How much to charge for an Airbnb in Chicago
If you are setting a nightly rate in Chicago by looking at three listings down the street, you are sampling a market of 8,660. Here is the whole distribution, from the June 2026 Inside Airbnb snapshot.
Start with the city median, then stop using it
The median Chicago listing asks $223 a night. That single number is the most quoted and least useful figure about this market, because the spread around it is enormous: the 25th percentile is $134 and the 75th is $360. Half of all listings fall outside that band entirely.
Two things drive almost all of that spread, and neither one is how nice your place is: how many bedrooms it has, and where it is.
Bedroom bands
This is the number to price from. It covers entire places only — including private rooms would drag the one-bedroom band down by a third and give you a target no whole unit should aim at.
| 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.
The jump from 1 bedroom to 4+ bedrooms is from a median of $188 to $580. If you have a spare room you have been using as an office, that gap is the argument for converting it.
Then adjust for neighborhood
This is the table that matters most in Chicago. Inside Airbnb publishes 77 named neighborhood areas, and the top eight by listing count span from +52.5% to -19.2% against the city median. Loop and Near North Side are the price ceiling; Logan Square and Lower West Side sit below the median with real listing volume. Your neighborhood is doing more work on your rate than any renovation you are considering.
| Neighborhood | Median | vs city | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Near North Side | $326 | +46.1% | 1,061 |
| West Town | $270 | +20.9% | 770 |
| Loop | $340 | +52.5% | 607 |
| Near West Side | $255 | +14.4% | 601 |
| Lake View | $294 | +31.6% | 533 |
| Logan Square | $209 | -6.2% | 408 |
| Lincoln Park | $330 | +48.2% | 285 |
| Lower West Side | $180 | -19.2% | 240 |
Inside Airbnb publishes Chicago geography as 77 named neighborhood areas. Areas with fewer than 30 priced listings are left out — the median stops meaning anything below that.
A three-step way to set your rate
- Take the median for your bedroom count from the first table.
- Apply your neighborhood's percentage from the second table.
- Move within the 25th–75th band based on what a guest can see: photo quality, review count, and whether you can claim anything on the differentiator list.
That gives you a defensible starting rate. It does not give you a revenue forecast — these are asking prices, not bookings. Nothing in this dataset says how many nights sold.
What reviews do to your ceiling
A listing at the 75th percentile with 20 reviews and a listing at the 75th percentile with 170 reviews are not selling the same product. 17.6% of Chicago listings have no reviews at all, which is both the size of the problem and the size of the opening.
| Measure | Value | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Listings with zero reviews | 17.6% | 1,523 listings competing with no social proof at all |
| Median review count | 20 | Half the market is below this |
| 75th percentile | 77 | Clearing this puts you in the top quarter |
| 90th percentile | 170 | The established operators |
| Median rating | 4.87 | Among the 7,137 listings that have one |
| Rated 4.9 or higher | 44.5% | Of rated listings — this is the bar, not 4.5 |
| Rated 4.5 or higher | 91% | Below 4.5 you are in the bottom decile |
- 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.