Cities where Airbnb hosts made the most money: what the 2016/17 figures showed

In early 2016, an analysis of AirDNA and Zillow data for 30 of the largest US metro areas set out to answer a simple question: where were Airbnb hosts actually making the most money? The answer split in two. The cities with the best percentage return on a property purchase were mostly cheap, Midwestern markets. The cities where a host banked the most raw dollars each month were the expensive coastal ones. Both were true at once, and the gap between the two rankings is still the most useful way to read that data today.

The 2016 figures, as reported

The starting example was San Francisco. The analysis put the average nightly rate for a one-bedroom "entire place" listing there at about $199 (April 2016), which at full occupancy works out to a gross monthly income of roughly $6,169 — and, even at a more realistic 50% occupancy, well over $3,000 a month. Zillow's average asking rent for a comparable one-bedroom in the city at the same time was cited at around $2,850 a month, meaning a subletting host could, on paper, clear a few hundred dollars of gross profit on top of covering the rent. None of these specific dollar figures can be reproduced from today's AirDNA data — they are a snapshot of one month, one methodology and one dataset, so they are best read as illustrative, as-reported 2016 numbers rather than figures to plan a business around.

Best return on investment vs highest actual earnings

The wider 30-city comparison is where the picture gets more interesting, because "makes the most money" turns out to mean two different things. Ranked by percentage return on investment, the winners were cheap markets: Cincinnati topped the list for renters subletting a one-bedroom home, with a reported yearly return of 99.21% of annual rent at 50% occupancy and 198.81% at 75%. For owners buying a property outright, Cleveland led the one-bedroom category — an average purchase price of about $63,300 paired with a reported return of 22.72% at 50% occupancy and 35.65% at 75%, implying the property's Airbnb income could match its purchase price in well under three years of strong occupancy.

Ranked by actual dollar earnings instead, the same dataset told a different story. Among the 30 cities studied for one-bedroom rentals, Boston ranked first for raw earnings, with San Francisco second, Los Angeles fourth and Washington, DC seventh. Yet on return on investment those same cities ranked 9th, 30th (last), 29th and 28th respectively — because rents and property prices there are so high that they eat into the percentage return, even while the total dollar amount collected stays the largest of any market studied.

The city that pays a host the most money and the city that pays a host the best return are, on this data, almost never the same city.

Why the same handful of cities keep showing up

The pattern behind the 2016 numbers is not really about Airbnb — it is about housing supply. San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, DC are among the most persistently supply-constrained big-city housing markets in the country, which pushes both long-term rents and short-term nightly rates higher than almost anywhere else. That is why hosts there collect the most money per listing even when the percentage return looks weak: the "per night" figure is high, but so is the property price or rent it is being measured against.

That underlying pattern has proven durable. A separate analysis of major US Airbnb markets, run years later using pricing data from Beyond Pricing, found San Francisco and New York still commanding the highest average nightly rates of the cities compared — reportedly around $247 and $233 a night respectively — while the highest net annual profit after costs went instead to San Diego and Miami. In other words, the specific dollar figures move with the market cycle, but the split between "highest nightly rate, high-demand cities" and "highest actual profit, lower-cost cities" recurs whenever this kind of comparison is run.

How regulation moved the numbers since 2016/17

The cities this kind of analysis repeatedly flags as the biggest dollar earners are also, not coincidentally, the ones where regulators have since done the most to restrict short-term letting. San Francisco spent much of 2016 and 2017 with a registration system that was only loosely enforced; that changed in early 2018, when the platforms purged unregistered hosts from their listings, and the number of active short-term rentals in the city reportedly fell from around 9,000 in August 2017 to roughly 4,000 by February 2018 — cutting the available host income in that market by close to half almost overnight.

New York went further. Its Local Law 18, in force since September 2023, requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city and effectively bans whole-home rentals in units where the host is not present — a near-total block on the kind of "entire place" listing this analysis was built around. Both cities were flagged in 2016 as places where Airbnb hosts made unusually large sums of money; both are now places where that specific opportunity has been substantially closed off by regulation, which is a reminder that any city-level earnings ranking is a photograph of a moment, not a permanent map.

Reading a city earnings ranking like this one

• Check whether a ranking measures dollar earnings or percentage return — they usually point at different cities.
• Treat occupancy assumptions with caution; a jump from 50% to 75% roughly doubles most of the reported returns.
• Factor in costs the headline numbers usually leave out, especially utilities and cleaning fees.
• Check current local short-term rental rules before assuming any historic ranking still applies — several of the top-earning cities from 2016/17 have since restricted or banned the activity that produced those numbers.

Frequently asked questions