U.S. Short-Term Rental Market Report 2026

The year at a glance

This is Cavmir's first annual report on the United States short-term rental market — the numbers that defined 2026, compiled from primary sources, joined with Cavmir's own datasets, and published free to cite. Every figure names its source. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement instead of averaging it away.

The short version of 2026: a war-driven energy shock kept inflation and mortgage rates high, which froze new supply — and that freeze, not booming demand, is what held the market up. Available listings are growing just 2.7% this year against 2.7% demand growth, so occupancy is holding at 57.4%, above its pre-pandemic average, while revenue growth comes almost entirely from rate. The FIFA World Cup delivered a $1.33 billion pricing event across 16 host cities. Regulation split into two opposing tracks. And for owners — though not for buyers — the math quietly improved.

The full 39-indicator table, with periods and sources, is further down this page and in the free CSV.

The economy underneath the market

2026 did not follow the script anyone wrote in December. The year opened with job growth still slowed by the longest federal government shutdown on record. Then, in late February, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a shipping lane carrying roughly a fifth of the world's oil — set off the biggest energy shock in recent memory. By May, consumer price inflation had reached 4.2% year over year, wiping out the boost from spring tax refunds and dragging real income growth to near zero, per the economic backdrop laid out in AirDNA's midyear outlook.

With inflation stubborn, the Federal Reserve held rates at 3.5%–3.75% at its June meeting — the first chaired by Kevin Warsh — and raised its inflation outlook to 3.6%. Mortgage rates, which forecasters had expected to fall, instead stayed above 6%, where they are expected to remain through 2026 and much of 2027. For short-term rentals, that one number did more than any other to shape the year: it kept would-be hosts out of the market, and existing hosts in a stronger position than anyone predicted.

Demand: domestic travel carried the year

Total U.S. travel spending is forecast to reach $1.37 trillion in 2026, and domestic travel is 87% of it, according to the U.S. Travel Association, U.S. Travel Forecast (May 2026). Domestic leisure — the short-term rental industry's core customer — reaches $909 billion, up 0.9%, and is the only travel vertical spending above 2019 levels in inflation-adjusted terms. Growth is real, but it is slow, price-driven, and concentrated in higher-income households.

The international picture is the drag. Inbound visits fell 5.5% in 2025 to 68.3 million, and 2026 inbound spending of $178 billion remains about 18% below 2019 in real terms. AirDNA's booking data puts a finer point on it: international short-term rental demand was still down 11.7% year over year in May 2026, after bottoming near −17% in late 2025 — and the weakness is concentrated, not spread. Canada, historically the largest inbound market, is down 32% against 2024. Most of the rest of the world is actually growing:

The practical read for operators: markets that lean on Canadian and Western European guests — border towns, gateway cities — absorbed a real hit in 2026, while destinations drawing Latin American and Asian travelers grew through it. Domestic demand did the carrying everywhere else, and even it cooled from low-teens growth in early 2025 to under 3% by May.

Supply: the listings that didn't arrive

In December 2025, AirDNA projected available listings would grow 4.6% in 2026. By July it had cut that forecast to 2.7% — because the wave of new hosts that lower interest rates were supposed to unlock never arrived. That is a fraction of the 20% annual supply expansion of 2021–2022, and it is the single most important number in this report: less new competition is the reason occupancy held while demand merely trudged.

The supply that is arriving is going somewhere specific: lower-cost small cities, rural destinations, and mid-size markets, pushed there by purchase prices and pulled by gas-price-conscious drive-to travel. For scale, Expedia Group's Q2 filing counts roughly 2.6 million online-bookable alternative accommodations on Vrbo globally, and Airbnb reported more than 100,000 homes newly listed in World Cup host cities alone between October 2025 and the tournament.

The year's biggest structural supply story was corporate, not individual. Casago closed its $130 million acquisition of Vacasa — once North America's largest vacation rental manager — on April 30, 2025, and then did the opposite of what consolidators usually do: per transaction coverage, by mid-2026 it had converted all but roughly 600 of Vacasa's ~32,000 units to local franchise operators, who rehired about 89% of former field staff. The largest professional portfolio in the industry was effectively re-localized in fourteen months, even as surveyed operators managing 100+ listings kept growing faster than the market average. Professionalization continues — but as a franchise and local-operator story, not a national-brand one.

Occupancy, rates, and revenue

AirDNA's midyear forecast has 2026 occupancy at 57.4% — above the pre-pandemic average of 57.0%, and above the 56.7% its own December outlook projected before supply growth collapsed. RevPAR is forecast up 2.9%, driven almost entirely by rate: nightly-rate growth accelerated from 0.7% year over year in January to about 3% by spring. The market is earning more per listing not because homes are fuller, but because operators regained pricing power.

