Published October 2026. Every figure below comes from Booking.com’s own partner help pages and the General Delivery Terms, with independent reports where Booking.com does not publish a number, all checked in October 2026. This is one of a series: the overview of every platform is in Booking platform commissions: what hosts really pay, with Airbnb’s 15.5% in Airbnb host fees explained (2026) and Vrbo’s new 12% in Vrbo fees explained (2026).
The short version
- Booking.com charges the host a commission of 10% to 25% of each reservation, set when you sign up by country, property type and cancellation policy. About 15% is the global average and the rate most short term rental hosts see.
- It is charged on the room rate plus every fee you add: cleaning, extra guest, pet. Separately itemised taxes are outside it. Guests pay no Booking.com service fee, so the price you set is the price they see.
- The 15% is rarely the whole bill. Payments by Booking.com adds 1.1% to 3.1% per payout. If you are not VAT registered, Booking.com adds VAT to its commission and you cannot reclaim it. Preferred Partner adds about 3 points, Preferred Plus about 8, and Genius is a 10% to 20% discount you fund.
- A $1,000 reservation at the headline rate costs you $150. With payments and VAT on the commission it is closer to $190 to $210, and on Genius it is $900 in the first place.
- Since 14 November 2024 Booking.com cannot stop a property in the European Economic Area from offering a lower price on its own website. Outside the EEA, including the UK, check your contract before you undercut.
- Your own website still costs you 0%. On a Hello Hosty direct booking website the guest pays a 0.9% booking fee and you keep the full rate.
What the commission is, and what it is charged on
Booking.com has never charged guests a service fee. The whole cost sits with the host as a commission on each stay, agreed at registration. Booking.com does not publish a rate card: its help pages say the percentage depends on your country, property type and the programmes you join, and third parties report a spread of 10% to 25% with about 15% as the norm for apartments and holiday homes in most markets. Your exact rate is on the first page of your General Delivery Terms and on every monthly invoice.
The base is the total reservation price: the nightly rate plus any cleaning, extra guest, pet or other fees you add at booking. Local taxes that you set up as separate, itemised taxes in the extranet, such as city tax or an itemised VAT line, are excluded. A tax you have baked into the nightly rate is not, because Booking.com cannot see it. That is the first thing to check if your effective rate looks higher than 15%.
The second thing to check is VAT on the commission itself. Booking.com invoices from the Netherlands. If you give it a valid VAT number, the commission is reverse charged and nets to nothing. If you do not, it adds your country’s VAT to the commission invoice: 20% in the UK and France, 21% in Spain, 22% in Italy, and so on. On a 15% commission that is roughly 3 more points you cannot claim back. A non registered host in Spain is paying about 18% before anything else.
The add ons
Payments by Booking.com. If Booking.com collects the guest’s money and pays you out, it charges a payment fee of 1.1% to 3.1% of the payout, depending on your country and currency, deducted before the money reaches you. If you take the guest’s card details and charge them yourself, you pay your own processor instead and carry the fraud and no show risk. For many new properties it is the default option at sign up.
Preferred Partner and Preferred Plus. The thumbs up badge and the ranking boost come at a price Booking.com describes only as a small increase in commission. Operators and comparison sites consistently report about 3 points for Preferred, taking a 15% host to around 18%, and about 8 points for Preferred Plus, around 23%. Booking.com invites you in when your review score and performance qualify, and the extra commission applies to every booking, not just the ones the badge brought.
Genius. This is not a commission, it is a discount you fund. Level 1 is a 10% discount on your cheapest and most popular room type, applied by default once you opt in. Levels 2 and 3 add 15% and 20% options. Commission is charged on the discounted price, so a $100 night on Genius Level 1 becomes $90 to the guest, $13.50 to Booking.com and $76.50 to you before payments and VAT. Mobile rates, country rates and early booker deals work the same way: the discount is yours, the commission is theirs.
Cancellations and no shows. Commission is charged on money you actually collect. If a guest cancels inside a non refundable or partially refundable window and you charge them, you owe commission on the charge. If a guest does not turn up and you mark them as a no show in the extranet within 48 hours of the planned check out and waive the fee, no commission is due. Forget to mark it and you will be invoiced for a stay that never happened.
Invoicing. Unless Booking.com is handling your payments, commission is not deducted at source. You get one invoice in the first week of each month for every guest who checked out the month before, payable within 14 days. With Payments by Booking.com the commission and the payment fee come off each payout instead. Either way, the money you see in your bank is not the price the guest paid, and your owner statements need to say so.
