Industry Insights
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Cleaning isn't a line item you can treat as an afterthought. It's the single biggest recurring cost most short-term rental hosts have, it's the thing guests complain about most when it goes wrong, and it's usually the first thing to fall apart when a host tries to save money on it. Finding the right person, paying them fairly, and setting your cleaning fee correctly on Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com will do more for your bottom line and your reviews than almost anything else you manage as a host.
There's no single best channel, hosts report success and frustration with all of them, and the right one often depends on your market size.
Search for groups specific to short-term rentals, not just general local community pages, whether nationwide host groups or ones for your specific city or region. Post what you're looking for and what you're paying, and expect responses either way: cleaners pitching themselves directly or other hosts tagging someone they use.
Ask in your local vacation rental host group, or ask a nearby host directly who they use. A cleaner who already understands STR turnovers is worth more than one who only cleans regular homes.
Useful for finding backup cleaners fast, especially on short notice, and they handle scheduling and payment. Hosts are split on the experience: some rely on them entirely, others use them only as a last-resort backup because the apps can be buggy or overly rigid about how they want scheduling to work.
Independent cleaners tend to be less expensive and, according to several hosts, more invested in keeping your business. Established cleaning companies cost more but offer backup coverage if your regular person is sick, which matters more the more properties you manage.
A few hosts found their best cleaners through casual conversations at laundromats, retail stores, or through contractors already working on the property. The advantage is trust that's already been earned somewhere else, not a cold introduction.
Key takeaway: Whatever channel you use, plan to try more than one cleaner before committing. Nearly every host who's been doing this a while says the same thing: you won't know if someone's good until you check their first few cleans yourself.
A few traits come up again and again when hosts describe the cleaners they'd never want to lose:
It goes both ways. The hosts with the longest-tenured cleaners tend to do a few things consistently:
A cleaner who feels valued has less reason to prioritize someone else's property over yours when their schedule gets tight.
A handful of practical questions are easy to skip when you're just excited to have found someone reliable, and they tend to surface as problems later if you don't:
There's no universal rate, and trying to build one that works across the whole country doesn't hold up. What hosts report paying varies enormously by region, property size, and whether it's an individual or a team, reported hourly rates alone range anywhere from around $20 to $60+, and per-clean rates for a full turnover span from well under $100 for a small unit to $500 or more for a large home.
Here's roughly how that breaks down by property size, based on reported ranges across several industry pricing guides:
These are still wide ranges, not fixed prices, since a 2BR in a major city can cost more to clean than a 4BR in a rural market. Comparing yourself to a single "average" number isn't very useful when a 2-bedroom in a small town and a 5-bathroom lake house in a resort market aren't remotely the same job.
The one number worth anchoring to is your own market. Ask two or three local cleaning companies or independent operators for a quote on your specific property before you decide what's fair. A cleaner charging $20/hour and one charging $50/hour are often not doing the same job. Several hosts who tried to underpay describe exactly the outcome you'd expect: rushed work, high turnover, and having to start the search over every few months. Paying at or above the local going rate is consistently the thing experienced hosts point to as the difference between a cleaner who stays for years and one who doesn't.
This is a separate decision from what you pay your cleaner, and it's worth treating that way, especially because each platform now handles that fee differently once you factor in their commission. If you haven't already, it's worth reading how much Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com actually charge before setting any fee, since the math below builds directly on those numbers.
Start with what the clean actually costs you, then work out what each platform actually lets you keep from a cleaning fee of that size.
Airbnb charges its 15.5% host-only service fee against your full payout, and that fee base includes your cleaning fee, not just the nightly rate. This isn't a brand-new wrinkle: Airbnb's official fee documentation confirms that even under the older 3% host commission, the fee was calculated on the nightly price "and any fees charged by the host," including the cleaning fee. What actually changed with the move to the 15.5% single fee is the size of that cut, not whether your cleaning fee was subject to it. If a clean costs you $120 and you set your Airbnb cleaning fee at exactly $120, you're not breaking even, the platform's cut comes out of that $120 too. You need to set the fee slightly above your actual cost to net the same amount you're paying your cleaner.
Vrbo charges a 5% commission plus a 3% payment processing fee for most hosts, about 8% combined. Per Vrbo's own help documentation, the 5% commission "is charged on the rental amount and any additional fees you charge the traveler (such as cleaning, pet, and boat fees)," and the 3% processing fee applies to the full payment you receive, including taxes and refundable damage deposits. Same principle as Airbnb: a $120 cleaning fee doesn't net you $120.
