn't really have a peak season. What it had this year was a tournament, and June's rate sits about 44% above that $262 ceiling.

The floor is easier to plan around. January and February brought the year's cheapest nights, at $218 and $213, with occupancy at 32% and 31%, so make sure the winter part of your plan isn't built off the year's average rate, because that overshoots what those two months hand you.

The market's week is far less even than its calendar. Saturday nights fill about a third more often than the average night and Fridays a little over a quarter more, while Mondays and Tuesdays fill about a fifth less, and nightly rates trace that curve too, with roughly half the swing, about 18% above the average on Saturday and 17% on Friday. That gap between Saturday and Tuesday is wider than the gap between the busiest month and the quietest, so if there's one pricing rule you fix here, fix the weekend.

Where Should You Buy an Airbnb in Dallas?

Pricing well pays off more once the home is in the right place, and in this market choosing the place means choosing a city first. Most of the listings BNBCalc measures sit outside Dallas, so I've ranked the places holding the deepest pools of listings by what the middle listing earns.

Rank	City	Median annual revenue	Median nightly rate	Median occupancy	75th-percentile revenue
1	Grand Prairie	$37,298	$365	30%	$56,986
2	Plano	$34,135	$305	33%	$52,246
3	Richardson	$31,030	$293	34%	$50,281
4	Irving	$30,003	$277	31%	$44,973
5	Frisco	$29,253	$277	31%	$41,842
6	The Colony	$29,140	$294	31%	$48,424
7	McKinney	$28,670	$265	31%	$36,503
8	Fort Worth	$26,219	$232	31%	$35,574
9	Dallas	$24,294	$224	31%	$37,764
10	Arlington	$23,615	$260	28%	$41,749
11	Denton	$22,917	$228	31%	$33,493
12	Tyler	$21,011	$204	30%	$27,463

BNBCalc 2026 listing data inside US Census place boundaries, trailing twelve months, for the places in this market holding the deepest pools of listings. Revenue, rate and occupancy are medians, while the last column is the 75th percentile, where a place's top quarter begins. Each figure is calculated on its own, so they don't multiply together. Dallas publishes no official neighborhood boundary set, which is why the table stops at city level.

Dallas lands ninth of twelve, with Fort Worth and Arlington beside it near the bottom. That looks like a suburban win until you check what's being counted, because the typical listing is a two-bedroom in Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington and a three or four-bedroom in all seven places above them. Bigger homes earn more, which is most of what that ranking is showing you.

Size isn't the whole story, though, since Denton and Tyler both run to three-bedroom listings and still finish below Dallas. Tyler is on the list at all because this market's boundary reaches a long way east of the metro, so don't read the bottom rows as suburban Dallas. The distance from the middle listing to the top quarter varies a lot as well, from barely a quarter above the median in McKinney to more than three-quarters above it in Arlington, but it doesn't follow the ranking, so it tells you how far a strong operator can pull clear in a given city rather than which city to pick.

So, short answer: the seven suburbs at the top of the table pay more on the middle listing than the three big cities, mostly because their homes are bigger. Unfortunately that ranking isn't a buy list, since the top three treat a new buyer very differently.

Plano has kept new short-term rentals out of its single-family neighborhoods since April 2024, allowing them mainly in nonresidential districts and a small share of apartment units, and only the rentals already running on May 15, 2023 were allowed to carry on, so the three-bedroom house its median describes is one you couldn't register if you bought it today. Richardson paused new registrations in its residential districts from May 27 to August 25, 2026, and the rules it passed on August 10 now bar a new single-family rental within 500 feet of a registered one, so check the city's spacing map before you make an offer. Grand Prairie will still permit a house, as long as it passes an inspection, you pay $480 a year, your HOA allows it and you hand a notice to every neighbor within 200 feet once the permit comes through, which makes it the one of the three where I'd start. As for Irving, Frisco and the rest of the table, I haven't covered their rules here, so read each city's own ordinance before you read the comps.

The two big cities either side of Dallas in the table draw their lines harder still, and no court is holding either of them back. Fort Worth bars short-term rentals from its residential zoning districts outright, so a house that's fine on one side of a boundary can be prohibited on the other. BNBCalc's Fort Worth guide carries the district list and the registration fees. Arlington takes a third route again. Outside a zone reaching about a mile from the center of its Entertainment District, a house in a single-family district isn't eligible at all, the permit is tied to both the owner and the address, and the city never grandfathered the listings that came before it. That's worth knowing before you read Arlington's row as World Cup money, because the city that hosted the matches sits tenth, and its median occupancy is the table's lowest.

