Every “best cities for Airbnb” list has the same markets: Gatlinburg, Joshua Tree, Scottsdale, and the Smokies. 

We looked at things differently to show you what the data is actually saying. This data produced Sandusky, Ohio.

BNBCalc pulled it themselves: 462 cities across all 50 states, every one backed by at least 50 real properties. I ranked the best city in each state by revenue per dollar of purchase price, then threw out the ones their own quality review flagged.

What’s left is a list of places nobody is making content about, which is the entire reason to read it. The markets everybody talks about are priced like everybody’s talking about them.

Then keep going past the list. Underneath it, I put a mortgage on the median winner, and about half of this stops working.

Why Gross Yield Matters

Every number below is modeled gross yield: annual revenue divided by home value. There’s no mortgage, down payment, property taxes, insurance, cleaning, utilities, or management fee factored in. Gross yield is what a property throws off before anybody touches it.

That sounds weaker than the cash-on-cash returns I was working with a month ago, and in one way, it is. Cash-on-cash tells you what actually lands in your account, and this measures something a step earlier than that.

But cash-on-cash only works if you accept somebody else’s guesses about your deal, like your rate, down payment, expense ratio, and whether you’re hiring a manager. Miss any of those, and the number breaks down without telling you which assumption did it.

Gross yield carries none of that. It’s revenue over price, the same for me as it is for you. Then you add your own financing and expenses, which is what I do further down. That’s where this list gets uncomfortable.

The Best Short-Term Rental City in Every State, by Gross Yield

Here’s every percentage modeled by gross yield, annual revenue divided by home value, best to worst by state and then city.

How the rankings work: BNBCalc ranked cities by modeled gross yield; annual short-term rental revenue divided by the city’s median home value for the same bedroom count. We used the median result and required enough listings and independent hosts to prevent one unusual property from skewing the ranking.

Source: BNBCalc national analysis of short-term rental performance and city-level median home values segmented by bedroom count, based on 10M Airbnb & VRBO Listings.

Kansas City appears twice, once on each side of the state line, and the Kansas side yields better.

Now, the Uncomfortable Part

The median winner yields 10.91%. That’s a healthy-sounding number. Let’s go buy one (with less paperwork than it actually takes, luckily).

Take the median property: $251,338, producing $27,671 a year. At 20% down, it puts $50,267 of your money in. Finance the rest on a 30-year note at 7%, and debt service runs $16,052. Operating expenses at 37.5% of revenue, covering cleaning, supplies, utilities, insurance, taxes, and repairs, take another $10,376.

You clear about $1,241. On $50,267 in, that’s a 2.5% cash-on-cash return. You’d do better in a savings account, and you wouldn’t have to unclog anything.

Now hire somebody to run it, because you live four states away and you aren’t driving out to meet a plumber. A property manager takes roughly 20% of gross, which is $5,534 here. That means you’re losing about $4,292 a year.

Run it backward, and you get the number I keep thinking about. Covering debt service and operating costs at those assumptions, before a single dollar of profit, takes a gross yield of roughly 10.5%. Twenty-six of these 50 cities clear it, while 24 don’t. That means roughly half the best-in-state list doesn’t break even on a conventional purchase at today’s rates.

That’s the actual lesson. Nobody eyeballs a ranking and finds a deal. Everything between a 10.91% gross yield and money in your account is a decision you make after closing.

Five to Watch

Sandusky, Ohio

A 15.35% gross yield on 181 properties at $145,150, and the top of this list. Cedar Point drives the calendar. At 48% independent hosts, the market hasn’t fully professionalized, which is the most interesting combination on here for somebody who wants a real shot at outrunning the competition.

Detroit, Michigan

A 15.1% gross yield on 506 properties, one of the deeper samples, at $137,024. Big enough that the citywide figure averages streets that work with streets that don’t. Do address-level homework here more seriously than anywhere else.

Kapolei, Hawaii

A 15.06% gross yield on 337 properties at $597,065, generating $109,736 a year, by far the largest revenue figure in the file. Read the regulation section before you get excited, because this one is a zoning story more than a market one.

Abilene, Texas

A 15.05% gross yield on 315 properties at $194,996, with 58% independent hosts. There’s no beach, theme park, or rally. Whatever demand exists there runs year-round, and on a list this seasonal, that’s worth more than it looks.

Lewes, Delaware

A 5.43% gross yield on 212 properties at $540,439, dead last. I include the bottom of the list every time I do this. Delaware’s best available answer yields under 6% gross, which doesn’t survive contact with a mortgage. Every state has a top city, which is a very different thing from every state having a deal worth doing.

Don’t Get Blindsided

Nothing here addresses local short-term rental law. It will show you a gorgeous yield in a city that outlawed the thing you’re modeling.