What a booking really costs
Take a $1,000 reservation, rate plus cleaning fee, no itemised taxes. Commission at 15% is $150. Payments by Booking.com at 1.1% to 3.1% is $11 to $31. VAT on the commission if you are not registered, at 20%, is $30. So the realistic cost of that booking is $161 to $211 before any programme, and you keep $789 to $839. On Preferred Partner at 18% it is $191 to $247. On Genius Level 1 the guest pays $900, commission is $135, and after payments and VAT you keep $710 to $755 on a stay that would have been $1,000 on your own website.
Now compare the guest’s side. On Airbnb the guest pays $1,000 and you keep $845. On Vrbo from 29 October the guest pays $1,000 plus a service fee of around 11% to 14%, and you keep $880. On Booking.com the guest pays $1,000 and you keep $789 to $839, or less on a programme. On Agoda, Booking.com’s sister company, the guest pays $1,000 and you keep about $820 before its growth programmes; see Agoda commission explained (2026). Booking.com is the one platform where the headline rate understates the bill, because the extras are itemised somewhere else.
Side by side
Checked October 2026. Figures are for a $1,000 reservation before itemised taxes. Booking.com figures marked reported come from operator and comparison site accounts because Booking.com does not publish them.
| Booking.com | Airbnb | Vrbo from 29 Oct 2026 | Your own website on Hello Hosty | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Host fee | 10% to 25%, about 15% | 15.5% | 12% (12% to 15% some regions) | 0% |
| Payment processing | 1.1% to 3.1% if Booking.com pays you | Included | Included where Vrbo processes | Your own gateway |
| VAT on the fee if not registered | Yes, local rate, about 3 points | Included in the fee shown | Added where applicable | None |
| Guest fee | None | None | About 11% to 14% | 0.9% booking fee |
| Visibility programmes | Preferred about plus 3 points, Preferred Plus about plus 8 (reported); Genius 10% to 20% discount you fund | None | None | None |
| You keep on $1,000 | $789 to $839, less on a programme | $845 | $880 | $1,000 (guest pays $1,009) |
| Can you price your own site lower? | Yes in the EEA since 14 Nov 2024; check your contract elsewhere | Yes | Rate parity clause in the Host Terms | It is your site |
What to do now
Read your invoice. Find your commission rate, check whether VAT is being added to it, and if it is, decide whether registering for VAT would cost you less than paying 20% on every commission for the rest of your hosting life. Then open the extranet and make sure every tax you can itemise is itemised, so you are not paying commission on tax.
Price Booking.com to carry its own cost. The guest sees the whole price, so the number you put in the extranet should be grossed up for the commission, the payment fee and, if you are on it, the Preferred uplift. To net the same as your own website at 15% plus 2%, the Booking.com rate needs to be about 20% higher. Hello Hosty’s channel manager lets you set a rate modifier per platform, up or down by an amount or a percentage, so Booking.com can sit 20% above your website and Airbnb 18% above it without you touching three calendars.
Treat Genius and Preferred as marketing spend, not fees. Each one buys ranking and conversion. Each one costs 3 to 20 points of every booking it touches, including the bookings you would have had anyway. Try a quarter on, a quarter off, and compare the net, not the occupancy.
Use the parity change. If your properties are in the European Economic Area, Booking.com has not been allowed to hold you to its price on your own website since 14 November 2024, and in September 2026 it told the European Commission it would stop using your outside prices to decide who gets into Preferred and Genius. That means you can show a lower rate on your own site, say so in your guidebook and your post stay emails, and let the guest do the maths. If you are in the UK or anywhere else outside the EEA, read your General Delivery Terms first: the clause may still be there.
The money left on the table
Take a 20 property manager turning over $1,000,000 a year with $400,000 of it through Booking.com. Commission at 15% is $60,000. Payments by Booking.com at 2% is $8,000. If the business is not VAT registered, VAT on the commission is another $12,000. That is $80,000 a year, 20% of the Booking.com revenue, before a single Genius discount. Put the whole portfolio on Genius Level 1 and the discounts cost a further $40,000 in price before the commission is even calculated.
Now move one fifth of that Booking.com volume, $80,000, to your own website: repeat guests, guests who found you on Google, guests who read the lower rate in your guidebook. The commission, payment fee and VAT on it drop from about $16,000 to nothing, and the guest pays a 0.9% booking fee that never touches your payout. That is $16,000 a year back, $48,000 over three years. The software that makes it possible costs $410 a month for those 20 properties on Hello Hosty, $4,920 a year, website included. The Booking.com saving alone pays for it three times over.
