Ask ten people what an Airbnb earns in Toronto and you will get ten guesses. Most of them are anchored to a screenshot of someone’s best month. Here is the honest version, using the same metric professional operators use.
Revenue per available night, or RevPAR, is your nightly rate multiplied by your occupancy rate. It is the only number that captures both sides of the equation. A $400 nightly rate at 40% occupancy is a $160 RevPAR. A $280 rate at 85% occupancy is a $238 RevPAR. The second property earns dramatically more with a cheaper listing, and this is the trap most self-managed listings fall into: they price for the best week of the year and sit empty the rest.
Across the Certus portfolio, our current average is a $250 RevPAR at 80% occupancy. That is the benchmark we manage toward, and it is achievable for well-located, well-presented Toronto properties.
A $250 RevPAR works out to roughly $7,600 in gross monthly revenue when the calendar is open all month. For comparison, the same downtown one-bedroom might rent long-term for $2,400 to $2,800 a month. Even after short-term rental costs, the gap is substantial, which is why the model attracts so much attention in the first place.
Location. Walkability to transit, the core, and event venues carries more weight than square footage. Presentation. Professional photos and hotel-grade furnishing routinely lift nightly rates 20% or more against identical floor plans. Pricing discipline. Toronto demand swings hard with conferences, concerts, and seasons. Static pricing leaves money on the table in peaks and sits empty in troughs, which is why dynamic pricing is standard in every Certus management plan above the entry tier. Reviews. The algorithm feeds visibility to five-star listings, and visibility feeds revenue.
Cleaning is mostly passed to guests through cleaning fees, but supplies, linen turnover, utilities, and consumables run real money. The 6% Municipal Accommodation Tax is paid by guests but touches your bookkeeping. Management runs 10% to 20% per booking depending on service level. And the big one: Toronto’s 180-night annual cap on entire-home rentals means the pure nightly model has a hard ceiling, so the strongest operators blend nightly stays with 28-plus-night mid-term bookings that sit outside the cap. We covered the full rulebook in our guide to Toronto’s short-term rental rules.
Take a strong downtown one-bedroom: 180 nightly-rental nights at a $250 RevPAR is about $45,000. Fill another five months with a furnished mid-term stay at $3,800 a month and the property grosses roughly $64,000 for the year. The same unit leased long-term at $2,600 grosses $31,200. The premium is real, but it is earned through pricing work, guest operations, and compliance, not by posting a listing and waiting.
Every building and street tells a different story, which is why we run projections per property rather than quoting city averages. Request a free earnings estimate and we will send you a projection with our management fees already factored in, so the number you see is the number you keep.
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Toronto property management and short-term rental specialists. We manage Airbnb, mid-term, and long-term rentals across the GTA.
