Which Airbnb Markets Have the Highest Occupancy Rates?

Search for the highest Airbnb occupancy rates and you will find a dozen city rankings that disagree with each other, because each one measures a different thing and none of them is measuring your street. This guide does something more useful: it explains what actually produces a high occupancy market, gives you the five structural signals that separate one from a busy-looking one, and shows you how to get a real figure for the specific place you care about. It also covers the trap nobody mentions, which is that the highest-occupancy markets are frequently the worst ones to buy into.

Which markets have the highest Airbnb occupancy rates?

Short answer: the markets that run highest are the ones with demand on every night of the week rather than only weekends, supply that is capped by regulation or geography, and short average stays. Dense city centres and heavily restricted destinations top the list. Seasonal resorts do not, despite peaking higher than anywhere.

• Weekday plus weekend demand — business travel that overlaps with leisure fills Monday to Thursday, which is where most markets lose their nights
• Constrained supply — a permit cap, a licence requirement or simply nowhere left to build keeps new listings from diluting demand
• Short minimum stays — markets where one and two-night bookings are normal have fewer gap nights structurally
• Year-round reason to visit — a hospital, a university, a port, a convention centre, rather than a beach
• Flat or falling listing count — the signal that decides whether today's occupancy survives next year

Why we do not publish a city ranking

This is worth being direct about. A ranked table of cities with occupancy percentages beside them would be the easiest thing to write and the least trustworthy thing on this site, for three reasons.

• The denominator is not standard. Some sources divide by nights the host made available, others by every night in the calendar. On the same listing those two produce answers twenty points apart
• Nobody can see a booking from outside. Every market estimate is built by reading public calendars, and a blocked night looks exactly like a sold one
• A city is not a market. Downtown and the suburb forty minutes out share a city name and nothing else that matters to your calendar

So the honest answer to which city has the highest Airbnb occupancy rate is that no published figure survives scrutiny: each one uses a different denominator, infers bookings from calendars it cannot see inside, and treats an entire city as one market. The structural signals below predict a market better than any table of names ever will.

So instead of a number we cannot stand behind, the rest of this article is the method for getting one you can, plus the structure that tells you what to expect before you measure.

What kind of market produces high occupancy

Read the table as a set of ceilings rather than a ranking. What counts as a high occupancy rate is high relative to what the market structurally allows: a weekend-driven area sitting in the fifties may be at its limit, while a city-centre listing at the same number is underperforming badly. Seasonal markets are the ones most often misjudged on this. They can be excellent, but only if you judge them by season instead of by annual average, and budget the empty off-season months as a cost of the peak rather than treating them as a failure.

In plain English: occupancy is mostly decided by why people come and whether they come on a Tuesday. A market where the reason to visit is a weekend attraction has a ceiling built into it, and no amount of listing optimisation raises a ceiling.

The trap: high occupancy is not the same as a good market

The markets that report the highest occupancy are often the ones where the nightly rate has been competed down until the calendar has to be full for the numbers to work. Full at a low rate is not the same business as three-quarters full at a strong one.

• Market A: 82 percent occupancy, $70 average nightly rate = $57.40 per available night
• Market B: 58 percent occupancy, $165 average nightly rate = $95.70 per available night
• Difference: Market B earns 67 percent more per night offered, on a calendar that looks far worse
• And costs less to run: fewer nights sold means fewer turnovers, fewer cleans, less wear

All figures above are illustrative. The arithmetic is the point, and it is the same arithmetic set out in what counts as a good Airbnb occupancy rate: the honest measure is revenue per available night, and occupancy on its own can move in the wrong direction while it improves.

Meet Tomas: the market he did not buy in

Tomas was choosing between two towns and had a ranking that put the first one well ahead on occupancy. All figures below are illustrative.

• Town 1, from the ranking: high occupancy, and 40 percent more listings than a year earlier
• Town 1, from his own sample: ten comparable listings, calendars mostly empty until the final fortnight
• Town 2, lower in the ranking: listing count flat, calendars filling six weeks out, wider rate spread
• What he concluded: the ranking was describing last year, and supply was already correcting it

Before: a decision based on a published table. After: a decision based on forty minutes of counting calendars in both places. Why it wins: the published figure is a rear-view mirror, and supply growth is the windscreen.

How to find the highest-occupancy areas near you

To find the highest-occupancy areas near you, sample three candidate areas by hand: pick a window 45 to 75 days out, count unavailable nights across ten comparable listings in each, and note the spread between the cheapest and dearest. It costs nothing, takes an afternoon, and beats any published ranking for the question you actually have.

• Pick three candidate areas and a date window 45 to 75 days out
• Filter to genuinely comparable listings — same bedroom count, same standard, same walkable area
• Count unavailable nights across ten listings per area for the next 30 days
• Note the rate spread between the cheapest and dearest of those ten
• Repeat in a month and compare listing counts — growth is the number that predicts next year

The step-by-step version, including where each source stops being reliable, is in how to find Airbnb occupancy rates. If you already operate in the area, your own dashboard figure beats every estimate, and the tools landscape is covered in Airbnb analytics tools.

