Cheapest Airbnb cities in 2016: where studio rentals cost as little as $26 a night

Airbnb's global expansion turned "which city is cheapest" into a genuinely answerable question. Cross-referencing a 2016 hospitality price index against live listings data shows just how wide the gap was — and still is — between the world's priciest short-term rentals and its most affordable.

Methodology

The comparison starts with GoEuro's Accommodation Price Index, published in 2016 using hospitality-market data from 2014, which ranked 150 major tourist destinations by hotel availability and the size of the local hospitality industry. Against that list of cities, AirDNA — an analytics firm that tracks Airbnb listings — supplied average nightly rates for "entire place" studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom rentals in February 2016, plus cleaning-fee data from May 2016. AirDNA had usable listings data for 87 of the 150 cities on the index, and counted only rentals it classed as "active" — a status AirDNA itself defines, and one that necessarily excludes dormant or unlisted properties.

Where Airbnb activity concentrated

Before price, volume: London and Paris were, as reported in AirDNA's February 2016 snapshot, the two most active Airbnb markets in the dataset, with roughly 29,700 and 29,300 active listings respectively — ahead of Manhattan (about 16,650, or 26,800 across all five boroughs), Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome and Sydney. That a European city led over any US market was notable given the United States was Airbnb's first and, at the time, largest market by most other measures.

The cheapest studios: Eastern Europe's advantage

On price, the picture flipped. As reported in the 2016 data, the least expensive "entire place" studios were in St. Petersburg, Russia, averaging around $26 a night before fees, followed by Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina at roughly $29. Most of the 87 cities surveyed — 58 of them — clustered between $35 and $75 a night, with Mumbai (about $31.50) the cheapest city surveyed outside Europe. Eastern European and Balkan capitals filled out most of the bottom of the ranking, a regional pattern a separate, independently reported ranking of Europe's cheapest Airbnb cities corroborated the same month, naming Tbilisi, Belgrade, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Sofia and Bucharest among the continent's most affordable.

Nearly every city at the cheap end of the 2016 ranking sat in Eastern Europe or the Balkans — a regional pattern that budget-travel data still points to today, alongside parts of Southeast Asia.

The most expensive studios: an unexpected UK outlier

The priciest studio market surveyed was not San Francisco or Singapore, though both feature. It was Manchester, UK, at roughly $169.50 a night before fees, ahead of Singapore ($154.50) and San Francisco ($153.50). That put Manchester nearly $15 above second place and, oddly, well above London itself, which ranked ninth at about $109.50 despite London rents running far higher than Manchester's overall. The likely explanation is supply mix rather than cost of living: cities such as London, San Francisco and Singapore have a deep stock of studios built for transient short-stay demand, while Manchester's smaller studio supply skews toward higher-specification, centrally located units aimed at longer-term tenants rather than tourists — a composition effect rather than a genuine premium on short stays.

Larger apartments and cleaning fees

One-bedroom and two-bedroom rentals showed a similar spread but with different leaders. One-bedroom apartments were priciest in San Francisco ($172.50), Boston ($167.50) and Manhattan ($164.50), and cheapest in St. Petersburg (about $26.50) — one-bedrooms ran roughly 14% above equivalent studios across the dataset. Two-bedroom rentals showed the widest range of all: Dubai topped the list at $326.50 a night and Frankfurt followed at $311.50, while the ten cheapest two-bedroom markets were, as reported, all in Eastern Europe, led by Sarajevo at roughly $38.

Cleaning fees, charged separately from the nightly rate, added a further layer of cost that tracked only loosely with rental price. Miami had the highest average cleaning fee surveyed at $100, followed by Boston ($95) and Ibiza ($91) — notably, two of the top three were destinations associated with a busy short-stay party-tourism trade, plausibly correlating with heavier turnover cleaning. At the other end, cleaning fees in Kiev (about $10), Sarajevo and Bucharest (both around $12) were a tenth of Miami's.

Has the pattern held up since 2016?

The regional story checks out. Independent 2016 reporting on Europe's cheapest Airbnb markets named largely the same cities — Balkan and Eastern European capitals — as the continent's best value, confirming the AirDNA snapshot wasn't an outlier. What has not held is the absolute pricing: Airbnb's own listings base roughly quadrupled worldwide between 2016 and the mid-2020s, and industry rate-tracking shows global average nightly prices running well above 2016 levels, having risen sharply through the pandemic-era travel recovery. Budget-conscious travellers today are also as likely to look toward parts of Southeast Asia — destinations such as Vietnam and Thailand are now regularly cited among the world's cheapest short-term rental markets — as toward Eastern Europe, broadening rather than replacing the original pattern. The dollar figures above should be read as a 2016 snapshot, not a current price guide.

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