Hotels tell a sharper version of the same story. Per STR/CoStar data cited in the same outlook, hotel RevPAR rose 4.0% through April — the best first quarter on record — and CoStar and Tourism Economics raised their full-year hotel forecast to +2.8% from +0.6%. Hotels are converting steady travel demand into occupancy gains; short-term rentals are converting it into rate. Where the two compete head-on — urban, group, and event markets — aggressive hotel pricing is the ceiling on STR rate growth.

Holiday peaks showed what the leaner supply picture does when demand actually surges: Key Data's July 4th report, drawn from professionally managed properties across 25 U.S. markets, pacing showed occupancy up 6.5%, ADR up 5.5%, and RevPAR up 12.4% year over year, with the Mid-Atlantic up 26.2% on RevPAR. One honest caveat: Key Data's managed-property panel also showed booking windows lengthening slightly (131.5 to 134.2 days for the holiday), while AirDNA's whole-market data shows lead times shrinking. Both are real; they measure different slices of the market, and we report both.

The World Cup effect

The 2026 FIFA World Cup — 104 matches across 16 North American host cities in June and July — was the largest event the U.S. short-term rental market has ever absorbed. AirROI's recap tallies about $1.33 billion in short-term rental revenue across the host cities during the tournament, roughly $276.7 million more than the same period in 2025. Airbnb projected more than 230,000 fans in its listings with $212 million in host earnings, reported search spikes averaging 80% in host cities, and — the durable part — over 100,000 first-time listings in host cities, with about 1 in 6 tournament guests new to the platform entirely.

It was, however, a price event more than a crowd event. Visa friction and transport costs limited the international influx; domestic fans drove the bookings; and results split by geography — Miami and the San Francisco Bay Area ran strong while New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago saw flatter growth. Nearly every host market got pricing power out of it, and AirDNA expects Large City Urban to finish 2026 as the strongest market type for occupancy growth (+1.7%) largely on the tournament's back.

Market winners and losers

The dividing line across 2026's markets is supply, not demand. The year's best performers are metros where listings are shrinking:

San Diego, Oakland, and San Jose/Palo Alto follow close behind — the last boosted by hosting both the Super Bowl and World Cup matches, a comparison base to remember when 2027 numbers look soft. The weakest performers are the mirror image: Florida Gulf Coast markets (Cape Coral–Fort Myers, Sarasota, St. Petersburg) are still adding listings faster than demand, and a severe snow drought crushed ski-season demand in Breckenridge and Big Bear — both positioned to rebound if the snow returns.

On the buy side, AirDNA's Best Places to Invest 2026 ranking reads nothing like a tourism brochure — it is small and mid-size America, where purchase prices still make the math work. Across the top ten, home prices average about $296,000 against roughly $40,500 in annual revenue potential — yields near 14%:

How guests booked in 2026

Guests booked later and stayed shorter. Urban booking windows compressed to just over 20 days on average, the lowest since the pandemic, and average stays shortened across every location type — coastal resorts saw their shortest average stays since the pandemic, per AirDNA. The one behavior that has refused to fade: groups. Five-plus-bedroom homes are 2026's best-performing size tier, with occupancy up about 1.3% and rates up 2.2% through May, while studios through two-bedrooms sat flat. Space is how short-term rentals out-compete hotel rate cards, and guests keep paying for it.

Two quieter shifts matter for anyone marketing a rental. First, direct booking: in operator surveys compiled in early 2026, about 70% of operators now run a direct-booking website, but two-thirds still take under a quarter of their bookings direct — against platform commissions of 15.5% on Airbnb's host-only model and 15–25% on Booking.com. The infrastructure is built; the demand capture mostly is not. Second, AI planning: roughly 40% of travelers globally now use AI tools somewhere in trip planning per Statista (37% of U.S. travelers, per Allianz Partners), and ChatGPT began integrating Booking.com and Expedia directly into conversations in late 2025. Travelers increasingly meet a market's listings inside an AI answer before they meet any website.

Regulation moved in two directions

2026 is the year state legislatures started overruling their own cities — in both directions at once. Idaho's HB 583 and Indiana's HEA 1210, both effective July 1, 2026, preempt local governments from capping, zoning out, or imposing owner-occupancy rules on short-term rentals. California went the opposite way: SB 346, effective January 1, gives any city that opts in by ordinance access to platform booking data — addresses and nights booked — turning enforcement from door-knocking into database work. And New York City kept demonstrating what maximal enforcement looks like: per the Office of Special Enforcement, more than $72 million in fines levied under Local Law 18, $3.6 million collected in settlements, and roughly 5,000 unregistered listings removed in the first year.