To be fair to Booking.com, it brings a guest the others do not: international, often last minute, often paying by card on the day, and it is the only one of the three that has never put a fee on the guest’s side. For a city apartment it is frequently the largest channel. The point is not to leave it. The point is to price it for what it costs, and to stop sending it the guests who would have booked you anyway.
Hello Hosty includes a direct booking website on your own domain in every subscription, with the channel manager for Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, Agoda, Trip.com and 50 plus platforms, rate modifiers per platform, monthly owner statements per property that show the commission as well as the payout, the AI assistant that answers guests on every channel, and the digital guidebook that collects the guest’s email so the second booking comes to you. $24 per property per month, $17 from your 11th and $12 from your 31st (£17, £12 and £9 in the UK), no setup fee, free migration, and every price on the website. Nothing is taken from your bookings.
Frequently asked questions
What commission does Booking.com charge hosts in 2026?
Between 10% and 25% of each reservation, agreed when you register and depending on your country, property type and cancellation policy. About 15% is the global average and the rate most apartment and holiday home hosts see. Booking.com does not publish a rate card; your rate is in your General Delivery Terms and on every monthly invoice. Guests pay no Booking.com service fee.
What is Booking.com’s commission charged on?
The total reservation price: the nightly rate plus every fee you add at booking, including cleaning, extra guest and pet fees. Taxes you set up as separate, itemised lines in the extranet, such as city tax, are excluded. A tax you have built into the nightly rate is commissioned like any other part of the rate, so itemise everything you can.
Does Booking.com charge VAT on its commission?
If you give Booking.com a valid VAT number, the commission is reverse charged and the VAT nets to zero. If you are not VAT registered, Booking.com adds your country’s VAT to its commission invoice and you cannot reclaim it: 20% in the UK and France, 21% in Spain, 22% in Italy. On a 15% commission that is about 3 extra points, so a non registered host is paying around 18% before payment fees.
What is the Payments by Booking.com fee?
When Booking.com collects the guest’s payment and pays you out by bank transfer or virtual card, it charges a payment fee of 1.1% to 3.1% of the payout, depending on your country and currency, deducted before the money reaches you. If you charge the guest’s card yourself you avoid it but pay your own processor and carry the no show and fraud risk.
What do Preferred Partner and Genius cost?
Preferred Partner adds a commission uplift Booking.com describes as small and operators report at about 3 points, taking a 15% host to around 18%. Preferred Plus is reported at about 8 points, around 23%. Genius is not a commission but a discount you fund: 10% on your cheapest and most popular room type by default, with 15% and 20% options at higher levels. Commission is then charged on the discounted price.
Do I pay commission on cancellations and no shows?
Only on money you collect. If you charge a guest under a non refundable or partially refundable policy, commission is due on that charge. If a guest does not arrive, mark them as a no show in the extranet within 48 hours of the planned check out and waive the fee, and no commission is due. If you do not mark it, Booking.com will invoice commission on the full stay.
Can I offer a lower price on my own website than on Booking.com?
In the European Economic Area, yes. Since 14 November 2024 Booking.com has been barred under the Digital Markets Act from preventing a property offering lower prices on its own site or other channels, and in September 2026 it confirmed to the European Commission that outside prices no longer affect access to Preferred, Genius or the Sponsored Benefit programme. Outside the EEA, including the UK, check your General Delivery Terms, because a parity clause may still apply.
Is Booking.com cheaper than Airbnb for hosts?
On the headline, 15% against 15.5%, barely. In practice Airbnb’s 15.5% includes payment processing and the VAT where it applies, while Booking.com’s 15% has the 1.1% to 3.1% payment fee, VAT for non registered hosts and any programme uplift on top, so a Booking.com host in Europe commonly pays 18% to 21% all in. The cheapest channel is still your own. A direct booking website on your own domain is included with Hello Hosty; the guest pays a 0.9% booking fee and you keep the full rate. Try it free for 14 days.
Sources: Booking.com Partner Help (commission, invoices, Payments by Booking.com, Genius, no shows), Booking.com General Delivery Terms, the European Commission’s fact sheet of 28 September 2026 and the Court of Justice of the European Union ruling of 19 September 2024, and reports from Houst (11 May 2026), RentTools (18 August 2026), Nowistay (15 October 2026), Hospitality ON (30 September 2026) and Skift, all checked October 2026. If Booking.com publishes a rate or changes a rule, tell us and we will update this page. That is a standing promise.