Data & research
How much do hosts lose to OTA commission per year? A real £ breakdown by revenue band
Everyone quotes the percentage. Almost nobody works out the pound figure. Here is exactly how much a UK host hands to Airbnb and Booking.com in a year, band by band, why it grows as you grow, and how much of it you could keep by booking repeat guests direct.
Updated 7 July 2026 · 7 min read
Short answer
A UK host turning over £40,000 a year in bookings hands roughly £6,200 to Airbnb at the 15.5% host-only fee, or about £7,440 once 20% VAT is added for a non-VAT-registered host. Booking.com is similar at £6,000 to £7,200. At £100,000 gross that becomes £15,000 to £18,600 a year, every single year.
Key takeaways
- ✓At the 15.5% Airbnb host-only fee, a £40,000 host loses about £6,200 a year; non-VAT-registered hosts pay ~18.6% effective (VAT on top), or roughly £7,440.
- ✓Booking.com's base is about 15%, but Preferred Partner, Genius and Visibility Booster commonly push the real cost to 17-20%+, so £6,000 becomes £7,000-£8,000 on the same revenue.
- ✓The bill compounds as you grow: the percentage is fixed, so a bigger business simply means a bigger cheque. £100k gross is £15,000-£18,600 a year gone.
- ✓A flat-fee direct site costs a fixed few hundred pounds whether you turn over £20k or £100k, so the more you earn, the more lopsided the comparison gets.
- ✓You do not have to move every booking. Shifting just your repeat and referred guests to direct can claw back thousands a year at zero commission.
Every host knows the headline number: Airbnb takes around 15%, Booking.com around 15%. What almost nobody stops to calculate is what that percentage adds up to in actual pounds over a year, and how much bigger the cheque gets as the business grows. So let's do the arithmetic properly, band by band, using the 2026 UK rates, and turn a vague percentage into a number you can act on. Every figure below is reproducible from a stated rate, so you can check it against your own turnover.
How much do hosts actually lose to OTA commission per year?
It depends entirely on your turnover, because commission is a percentage, not a flat fee. At Airbnb's 15.5% host-only rate (rolling out across the UK through June 2026), a host doing £20,000 a year in bookings loses £3,100; at £40,000 it's £6,200; at £100,000 it's £15,500. Non-VAT-registered UK hosts pay more, because Airbnb adds 20% VAT on top of its fee and you can't reclaim it, taking the effective rate to about 18.6%. Booking.com's base is roughly 15%, but the extras it sells (Preferred Partner, Genius, Visibility Booster) routinely lift the real cost to 17-20% or more. Here's the full picture.
| Gross booking revenue | Airbnb 15.5% | Airbnb 18.6% (non-VAT) | Booking.com 15% | Booking.com 18% (effective) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £20,000 | £3,100 | £3,720 | £3,000 | £3,600 |
| £40,000 | £6,200 | £7,440 | £6,000 | £7,200 |
| £60,000 | £9,300 | £11,160 | £9,000 | £10,800 |
| £100,000 | £15,500 | £18,600 | £15,000 | £18,000 |
Annual commission paid on gross booking revenue, at 2026 UK rates. Airbnb 15.5% is the host-only fee; 18.6% is the effective rate for a non-VAT-registered host (20% VAT added on top). Booking.com 15% is the base rate; 18% is a typical effective rate once Preferred Partner / Genius / payment fees are included. Figures are the stated rate multiplied by gross revenue.
Read that bottom row again. A host with a strong single property or a small portfolio doing £100,000 a year is handing over somewhere between £15,000 and £18,600 every year, indefinitely, for the privilege of being listed. That is not a one-off setup cost; it recurs for as long as those bookings come through the platform.
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Build my free preview →Why does the same percentage cost more as you grow?
Because a percentage of a bigger number is a bigger number. This sounds obvious, but it's the single most under-appreciated fact in short-let economics. When you're doing £20k a year, 15.5% feels like a fair price for the demand a platform brings. When you've built the same listing up to £60k, that identical 15.5% is now £9,300 a year, and the platform is doing nothing extra to earn the extra £6,200 it takes from you versus the smaller host. You did the work: better photos, better reviews, better pricing, more repeat guests. The commission simply rode along and scaled with you.
£6,200
Airbnb commission on £40k of bookings, at 15.5% (before VAT)
18.6%
Effective Airbnb fee for a non-VAT-registered UK host
£18,600
A single year's cost at £100k gross, at that 18.6% effective rate
The compounding trap
Commission is the one cost in your business that grows in lockstep with your success and never negotiates itself down. Cut your cleaning, your linen, your energy bill and you save a fixed amount. The platform fee only ever gets bigger as you get better.
What does that commission buy the platform, and what would a direct site cost?