Beneath the statute headlines sits the measurable layer: licensing. There is still no national registry of short-term rentals, so in July 2026 Cavmir compiled every official registry we could verify — 21 of them, across 14 states — into a free, deduplicated dataset of 129,643 permit and license records. Florida alone is 39% of it; New Orleans' 24,000 applications against roughly 1,800 active licenses remains the starkest picture of a strict regime in public data. The full analysis is in The State of STR Permits 2026, and every state file is downloadable. As SB 346-style data-sharing spreads, expect registries — and datasets like this one — to become the regulation story's scoreboard.

Seasonality across 294 markets

This chapter is Cavmir first-party data. We maintain editorial demand profiles — twelve monthly demand tiers on a 1–5 scale, based on each market's real event calendar, climate, and travel patterns — for every U.S. market in our library: 294 markets across all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico as of September 2026. They are directional assessments by our research desk, not booking data — and in aggregate they map the shape of the American vacation-rental year:

Three findings stand out. First, July is the modal peak: 183 of 294 markets — 62% — count July among their strongest months, and two-thirds peak in summer at least in part. Second, fall is the sleeper: more markets peak in October (77) than in April and May combined (36 + 29), on foliage, festivals, and post-summer value. Third, the American market calendar is severe: 9 in 10 markets swing at least three tiers between their best and worst months, and only a handful hold steady year-round. 77 markets — about a quarter — are twin-peak, with two separate high seasons to staff, price, and market. The full panel is a free CSV download.

The economics of owning in 2026

AirDNA titled its midyear update “a better year to own than to buy,” and the ledger explains why. Working against buyers: mortgage rates above 6%, top-10 investment-market home prices averaging $296,000, and insurance — the Insurance Information Institute outlook and industry budgeting guidance put typical landlord premium increases at 10–20% at renewal, worst in hurricane- and wildfire-exposed markets, with STR-specific coverage increasingly required for permits.

Working for owners: the slowest competitive-supply growth since before the pandemic, rate-led RevPAR growth, an STR premium AirDNA's December outlook called its highest since 2022 — and taxes. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 2025) permanently restored 100% first-year bonus depreciation for qualifying property acquired after January 19, 2025, per AirDNA's analysis; under the prior schedule, 2026 buyers would have gotten just 20%. With cost-segregation studies typically identifying 25–30% of a property's depreciable basis as bonus-eligible, first-year tax math for a 2026 acquisition is dramatically better than the 2024–2025 rules it replaced. Ask your accountant — and note that yields near 14% in AirDNA's top-10 markets are before expenses, in markets few would have named five years ago.

What 2027 looks like

Every forecast in this report's sources points the same direction: 2027 improves on 2026 if inflation cools. AirDNA projects occupancy edging up to 57.5%, demand and investment strengthening as real incomes recover, ADR growth overtaking its Repeat Rent Index again, and supply beginning to recover as mortgage rates ease. By market type: coastal markets face tough comparisons against strong 2026 rates, mountain and lake destinations rebound if the snow returns, and mid-size drive-to cities keep accelerating. Hotels are forecast in the same lane — CoStar/Tourism Economics at +2.8% RevPAR for 2026 with PwC's May outlook near +2.9%.

The stated risks are concrete: the Iran ceasefire holding, energy prices, the pace of rate cuts — and one wildcard nobody priced a year ago, AI's effect on white-collar employment and equity markets, which would land directly on the higher-income households currently doing the industry's spending. We will score these forecasts against actuals in the 2027 edition of this report.

Methodology and sources

This report compiles the 2026 U.S. short-term rental market from primary sources: platform investor filings and shareholder letters (Airbnb, Expedia Group), industry analytics publishers (AirDNA, Key Data, AirROI), government and official bodies (U.S. Travel Association forecast, NYC Office of Special Enforcement, state legislation), insurance and tax references (Insurance Information Institute, OBBBA analyses), and Cavmir's own datasets: the 129,643-record permit compilation (July 2026) and the 294-market seasonality panel (September 2026).

Rules we held ourselves to. Every figure is attributed inline or in the indicator table — if we could not trace a number to a named source, it is not here. Where reputable sources disagree (booking windows; hotel forecasts revised mid-year), we present both readings rather than averaging methodologies that do not mix. Third-party figures belong to their publishers and are quoted here as reported, with links. Cavmir's seasonality tiers are editorial assessments, labeled as such. Forecasts are forecasts: 2026 full-year figures marked as forecasts are the latest published projections as of September 2026, not actuals. Market-size dollar estimates for the STR industry vary widely by methodology between research houses, so we deliberately anchor this report on operational indicators from named trackers instead of a single headline market-size claim.

This is the first edition of an annual series. The 2027 edition will publish in September 2027, score this year's forecasts against actuals, and refresh every dataset. Corrections: tell us and we will fix and note them.