The amenities that actually move an Chicago listing
Amenity advice for hosts is usually a list of things to buy. This is the opposite: the prevalence of each amenity across 8,660 Chicago listings, so you can tell which claims are scarce enough to be worth making — and which ones everybody already makes.
The two questions worth asking
For any amenity, only two numbers matter. How many of your competitors have it — that tells you whether claiming it distinguishes you or just keeps you from being filtered out. And what do listings with it ask — that tells you whether the market prices it at all. We measured 3,229 distinct amenity labels in Chicago; these are the ones with the volume to say something.
- Wifi — 90.2% of listings
- Kitchen — 90% of listings
- Self check-in — 76.7% of listings
- Dryer — 25.3% of listings
- Free parking on premises — 28% of listings
- Pets allowed — 34.6% of listings
- BBQ grill — 22.8% of listings
- Pool — 8.8% of listings
- Elevator — 20.1% of listings
- Gym — 14.8% of listings
- Hot tub — 3.5% of listings
- Crib — 13.4% of listings
- EV charger — 3.5% of listings
| Amenity | With | Without | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pool | $250 | $257 | -2.7% |
| Hot tub | $256 | $257 | -0.3% |
| Free parking on premises | $267 | $252 | +6.2% |
| Self check-in | $266 | $214 | +24.2% |
What this market is telling you
Chicago is an indoor market and the amenity data says so plainly. A pool (-2.7%) and a hot tub (-0.3%) show essentially no association with asking price — the opposite of Broward. What does track is friction removal: entire places with self check-in ask $266 against $214, +24.2%.
Two prevalence numbers are worth pinning up. Free parking is on only 28% of Chicago listings — less than half the rate in Austin — so it is a genuine differentiator here rather than table stakes, and it belongs in your title if you have it. And air conditioning is on 63.4%, the lowest of the four markets, which makes it a summer booking filter that a third of your competition fails.
It compares the median asking rate of entire places that list an amenity against those that don't. It is not a return on investment. A listing with a pool is also, on average, a different size in a different part of town, and this data cannot separate those. Use it to decide what to say in your listing, not what to build.
What to do with your listing this week
- Audit for missing table stakes. Every item on the first list that you have but haven't checked in your amenity settings is a filter you're failing for free.
- Move a differentiator into your title. If you can claim something fewer than 40% of Chicago listings can, it belongs in the first 40 characters, not buried in the amenity grid.
- Photograph what you're charging for. An amenity a guest can't see in the photos does not support a higher rate, whatever the table says.
Where your price should be sitting
Amenities move you inside your band; size and location decide the band. The median Chicago listing asks $223, and the bands by size are:
| Size | 25th pct | Median | 75th pct | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 bedroom | $141 | $188 | $270 | 1,561 |
| 2 bedrooms | $176 | $246 | $347 | 2,010 |
| 3 bedrooms | $237 | $328 | $479 | 1,179 |
| 4+ bedrooms | $393 | $580 | $889 | 722 |
Listings without a stated bedroom count are excluded, which is why these counts don't add up to the city total.
- Source
- Inside Airbnb — public data export, Chicago, IL snapshot dated 2026-06-24.
- Sample
- 8,660 listings. A nightly rate is published for 7,601 of them (87.8%); the rest are blank in the source and are excluded from every price figure on this page.
- What the price is
- The base nightly rate as listed, in US dollars, with no conversion applied. It excludes cleaning fees, service fees and taxes, and it is an asking price — not a booked rate, and not revenue.
- Method
- Percentiles are computed by linear interpolation over the sorted sample. Medians are used throughout instead of averages because the tail is extreme enough to make an average meaningless. Every figure on this page is recomputed from the source file at build time by scripts/market_stats_en.py — none of them is typed by hand.