Booking.com commission runs roughly 10-25%, averaging around 15% depending on your market and program participation. Per Booking.com's own partner documentation, commission is charged "on the reservation costs and any additional fees added at the time of booking, such as cleaning fees and service charges. " Local taxes are excluded, but your cleaning fee isn't. If you use Payments by Booking.com, a separate processing fee of roughly 1.1-3.1% applies on top.
The short version: on all three platforms, a cleaning fee set to exactly match your cleaner's invoice quietly loses you money. Build each platform's commission into the fee itself, not just into your nightly rate, and remember the exact math differs slightly by platform since the rates and fee structures aren't the same.
Some hosts skip the separate fee entirely and fold cleaning into the nightly rate instead, which several say results in a cleaner handoff from guests, on the theory that a visible fee makes some guests feel they've already paid for the mess and don't need to worry about it. There's no consensus on this in the host community, and it's a real, unresolved debate, not a settled best practice.
One more thing has changed the math recently: since Airbnb moved most listings to all-in pricing, guests increasingly see one total number instead of a nightly rate plus a separate cleaning line. Whatever psychological effect a visible cleaning fee used to have on guest behavior is quietly disappearing as fewer guests ever see that line item broken out.
There's no universal cleaning fee, but there is one useful benchmark worth knowing. AirROI's analysis of 685,000 US Airbnb listings found that fees set between 25% and 50% of a listing's average daily rate (ADR) correlated with the highest annual revenue, averaging $64,405 a year, well above listings with no fee at all or fees pushed above 75% of ADR. If your ADR is $200 a night, that puts your fee in the $50-$100 range. If your ADR is $350, the range moves to roughly $88-$175.
This isn't a rule Airbnb enforces, and it's a correlation from one dataset, not a guarantee for your specific property. Treat it as a sanity check against your own numbers: if your actual cleaning cost from the section above already lands inside that range, you're in good shape. If it doesn't, that's worth knowing before you set the fee and forget about it.
Before applying any pricing strategy, know what you actually have: a city-center studio drawing one and two-night trips is a different business than a family cabin booked for full weeks, and the right fee structure for one can actively hurt the other.
Once you know that, the fee-to-rate ratio becomes a real lever. A high cleaning fee paired with a lower nightly rate discourages short stays, since the fee gets spread over fewer nights. A low or zero cleaning fee paired with a higher nightly rate does the opposite, keeping the place competitive for one and two-night bookings where a flat fee would otherwise dominate the total price. Hosts running short-stay-heavy properties near highways, event venues, or city centers report deliberately keeping fees low or non-existent for exactly this reason.
Beyond what keeps them loyal, cleaners who work exclusively in STR turnovers describe a few specific boundaries that get crossed more often than hosts realize:
A few signals experienced hosts watch for:
It depends heavily on property size, region, and whether you hire an individual or a company. Reported hourly rates range from around $20 to $60 or more, and flat per-clean rates for a full turnover run from under $100 for a small unit to $500 or more for a large home. Get quotes from a couple of local providers rather than relying on a national average.
Not different in concept, but the math changes slightly on each. All three take their commission off the full booking, cleaning fee included, so a fee set to exactly match your cleaner's invoice leaves you short on every platform. Build a small margin into the fee itself to account for it.
Both approaches work, and hosts disagree on which one results in a cleaner handoff from guests. A visible fee recovers your cost directly; folding it into the rate can make your listing more competitive for short stays and, according to some hosts, results in guests leaving the place tidier.
There's no consensus. Some hosts report the opposite: a visible fee makes guests feel they've already paid for the cleanup and can leave things messier. Guest behavior likely depends more on the individual guest than the fee itself.
Local host Facebook groups and direct referrals from other hosts tend to produce the most reliable results, though platforms like Turno are useful for backup coverage on short notice. Plan to test more than one cleaner before settling on someone.
None of this is secret. You can learn to find a cleaner, price the fee, and write the contract yourself. But it's not a problem you solve once. It resets every time a guest checks out and the next one checks in.
If you'd rather have someone already running this system across hundreds of properties handle it for yours, that's exactly the kind of thing we do every day. Reach out to Triad Vacation Rentals and we'll walk through how we handle it for owners like you.
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