Airbnb & Short-Term Rental Calculator

On the short-term rental programs National Loan Provider places, the lender counts gross revenue — every booked night at the nightly rate, plus cleaning fees collected if you charge them — and divides it by PITIA: principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and HOA dues where the property has them. That is the whole ratio. No operating expense enters it. Platform fees, cleaning, utilities, supplies and management are real costs, but they are not part of the lender's test.

Cleaning fees are optional in the calculator. If you charge one, enter it with your average stay (3 nights unless you change it): the calculator counts stays as booked nights ÷ nights per stay and adds the fees collected to gross revenue. Leave it at zero and revenue is the nightly rate alone.

Either one can qualify the file. The short-term rental programs National Loan Provider places accept two income paths: an AirDNA projection, or the property's actual trailing 12 months of operating income.

The projection is accepted at face value. No haircut is applied to it, so the ratio runs on the full projected gross revenue — which is why this calculator has no discount toggle and no discounted second ratio. An operating history is an alternative, not a requirement: a purchase that has never been booked qualifies on its projection, and a property with a track record can qualify on what it actually earned.

Not every lender treats a projection that way. Some discount it before running the ratio; others want two years of operating history before they count short-term income at all. On a vacation-market purchase, the lender a file goes to decides the number it qualifies on — the program side of that is on the short-term rental DSCR loan page.

Long-term rental math starts from a full month's rent and subtracts a vacancy reserve for the months a unit sits empty. Short-term rental math starts from occupancy, which has already taken the empty nights out: 65% occupancy means 35% of nights earned nothing, and revenue is counted only on the 19.76 nights that booked.

Subtracting a vacancy reserve on top of occupancy would count those empty nights twice. So this calculator has no vacancy input, and at 100% occupancy it deducts nothing. If you take the deal to the rental cash flow calculator for the full expense picture, enter the gross monthly revenue from here as the rent and set vacancy to zero, for the same reason.

Everything that comes out of cash flow before operating costs: platform fees, cleaning, utilities, supplies, and management if you use a manager — plus furnishing, repairs, and replacing what guests wear out. None of it enters the lender's ratio, which is why none of it is an input here. All of it comes out of what the property pays you.

For that full picture, run the deal through the rental cash flow calculator: enter the gross monthly revenue from here as the rent, set vacancy to zero because occupancy already took the empty nights out, and use management and maintenance percentages that fit a short-term rental rather than a lease. The cap rate calculator and the LTV / LTC calculator cover the rest of the deal.