Medians stop at the city line, so for a street-level look inside Dallas itself, the best Dallas neighborhoods for Airbnb picks up where this table stops.

Which Amenities Make the Most Money in Dallas?

Once the city and the house are settled, what sits inside the walls is the last part you control.

On its current run, BNBCalc's amenity model credits a hot tub with about 21% more revenue on a listing in the Dallas market. Eight more amenities clear the model's bar here, namely a pool, a TV, an EV charger, a sauna, lake access, parking, a barbecue and allowing pets, and BNBCalc Markets carries the lift for each of them. I'd give lake access a second look, because this market stretches far past the suburbs, and a house on the water is a different product from a three-bedroom in Frisco. The model also skips the basics almost every listing in the market already offers, since those can't tell the good performers apart from the poor ones.

Price the cleaning fee properly too. As of September 2026, about 41% of listings across the Dallas market charged a cleaning fee, at roughly $143 a turnover where they did, which averages out near $1,650 a year per listing once the ones charging nothing are counted in. Nearly all of that money walks back out the door with the cleaner, so set the fee to cover the turnover honestly instead of booking it as profit.

Is Airbnb Legal in Dallas?

You can fit a house out beautifully and still lose the argument at the zoning counter, so here's where the city of Dallas stands.

Short-term rentals are legal in Dallas today, and a court order is the reason rather than any rule the city is happy with. In June 2023 the council passed a zoning ordinance creating a use called short-term rental lodging, and it allowed that use by right in office, multifamily, central area, mixed use, multiple commercial and urban corridor districts. Single-family, duplex and townhouse zoning aren't on that list, and the ordinance's own findings say the council meant to keep short-term rentals out of single-family neighborhoods. Then the registration ordinance, Chapter 42B, built the operating regime around it: register every year, pass an inspection, name a local person who can reach the property within an hour, cap the house at three people per bedroom and twelve in total, and refuse any booking shorter than two nights. Enforcement was due to begin six months after passage, and a court granted a temporary injunction on December 6, 2023 instead.

The city has been trying to lift that injunction ever since, and it keeps losing. The Fifth Court of Appeals upheld the block on both ordinances three times in 2025, in February, July and August, and on October 16, 2025 the city took the fight to the Supreme Court of Texas, where, as of September 2026, the petition is still waiting on a decision. That petition is the thing to watch, because a ruling there is what would change how you can operate in Dallas.

If that freeze ever lifts, the line it draws won't fall evenly across the city. A little under a quarter of Dallas's listings sit on land zoned for single-family homes, which the ordinance leaves out, while roughly a tenth sit in multifamily districts, which the ordinance does name. About half sit inside planned development districts, and those carry their own use lists, so the base zoning map on its own won't tell you which way a given address goes, while most of the rest sit on commercial, office or mixed-use land. So pull the zoning for the specific property before you sign anything.

What the city can still do matters more than it sounds. Chapter 27's minimum property standards apply, so do the ordinances on disturbing noise and private nuisance, and the city says it keeps enforcing all three. In practice that means Dallas can still come after the party your guests throw at two in the morning even while it can't touch the listing itself.

The tax is the part no court has frozen, and it's the piece new hosts get wrong most often. Texas charges 6% state hotel occupancy tax on any stay under 30 consecutive days and Dallas charges 9% of net room receipts on top, and the guest pays both over and above your nightly rate rather than out of it. What catches people out is who files. A platform can handle the state's 6% where it's agreed to collect it, while Dallas says it has no deal with any platform to collect its own share, so you register for the city's 9% yourself and file it every month by the 15th. Since February 1, 2026, a payment more than three months late carries a 15% penalty on top of 10% annual interest, and the city says neither can be waived or forgiven, so don't let the monthly deadline slide. The state half runs through the Comptroller instead, and BNBCalc's guide to Texas short-term rental tax handles that side.

Registering for that hotel tax is free, and you need it whether or not the freeze ever lifts. The registration written into Chapter 42B would add $248 a year, with another $144 for any reinspection, and since it's codified and waiting, I'd price a five-year hold as though it were live. Everything you'd file, and who you'd file it with, is laid out in the Dallas short-term rental regulation guide.

Where Do These Dallas Airbnb Numbers Come From?

Filing is that guide's job. The figures on this page are drawn from BNBCalc Markets, which ranks and compares short-term rental markets across the listings it tracks in each one, and the city table is my own cut of that same listing data along Census place lines. Markets will also set a saved group of listings you choose against everything else trading in the same market, which earns its keep in a city where a house on a single-family block and a unit in a mid-rise would land on opposite sides of the ordinance if the freeze ever lifted. Build that group from one property type, though, or what you learn is how an average Dallas listing performs rather than how your kind of home does.