The five signals, in the order to check them

If you are assessing a market this week, this is the sequence. Each one is free, and the first two eliminate most candidates before you spend time on the rest.

• 1. Is it legal, and will it stay legal? Permit requirements, caps, and whether new permits are still being issued. A market you cannot operate in has an occupancy rate of zero regardless of what any ranking says
• 2. Is supply growing? Count listings for a fixed filter today and again in a month. Growth above single digits per quarter will eat today's occupancy before you finish furnishing
• 3. Does midweek sell? Look at a Tuesday and a Wednesday 45 days out across ten comparable listings. This single check separates a genuine year-round market from a weekend one
• 4. How wide is the rate spread? A tight cluster at the bottom means the market competes on price and your margin will be thin whatever your calendar looks like
• 5. What is the reason people come? A hospital, a university or an employer produces demand every week. An attraction produces it on a schedule you do not control

Two of those deserve a warning. Regulation cuts both ways: where it caps supply it genuinely does lift occupancy for the hosts already permitted, and it simultaneously raises the risk that you cannot operate at all — so check whether new permits are still being issued before you buy, not after. And supply is not a one-off check. Count listings quarterly and calendar fill monthly, because the number that moves your occupancy without you touching anything is how many competitors appeared since you last looked. A market that was strong two years ago and has been adding listings ever since is a different market now.

Signals three and five usually agree, and when they disagree, trust three. What people say brings them to a place and what actually fills a Tuesday are different things.

Why occupancy differs inside the same city

Occupancy differs inside one city because distance to the reason people visit, transport, parking, bedroom count and local supply density all split it into separate markets. The variation between two neighbourhoods is routinely larger than the variation between two cities, which is why a citywide figure rarely describes any listing in it, including yours.

• Distance to the reason people came: ten minutes further out can halve midweek demand while barely changing the weekend
• Parking: decisive in a drive-to market, irrelevant where guests arrive by train
• Bedroom count: one-bedrooms and four-bedrooms in the same street serve different travellers with different weekly patterns
• Building type: a block with a lift and one without perform differently for the same nightly rate

This is why the manual sample beats the ranking: it is the only method that measures the handful of listings a guest is actually choosing between when they choose you.

Myths about high-occupancy markets

Myth: the top-ranked cities are the best places to buy.

Reality: a published ranking measures the past, and the markets in it attract the supply that erodes it. Listing growth matters more than last year's occupancy.

Myth: a resort town has high occupancy.

Reality: it has extraordinary occupancy for part of the year and almost none for the rest. The annual mean describes a business that does not exist in any single month.

Myth: regulation is bad for occupancy.

Reality: for the hosts who hold a permit, a supply cap is the single most protective thing a market can have. The risk is being on the wrong side of it.

Everything above judges a market on demand. If the reason you are reading it is that you are about to buy, demand is only one of six things that decide whether the purchase works — price against achievable rate, regulation, supply trend, turnover count and exit liquidity are the others, and they are worked through in how to choose where to buy an Airbnb.

Mistakes hosts make chasing high-occupancy markets

• Buying on a ranking without sampling the street. The area you can afford inside a top-ranked city is usually not the part of it that produced the ranking.
• Ignoring the listing count trend. Occupancy today with supply growing 40 percent a year is a temporary number.
• Forgetting regulation cuts both ways. Entering a capped market without checking whether new permits are issued is how people buy an asset they cannot legally operate.
• Comparing annual averages across market types. A ski town and a city centre cannot be ranked against each other on one number without both being misdescribed.
• Optimising a structural ceiling. In a weekend market, no listing improvement fills Tuesdays. Better to price the weekends properly and stop fighting midweek.

What to do if your market is not a high-occupancy one

Most are not, and it matters less than it sounds. A weekend market with a strong rate and few turnovers can out-earn a busy city listing after costs. What changes is which levers are worth pulling.

• Fill the gaps rather than chase new demand — in a weekend market the one and two-night holes around a Saturday booking are the cheapest nights available, covered in how to fill Airbnb gap nights automatically
• Shorten minimum stays out of season so the demand that exists can actually book — ranked among the other levers in how to increase your Airbnb occupancy rate
• Protect the rate rather than discounting into a structural gap — see the pricing tools comparison
• Keep placement strong through reply speed and review velocity — how the search ranking algorithm works

BnBGenius carries the parts of that list that have to run continuously — replies at any hour, gap-night and extension offers through the Upsell Engine, and reviews posted after checkout — for $10 per month flat across any number of listings, with the first 500 messages free. It does not choose your market and it does not set your rate. If you are still deciding whether to list at all, how Airbnb works for owners covers what falls to you, and how to start an Airbnb covers the order to do it in. Platform rules that vary by location live in the Airbnb Help Center.