Kapolei is the clearest case on the list, and it runs counter to what you’d expect. Honolulu allows short-term rentals in resort-zoned areas and a handful of designated apartment districts. Everywhere else on Oahu, residential rentals face long minimum stays, and the city has spent years in court over whether that minimum is 30 days or 90. Ko Olina, which sits in Kapolei, is one of the designated resort areas.

So that 15.06% gross yield is real, and it exists because of where the zoning line falls. A citywide number can’t tell you which side of that line an address sits on, and on Oahu, that distinction is the entire investment.

Atlantic City, Baltimore, Detroit, and Myrtle Beach all sit in places that have been actively rewriting short-term rental rules, and any of them can move again. Regulation isn’t a footnote on the yield. Sometimes, regulation is the yield.

How to Find the Actual Deal

Rankings hand you a shortlist and nothing more. BNBCalc is a short-term rental analytics platform covering more than 10 million listings across 2,400 global markets, including 487 U.S. metro markets. Its AI Agent helps investors estimate realistic benchmark comps and operating expenses for a specific address before modeling revenue, cash flow, and tax savings.

Start at an address, not a city

Every figure here is citywide, and Detroit shows you why that isn’t enough. Enter a specific address, and you get a revenue projection, average daily rate, occupancy, and up to 40 comparable rentals. In a market with real neighborhood variance, the comp set is the entire answer.

Filter the comps down to a house you could actually buy

Comps are filtered by property type and amenities, and revenue, occupancy, and nightly rate all recalculate based on whatever set you build. Filter to what your budget really gets you in that city, and see whether the revenue survives. Sometimes it does. Finding out for free beats finding out at closing.

Pull the monthly seasonality

That’s your direct answer to the Sandusky problem. See the shape of the year before you sign, then stare at the trough months and ask whether you can cover the note through them.

Check what the property does as a long-term rental

BNBCalc runs long-term and Section 8 numbers in the same analysis, and that’s your downside case. If an ordinance passes in year three, long-term rent is your floor. In a place like Kapolei, that floor isn’t hypothetical.

Read the regulations before you fall in love

BNBCalc publishes city-level regulation guides and state lodging and occupancy tax guides. Their Oakland guide breaks out the business tax rate and the registration, renewal, and inspection fees line by line. Those live separately from the calculator, so it’s a step you take rather than something the projection does for you. 

They say it in their own guides: Verify with the city. Five minutes on a municipal website is the cheapest due diligence in this business.

Run the tax math before you decide, not in April

Most people skip the tax math, and it changes deals, especially for W-2 earners. If you meet the applicable short-term rental and material participation requirements, you may use depreciation losses to offset W-2 income. BNBCalc’s short-term rental tax calculator models potential 100% bonus depreciation on qualifying components, cost segregation, and the possibility of non-passive treatment.

That last piece is worth understanding. If your average guest stay is seven days or less and you materially participate, those losses may offset active income rather than be passively held. They’ll also connect you with a cost seg partner that runs a free benefit analysis, so you see the number before paying for a study.

Given what debt service does to a 10.91% yield, the tax outcome carries more weight in year one than the operating outcome for a lot of these properties, and a yield ranking has no way to surface that for you.

The Smart Move

I wouldn’t buy a house because it showed up on this list. I’d buy one because the list pointed me in the right direction, and then I did the work.

What’s useful here is the pattern. Revenue efficiency lives in unglamorous places, and the cities producing the most revenue per dollar of price are Sandusky, Detroit, Abilene, Gulfport, Montgomery, and Shreveport. Nobody puts those on a vision board.

Meanwhile, the mountain and coastal markets everybody actually wants to sit near the bottom of the yield table, because you’re paying for the address, and the address doesn’t book nights.

And a yield in the low teens, which reads strong on a page, mostly evaporates once you add a mortgage and a manager. That’s the rate environment talking rather than any particular city on this list, and it applies everywhere.

So pick two cities. Pull five real addresses in each. Filter the comps to a house you could actually close on, look at what the calendar does in February, call the city about the ordinance, and run the tax math before you get attached to anything. Give it a Saturday.

One Saturday will teach you more than any ranking on the internet, mine very much included.

Data Note: The data shared in the article comes from BNBCalc. We looked at 462 cities across all 50 states (with at least 50 analyzed properties in each). Gross yield is just annual revenue divided by the estimated home value, so it doesn’t account for mortgages, operating expenses, or management fees. We limited the list to cities where BNBCalc has high confidence in the data. Just a heads up: the debt service and expense assumptions in the cash flow section are my own, not BNBCalc’s. This isn’t tax or investment advice; please check with your CPA and your local city officials regarding regulations before making any decisions.