How Much to Charge for Airbnb Cleaning: A Turnover Fee, Worked

October 26, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge for Airbnb cleaning, time one turnover of the rental, cost those hours at the hourly floor your year needs, add the laundry, the miles and your own supplies, and put a margin on top. Restock the host repays goes on the invoice beside the price, not inside it. In the illustrative 2-bedroom, 2-bath rental below, a turnover costs $143.75, a 15% margin prices it at $169.11, and the invoice with restock is $181.38. The same arithmetic, run from the host’s side, tells a host how much to charge as a cleaning fee.

None of these figures are market rates. Every minute, price and count belongs to one made-up cleaner and one made-up rental, and is there to be replaced with your own stopwatch, receipts and calendar. Nothing here says anything about any rental platform’s fees, payout rules or cleaning-fee policies.

The Airbnb cleaning price formula

hourly floor   = (income / (1 - tax share) + yearly costs)
                 / paid hours a year
turnover hours = (rooms + bathrooms + beds + walk-through minutes) / 60
turnover cost  = turnover hours x floor + miles x cost per mile
                 + laundry + your cleaning supplies
price          = turnover cost / (1 - margin)
invoice        = price + restock x (1 + handling)

Step 1: your hourly floor

The example cleaner wants $36,000 a year kept after a 20% tax set-aside, has $5,000 of yearly business costs, and books 30 hours a week inside rentals for 48 weeks. Cancellations and gaps take 10% of those hours, leaving 1,296 paid hours. The year needs $50,000.00, so the floor is $38.58 for every paid hour at a property. Forget the lost hours and you would set it at $34.72.

Driving and admin do not change the floor. They are hours you work but do not bill, so the floor already has to earn the year’s income without them. What they change is your pay per hour worked: with 10 unpaid hours a week, the cleaner keeps $18.75 for each hour actually worked. The house cleaning pricing post builds the same floor for regular homes.

Step 2: time the turnover

Time your own turnovers by part, then add them up for each rental. For a rental with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and 3 beds:

That is 169 minutes, or 2.82 hours, before laundry. With a 20 minute drive between rentals, 2 turnovers fit in a 8 hour day with 102 minutes left over, not enough for another. Change the bedrooms, bathrooms and beds and the same lines price a studio or a 4-bedroom house.

Step 3: wash the linens or send them out

Washing in-house takes 3 loads at 12 hands-on minutes each (0.60 hours, valued at your floor) plus $0.90 of supplies per load: $25.85 a turnover. Sending 18 pounds out at $1.60 a pound, plus 15 minutes of your time to drop off and collect, comes to $38.45. So in-house is $12.60 cheaper in this example, and that is the figure the price carries. A service that picks up, or a lower price per pound, can flip the answer; run both with your own figures.

Step 4: restock and your own supplies

Restock is what the guests use up and the host pays for. The example cleaner buys it and bills it back with a handling charge:

Your own cleaning products are different: they are a cost of doing the work, so they go into the price. A $9.00 bottle that lasts 6 turnovers plus $0.60 of cloths, sponges and gloves is $2.10 a turnover. If the host buys restock directly, leave it off the invoice.

Step 5: price the turnover

The price is $169.11 a turnover, or $84.56 per bedroom if a host asks for it that way. That per-bedroom figure is the same price divided, not a rate you can carry to another rental: a third bathroom or a fourth bed moves the minutes, not the bedroom count. The 15% margin is profit on top of a floor that already pays you and the business; the markup vs margin chart shows the markup that matches it.

Driving time is not a line here. It is one of the unpaid hours from step 1, which the floor already carries. The miles are a line, at the example’s own $0.50 cost per mile, because the vehicle is a real cost on every trip.

Same-day turnovers

When checkout and check-in fall on the same day, the example cleaner has 2 hours to work with. 2.82 hours alone will not fit, so 2 people split it and finish in 1.41 hours. A helper at $20.00 an hour, payroll costs included, costs $28.20. A 25% same-day surcharge adds $42.28, making the same-day price $211.39, and leaves $14.08 after the helper. Laundry is the catch: if the linens cannot be washed inside the window, you need a second set on hand.

The insight: price the hours, not the bedrooms

The cleaning hours at the floor are $108.80, 64% of the price. The next biggest cost is laundry: at $25.85 it is 15% of the price, more than the miles and your supplies together ($9.10). A cleaning fee set per bedroom, or copied from another listing, leaves out both the beds you strip and the loads you wash. Time the turnover, put the laundry in, and keep the restock out of the price so the host can see what it costs.

For hosts: how much to charge as a cleaning fee

A host can run the numbers the other way. Take the cleaning fee as the amount that actually reaches you per stay, from your own payout records. Say it is $150.00, against a cleaner who charges $169.11 plus $12.27 of restock: $181.38 a stay, $31.38 more than the fee.

Over a month of 7 stays, 2 of them same-day, the cleaner’s bill is $1,354.22 against $1,050.00 of fees, $304.22 short. The fee that covers the cleaner, with the same-day surcharges spread over every stay, is $193.46 a stay, or $64.49 a night on a 3 night stay. Any platform charges are not computed here; start from what you keep.

How these were calculated

The floor is (income / (1 - tax share) + yearly costs) / (booked hours a week x (1 - share lost) x weeks). Turnover minutes are the base minutes plus minutes per bedroom, per bathroom and per bed, plus the walk-through. In-house laundry is loads x hands-on minutes at the floor plus supplies per load; sent out is pounds x price per pound plus drop-off minutes at the floor; the lower one is used. Restock is the sum of the items, billed at (1 + handling). The turnover price is (hours x floor + miles x cost per mile + laundry + supplies) / (1 - margin). Same-day crew size is the turnover hours over the window, rounded up; the helper is paid for the hours the crew takes off you. The host’s break-even fee is the month’s cleaner bill over the stays. Figures are carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them, to the cent. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds the turnover minute by minute and the restock item by item, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not measured timings or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own rentals, timings and year, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to the host’s fee check.