The Airbnb Door: Short-Term Rental Profit, Occupancy & Break-Even Dashboard

Nightly rate times thirty, minus the mortgage, is not your profit. It is the number that makes people buy the wrong lake house.

This is a twelve-month profit dashboard for a short-term rental, built to answer one question before you buy and every quarter after: does this place actually pay?

Every month gets its own rate and occupancy. July at 91% and January at 32% are both real, and only one of them shows up on a napkin. The sample lake house runs 59.7% for the year — five months lose money, and the year still nets $4,664. That is what most seasonal rentals look like, and it is why one good month on a napkin is the wrong way to decide.

The platform fee is applied the way the platform applies it. Airbnb's host-only fee is 15.5% of the booking subtotal — the nightly rate and the cleaning fee. Charge $125 to clean, pay a $95 cleaner and $18 of supplies, and you lose $7.38 on every checkout. Seventy-eight times a year. This workbook shows you that line; most do not.

It solves for the occupancy you need. At the rates the year actually earned, the sample breaks even at 51.6% occupancy. It also solves the other way: the nightly rate you must charge at the occupancy you are counting on, and the rate you need if the calendar comes in ten points light.

The dashboard grades nine measures against your own targets — net cash, months that lost money, cash-on-cash, occupancy against plan, cushion above break-even, length of stay, and where every dollar of bookings goes — HEALTHY, WATCH or ALERT in color, with a verdict line. Two charts underneath: what comes in against what goes out, month by month, and what each month actually leaves you. One portrait page. Print it and take it to the closing.

Built for

Lake, mountain and beach rentals · city condos · the spare house · anyone about to sign, and anyone who has been hosting for two years without knowing the answer.

What you get

One .xlsx file, six tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. A full sample year is loaded so you see every color of the grading before you type over it.