Free tool
What are booking fees costing you?
Most UK hosts now pay Airbnb a host-only service fee of 15.5% on each booking (18.6% where VAT applies). Enter your own figures to see what taking some bookings direct could save, and how long a direct-booking website takes to pay for itself.
Calculate your booking fees
What one property is booked for in a month. The figures below multiply it by the number of properties.
Average booking £420, about 6.7 stays a month across the site.
Each property is counted at the nightly rate and the nights above, so two properties pay twice the fees and save twice as much. The website only costs £200 more for each one after the first.
A website doesn't bring guests on its own. Direct bookings usually come from repeat guests, referrals, social media and people who search for your property by name. Airbnb doesn't allow hosts to ask or encourage guests who booked through Airbnb to book or pay outside Airbnb, so keep your listings running and only count bookings you'd realistically take yourself.
Effective fee: 18.6%
Where VAT applies to Airbnb's fee and you're not VAT registered, you can't reclaim it. Check your Airbnb earnings statement.
£799 (usually £1,299) for one property, plus £200 for each additional property on the same site. Hosting and email are free for 12 months, then £25 a month.
Card fee settings
Standard UK cards on Stripe. EU cards cost 2.5% + 20p and other international cards 3.15% + 20p, so change these if many of your guests pay with them.
Fee saving a month (estimate)
£143
Fee saving a year (estimate)
£1,719
Site pays for itself in
5.6 months (estimate)
Net saving over 3 years
£3,758
After the website and hosting.
At £140 a night and 20 nights a month, Airbnb fees on all those nights would be about £521 a month at 18.6%. Taking 30% direct keeps about £156 of that, less about £13 in card fees. On a booking taken through your own site you avoid the platform's host fee, but you still pay card fees (for example Stripe's 1.5% + 20p per booking on standard UK cards).
How we worked this out
Estimates only. We use the nightly rate, nights booked per property, average stay, share of bookings taken direct and number of properties that you enter. Where you have more than one property we treat that rate and those nights as an average across all of them, so a quiet property and a busy one come out the same here when in reality they will not. We also use Airbnb's host fee (15.5%, or 18.6% with 20% VAT if you leave VAT on) and Stripe card fees (1.5% + 20p per booking unless you change them). Savings only come from bookings made directly on your own site, and we assume those guests would otherwise have booked through Airbnb. The website cost is £799 for one property plus £200 for each extra property. Hosting and email are free for 12 months, then £25 a month, which is included in the payback and 3-year figures. Cleaning fees, your time and any other costs aren't included.
These figures are an estimate, not a promise of savings. Airbnb and Stripe can change their fees at any time, and what you actually pay depends on your listing, your guests' cards and your circumstances. This is not tax, VAT or financial advice.
Where these figures come from
Airbnb charges most UK hosts a host-only service fee of 15.5% of the booking total, taken straight out of the payout. The UK finished moving across from the older arrangement, which took roughly 3% from the host and charged the guest the rest at checkout, on 22 June 2026. We last checked the rate on 18 October 2026.
The calculator works on one month. It takes your nightly rate times the nights you are booked times the number of properties, keeps only the share you say you would take direct, and works out the host fee you would avoid on that share. It then takes your card fees off again, because a direct booking still costs you a percentage plus a flat fee per transaction. What is left is the saving. The payback divides the build cost by that saving, and once the 12 free months are up it carries the £25 a month hosting too, so a saving smaller than the hosting bill correctly never pays anything back.
The saving only counts the share of bookings you enter as direct. Set it to 10% and that is what the figures describe: a tenth of your nights, not all of them.
Airbnb fees on all nights at £140 a night (15.5%, before VAT)
These are the fees themselves, not savings. What you could save is whatever share of them you would realistically take direct.
- 20 nights a month: £434 a month, £5,208 a year
- 25 nights a month: £543 a month, £6,510 a year
- A full 30-night month: £651 a month, £7,812 a year
At 18.6% with VAT, 20 nights is about £521 a month.
If you are not VAT registered, it is worse
Where VAT applies to Airbnb's fee and you're not VAT registered, you can't reclaim it, which takes the effective rate to about 18.6%. The calculator includes VAT by default, and you can switch it off. Check your Airbnb earnings statement.
A direct booking is cheaper, not free
The host fee goes, the card fee does not. Stripe takes 1.5% plus 20p a booking on standard UK cards, more on EU and other international ones, and the calculator takes that off the saving rather than leaving it out. You can change both figures under "Card fee settings" rather than guessing which applies to your guests.
A direct site is not instead of the platforms
Almost nobody should delist. The listing keeps finding guests who have never heard of the property, and that introduction is worth paying for. What a direct site changes is everything after it: the guest who comes back, the contractor booking four weeks, the family given your name by a friend, and the person who searches for the property by name having seen the listing once. Those bookings pay full commission today for an introduction that already happened.
That is what Shropshire Retreat does: availability, booking and payment on the owner's own site, with the listings still running alongside it.
These figures are an estimate, not a promise of savings. Airbnb and Stripe can change their fees at any time, and what you actually pay depends on your listing, your guests' cards and your circumstances. This is not tax, VAT or financial advice.