Before you buy an Airbnb, there's one number that matters more than projected income: the occupancy you need just to not lose money. This tells you that number — and whether your market actually clears it.
Blue = occupancy you need. The line = what your market averages.
Enter your numbers…
Break-even nights / month—
Contribution per booked night—
Est. monthly cash flow at market occ.—
Margin of safety—
Get the full STR underwriting checklist
Break-even is step one. Before you make an offer, run the 25-point checklist we use to pressure-test a deal — regulation risk, seasonality, capex reserves, exit math. Free, delivered instantly.
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STR Deal Underwriting Kit — $29
This page gives you one number. The Kit is the full model behind it — an Excel workbook where every yellow cell is an input and everything else is a live formula.
Full underwriting sheet — acquisition, furnishing, revenue, 11 expense lines, real amortising debt service, NOI, cap rate, DSCR, cash-on-cash, break-even occupancy and margin of safety.
Sensitivity grid — cash flow across a 6 × 5 matrix of occupancy and ADR outcomes, colour-coded. The bottom-left quadrant is the one that tells you whether the deal survives a normal-bad year.
10-year projection — cash flow, exact loan amortisation via FV(), appreciation, equity, exit profit and equity multiple.
25-point due-diligence checklist — ordered so the six deal-killers come first, before you spend a dollar on inspection.
Delivered by email within minutes of checkout — reply to your Stripe receipt or forward it to [email protected] and the workbook comes straight back. Single-user licence, use it on every deal you look at. Not financial advice.
How break-even occupancy actually works
Most Airbnb calculators tell you a rosy projected income if everything goes right. That's the wrong first question. The right one is defensive: what occupancy do I need before I start losing money every month? If that break-even number is close to — or above — what properties in your market actually book, the deal is fragile no matter how good the upside looks.
The formula
Each booked night earns you a contribution — nightly revenue after the platform's cut and the variable cost of turning the unit over:
Your fixed costs don't care whether you're booked. So the nights you must sell just to cover them is:
break-even nights = fixed monthly costs ÷ contribution per night
break-even occupancy = break-even nights ÷ 30
Then compare that to your market's real occupancy. The gap between them is your margin of safety — the cushion you have before a soft season, a new competitor, or a regulation change pushes you underwater.
What's a healthy margin of safety?
15%+ cushion (market occupancy well above break-even): resilient. You can absorb a bad quarter.
5–15% cushion: workable but tight — you're depending on staying at or above market average.
Under 5%, or break-even above market: high risk. A single slow season or a 10% ADR drop can flip you cash-flow negative.
Where to get honest inputs
Pull ADR and market occupancy from comparable active listings (AirDNA, Rabbu, or by studying 8–10 similar nearby listings on the platform itself). Be conservative: use the trailing 12-month occupancy, not the peak-season number, because your fixed costs run all 12 months. Add a realistic fee load — platform service fees plus, if you're not self-managing, 15–30% for a co-host or property manager.
It depends entirely on your break-even. 65% market occupancy is excellent if you break even at 45%, and dangerous if you break even at 63%. Occupancy only means something relative to the number you must hit — which is exactly what this calculator isolates.
Should cleaning fees count as income or a wash?
Only count the portion you actually keep after paying your cleaner. Many hosts charge a cleaning fee that roughly equals what they pay out — in that case it's a wash and belongs in variable cost, not income.
Why use fixed vs. variable costs instead of one monthly number?
Because a slow month changes your variable costs (fewer turnovers) but not your fixed ones (the mortgage is still due). Splitting them is the only way to get an accurate break-even point.
Does this replace a full ROI or cash-on-cash analysis?
No — it's the fast disqualifier you run first. If a property can't clear break-even with comfortable margin, the ROI math downstream doesn't matter. Run this before you spend an hour on the full underwriting.
Need real market numbers? Your break-even is only as good as your ADR and occupancy inputs. Pull trailing-12-month comps from AirDNA or Rabbu before trusting any projection — including this one.