Commission buys you distribution: a huge audience of ready-to-book strangers, and the trust and payment rails that come with a global brand. For your first booking from a new guest, that's genuinely valuable, and worth paying for. Where the maths turns sour is the repeat booking, and the referral, and the guest who Googles your place by name after seeing it once. On those, the platform adds little but still takes its full cut.
Now put the two cost structures side by side. A platform charges a percentage that scales forever. A flat-fee direct site charges a fixed amount that doesn't. A FindYourStay listing runs roughly £79 to £299 a year depending on plan, plus about £120 a year for the done-for-you booking website add-on, so call it a few hundred pounds all-in, whatever your turnover. Set that against the table above and the gap is stark: at £40k gross you're comparing ~£300 a year to £6,200; at £100k, ~£300 against £15,500. The direct site doesn't replace the platforms, it just means the bookings you'd have won anyway (repeat, referred, name-searched) stop paying a percentage they don't need to.
| Gross booking revenue | Airbnb at 15.5% | Flat-fee direct site (all-in) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| £20,000 | £3,100 | ~£300 | ~£2,800 |
| £40,000 | £6,200 | ~£300 | ~£5,900 |
| £60,000 | £9,300 | ~£300 | ~£9,000 |
| £100,000 | £15,500 | ~£300 | ~£15,200 |
Recurring cost of platform commission versus a flat-fee direct site, per year, on the same gross revenue. Airbnb figure uses the 15.5% host-only rate. Direct-site figure is a representative all-in cost (listing plus booking-website add-on).
💷 The commission you're giving away
£100 booking × 15.5% (Airbnb) × 60 a year = about £930 a year handed to the platform.
Direct bookings cost 0% commission, just ~1.5% card processing. You'd keep about £840 of that back.
See your free site →How much of it could you actually keep?
Not all of it, and you shouldn't try to. The realistic prize is your repeat and referred bookings, the cheapest bookings in hospitality because they carry no acquisition cost. If a third of your nights come from guests who'd happily come back or were sent by a friend, then on £60,000 of turnover that's roughly £20,000 of bookings you could take direct, saving about £3,100 a year in Airbnb commission alone (£20,000 × 15.5%), or nearer £3,720 if you're non-VAT-registered. Keep the platforms for discovery; keep the commission on everything else.
Where the free money is
You have already paid the acquisition cost on every past guest, once. A repeat guest booked direct is pure margin: no platform, no percentage, no middleman. Moving even a handful of loyal guests off-platform each year quietly pays for the direct site many times over.
This is entirely within the rules, provided you win the repeat booking through your own brand and channels rather than diverting a live platform reservation. We cover exactly where that line sits in how to move Airbnb guests to direct booking.
So what's the real number for my place?
Take your gross booking revenue for the last twelve months and multiply by your rate: 0.155 for the Airbnb host-only fee, 0.186 if you're non-VAT-registered, and around 0.15 to 0.20 for Booking.com depending on which extras you've opted into. That single figure is what a fixed-fee direct channel is competing against, and it's almost always a fraction of it. If you'd rather not do the sums by hand, our OTA commission calculator works it out from your own numbers, and Booking.com vs Airbnb vs direct, compared shows the three side by side. The percentages are small. The pounds, once you add them up over a year, are not.
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See how it works →Frequently asked questions
How much do hosts lose to Airbnb commission per year?+
At the 2026 host-only fee of 15.5%, a UK host loses about £3,100 a year on £20,000 of bookings, £6,200 on £40,000, and £15,500 on £100,000. Non-VAT-registered hosts pay an effective ~18.6% because Airbnb adds 20% VAT on top, so those figures rise to roughly £3,720, £7,440 and £18,600.
How much commission does Booking.com take in a year?+
Booking.com's base is around 15%, so £3,000 on £20,000 of bookings, up to £15,000 on £100,000. In practice Preferred Partner, Genius discounts and Visibility Booster commonly push the effective rate to 17-20% or more, so the real annual cost is often 15-30% higher than the base figure suggests.
Why does commission cost more the more I earn?+
Because it's a percentage, not a flat fee. The same 15.5% is £3,100 on £20,000 of bookings but £15,500 on £100,000. As you improve your listing and grow your revenue, the platform's cut grows in exact proportion, without the platform doing anything extra to earn it.
How much can I save by taking bookings direct?+
A flat-fee direct site costs a fixed few hundred pounds a year regardless of turnover, versus thousands in commission. If you move just your repeat and referred guests direct, say a third of a £60,000 business, you'd save roughly £3,100 a year in Airbnb commission alone, many times the cost of the site.
Are these commission figures accurate for 2026?+
They're built from the stated 2026 UK rates: Airbnb's 15.5% host-only fee (18.6% effective for non-VAT-registered hosts, with 20% VAT added), and Booking.com's roughly 15% base rate rising to 17-20%+ with optional programmes. Each pound figure is simply the rate multiplied by revenue, so you can reproduce and check any of them against your own turnover.
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