Revenue management, answered

What should I charge for cleaning relative to my cost and the market, and should I fold it into the nightly rate?

Charge cleaning as a pass-through at cost, then add a margin that reflects local market tolerance. Keep it as a separate line item. Folding it in inflates your nightly rate, hurts search ranking, and obscures your true labor cost.

By Jack Murphy, Head of Revenue Management at UpRev. Running pricing for US vacation rental managers since 2017. Last updated September 1, 2026.

Separate Line Item Is Almost Always the Right Call

When cleaning is buried in the nightly rate, short stays become unprofitable and long stays subsidize your ops cost invisibly. A separate fee lets you adjust cleaning independently as vendor costs shift without repricing the whole calendar. It also gives guests a transparent breakdown, which reduces disputes and chargeback risk. The only exception is luxury or all-inclusive positioning, where a bundled rate is a deliberate brand signal, not a default.

Setting the Fee Relative to Cost and Market

Start with your actual cleaning cost per turn, including labor, supplies, and any vendor markup you take as a management fee. Then audit what comparable properties in the market are charging, looking at total trip cost rather than just the cleaning line in isolation. If your fee is materially above market, you lose conversions on short stays where guests do that math quickly. If you are below cost, you are subsidizing owners and eroding your own margin, which is a common mistake in competitive markets.

Protecting Margin Across Your Portfolio

As a professional manager pricing multiple properties, you need a cleaning fee structure that holds across varying unit sizes and owner contracts. Build tiered fee schedules by unit type, bedroom count, or square footage so you are never eating the difference on a large property that costs twice as much to clean. Review your cost structure at least twice a year, since cleaning vendor rates move and locking in stale numbers quietly kills profitability. Owners rarely push back on transparent, justified fee structures when you can show the cost basis behind them.