How Do You Estimate Airbnb Revenue for a Dallas Property?

One market figure stands in for thousands of homes. So how does it become something you can price a single house with?

Open the Dallas market page first, where revenue, occupancy and seasonality refresh on their own, and if you haven't settled on Dallas yet, the best Texas markets ranked by gross yield sets it beside the rest of Texas. Then take a real house, with a purchase price, a loan and a set of running costs attached, and push all of that through BNBCalc.

You'll want four facts sitting beside whatever comes back. Which city the house is in comes first, since Plano, Richardson, Grand Prairie, Fort Worth and Arlington each answer the legality question their own way. If it's Dallas, look up the base zoning, because that's where the frozen ordinance draws its line. Read June and July as a tournament rather than a season. And price the guest's side with the state's 6% plus the city's own rate on top. That's 9% in Dallas and 7% in Grand Prairie and Richardson, and in all three the city's share is yours to file.

Wherever a rule is still in court or still being written, the numbers describe the hosts who got in under today's version of it, so the question worth putting to any market's data is whether you could still get in tomorrow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Average Airbnb Income in Dallas?

The middle listing inside Dallas city limits made $24,294 in the trailing twelve months, going by BNBCalc's 2026 listing data, against $26,876 for the whole Dallas market. Those are medians, which a few outsized earners can't skew as they skew an average, and the market's top quarter starts at $40,857. Earnings also scatter widely inside a single bedroom count, and the best one-bedrooms clear what a typical three-bedroom takes in over the same year.

Is Airbnb Still Profitable in Dallas in 2026?

It can be, and what usually stands between an investor and a yes is which city the house sits in and whether that city will register it. Average nightly rates across the Dallas market came in about 18% higher than a year earlier while occupancy gave back about 3%, in a year that took in nine World Cup matches at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. Whether a given house profits still turns on what it cost to buy, what running it takes, and the city's hotel tax being filed on time.

What Is the Best Month for Airbnb in Dallas?

On nightly rate, June 2026 led the Dallas market by a distance, at $379 against $340 in July and no more than $262 in any other month, with occupancy that month at 43%. FIFA World Cup matches filled both June and July at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, so neither reads as a typical Dallas summer. The cheapest nights were in January and February, at $218 and $213, and within any given week Saturday and Friday lead.

Do You Need a Permit to Run an Airbnb in Dallas?

For the hotel tax, yes. Registering for the city's hotel occupancy tax is free and required, and that tax has to be collected from guests and remitted every month. The short-term rental registration written into Chapter 42B is a different matter, because a court blocked both of the city's 2023 short-term rental ordinances on December 6, 2023, and the city's code compliance page still says it can't enforce them.

Can You Run an Airbnb in a Single-Family Home in Dallas?

Yes, as things stand. The 2023 zoning ordinance would've allowed short-term rental lodging only in office, multifamily, central area, mixed use, multiple commercial and urban corridor districts, leaving single-family zoning off the list, but a court has blocked its enforcement since December 6, 2023, and the city's appeals have failed so far. A little under a quarter of the city's listings sit on single-family-zoned land, so this is the provision that would bite hardest if the freeze lifted.

Which Dallas Suburb Earns the Most on Airbnb?

Of the Dallas-area places holding deep listing pools, Grand Prairie tops the list on median annual revenue at $37,298, ahead of Plano at $34,135 and Richardson at $31,030, in 2026 BNBCalc listing data cut to US Census place boundaries. Listings there typically run to three or four bedrooms against two inside Dallas, so house size explains a good part of that gap. The rules differ too: Plano doesn't allow new short-term rentals in single-family neighborhoods, Richardson requires a new single-family rental to sit at least 500 feet from a registered one, and Grand Prairie requires a permit and an inspection.

How Much Is the Airbnb Tax in Dallas?

Guests on a Dallas short-term rental pay 15% on top of the booking: Texas Tax Code Chapter 156 sets the state rate at 6%, and the City of Dallas charges 9% of net room receipts under its hotel occupancy tax articles. A platform can remit the state share where it's agreed to collect it, while Dallas says it has no deal with any platform to collect its own share, so the city's 9% is filed by the owner by the 15th of each month.

Is Dallas or Fort Worth Better for Airbnb?

On median annual revenue the two run close, with Fort Worth at $26,219 and Dallas at $24,294 in 2026 BNBCalc listing data, and the typical listing in both is a two-bedroom. The rules are what separate them: Fort Worth prohibits short-term rentals in its residential zoning districts and requires an annual registration, while Dallas's own ordinances have been frozen by a court since December 2023.