Airbnb’s September 15 fee switch: the 30-minute checklist

Before you start: what does not change

• Bookings already on your calendar keep the old fee, even if the guest modifies the reservation later. Only bookings made after your switch use the new structure.
• Guests won’t pay more. Once you adjust, the total a guest sees at checkout is roughly what they see today — the fee line just disappears. If anything, a single clean price converts better.
• You’re not being singled out. Every host is moving. Your neighbours are working through this at the same time.

The checklist

1. Confirm where you stand

Go to Account → Payments & Payouts → Service fee. If it already says 15.5%, you’ve been migrated and can stop reading. If it shows a split fee, keep going.

2. Figure out where your prices come from

This is the step most guides skip, and it decides everything else. You adjust in one place only — adjusting on Airbnb and in a pricing tool stacks the markup and leaves you 30–40% overpriced.

• You set prices manually on Airbnb → use Airbnb’s built-in price adjustment tool (step 3).
• You use PriceLabs, Wheelhouse, Beyond, or similar connected directly to Airbnb → make the change inside that tool, not on Airbnb. Your tool re-syncs prices every few hours and will silently overwrite anything Airbnb’s tool did, with no warning. Look for an Airbnb-specific channel markup setting.
• You use a PMS → you’ve almost certainly already switched. Check that your Airbnb channel markup is around 18.34% and move on.

3. Pick your target, then run the tool

You’ll see two numbers quoted everywhere: 15% and 18.34%. They aren’t competing answers — they’re the same adjustment measured from different starting points.

• Raise your listed price by about 15% → you keep today’s payout. On a $100 night that’s $97, and it’s what Airbnb’s own tool does.
• Raise by 18.34% → you net your full old listed price, the $100. PMSs quote this one because under the split fee their standard 3% markup already netted the full base price, and 18.34% restores that.

Which field you type into matters. PriceLabs applies its Airbnb channel markup to your listed price, so enter about 15% there. A PMS markup field (Guesty, Hostaway, OwnerRez) is payout-based, so 18.34% is the number. Either is a legitimate target — just know which one you’ve chosen.

Worked example on a $100 night:

Airbnb’s own tool targets the “keep my payout” number by default. If you’d rather net your full old listed price ($100 instead of $97), raise by 18.34% instead. Either is fine — just know which one you chose.

Two things to know about Airbnb’s tool before you click:

• It’s one-way. Once you use it, you can’t go back to the split fee.
• It touches everything. Base, custom, weekend, and custom-promotion prices, plus cleaning, pet, and other host-set fees, across all listings, active and inactive, for the next two years of calendar. Percentage discounts are left alone (they scale on their own). It adjusts dates before your switch date too — that’s expected, since bookings already made keep the old fee.

4. Check your cleaning, pet, and extra-guest fees

The 15.5% applies to the whole booking subtotal, not just the nightly rate. A $150 cleaning fee now nets you about $127. (There’s more on how the fee lands on your cleaning fee specifically in does Airbnb’s 15.5% fee apply to your cleaning fee.)

Airbnb’s tool adjusts these automatically. Most pricing tools do not — they mark up nightly rates and leave your fees sitting on Airbnb untouched. If you’re in the pricing-tool lane, raise these by hand: Listing editor → Pricing → Fees.

5. Audit your promotions and discounts

This is where hosts are actually getting burned right now. Airbnb calculates custom promotions off a 60-day median of your past prices, not today’s price. Straight after you adjust, that median is still your old rate — so a “20% off” promo can display a price 30% or more below your new target. Hosts on the Airbnb Community forum are reporting exactly this. It corrects itself as the 60-day window rolls over.

After adjusting:

• Open every active custom promotion and check the resulting nightly price in your calendar — not the preview in the promotion tool — against your new base.
• Re-check weekly and monthly discounts.
• If Smart Pricing is on, confirm the new minimum and maximum look right.

If a promotion looks wrong, lower the percentage or pause it until the median catches up.

6. Leave VRBO and Booking.com alone

VRBO still runs a split model with its own guest fee. If you raised your base price everywhere instead of Airbnb only, your VRBO guests now see roughly 15% more than they did last month. Make sure the adjustment is Airbnb-specific, and if you already made a global change, walk it back on the other channels.

7. Hold your nerve for a few weeks

For a short window after September 15, some hosts near you will have done nothing. Their guest-facing price will look about 13% cheaper than yours — because they’ve taken a hidden pay cut and don’t know it yet. Most will notice on their first payout and reprice. Don’t match them; you’d be locking in their mistake as your rate.

8. Do the channel math while it’s fresh

Here’s the quiet upside of this change: for the first time, the real cost of an Airbnb booking is one clear number on your side of the ledger. 15.5% of every nightly rate, every cleaning fee, every pet fee.

That makes it very easy to answer a question most hosts never sit down to work out: what is a returning guest worth if they book you directly next time? We’ve run what Airbnb’s 15.5% fee looks like next to a direct booking in full, but the short version is simple.

On a $1,000 stay, it’s $155. On a guest who comes back twice a year for five years, it’s the price of a new sofa, a new roof, a bathroom reno. The hosts who come out of this transition ahead won’t be the ones who found the perfect markup — they’ll be the ones who used the moment to make sure the guests they’ve already earned know how to find them again.

That doesn’t mean leaving Airbnb. It means treating it as one channel, priced correctly, while you build the one that costs you nothing.