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These 10 cities have the world's most vacation rentals

Short-term rental supply varies wildly across global cities. AirDNA's active listing data shows which markets lead in inventory

Travelers $TRV now treat whole-home rentals as a default alternative to hotels in most major cities. Families and groups comparing a two-bedroom apartment near a transit stop against a hotel room at the same nightly price tend to pick the apartment. Investors have followed that demand into residential housing stock, buying condos with nightly booking calendars in mind, while property management companies run hundreds of units at a time inside a single city. Local governments have answered by rewriting the rules on how many nights a home can be rented out and who's allowed to rent it. Anyone deciding where to buy a unit or where to operate one has a stake in how a city's rental supply is built, and so does the traveler hunting a cheaper bed.

Short-term rental supply has grown to a scale that competes with hotel chains outright. More than 10 million rentals are active across Airbnb $ABNB, Vrbo, and Booking.com in over 120,000 markets worldwide, and in a handful of cities hosts collectively list tens of thousands of homes apiece. What those homes earn looks nothing alike from one place to the next. Nightly rates in big-city markets run from under $50 to nearly $250, and a typical listing brings in anywhere from roughly $8,000 to more than $50,000 a year. Occupancy moves far less, mostly holding between 60% and 70%, so the earnings gap traces back to what guests pay per night rather than how often a home books.

AirDNA tracks what hosts list and what guests book on Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, then folds in more than 1 million partner homes that reach the company through management software, channel managers, and direct host connections. Duplicates get stripped out, so an apartment posted on all three sites counts once. Every headline figure covers the trailing 12 months, which keeps one packed summer or one dead winter from skewing a market's numbers. In its October 2026 refresh, the company ranks the 12 markets worldwide carrying the most active listings and reports each one's occupancy rate, typical nightly price, and yearly earnings for a single home. The company also scores every market between 40 and 100 on how promising it looks for nightly rentals. Demand, revenue growth, and seasonality account for three of the five subscores behind that Market Score. Signals of local regulation drawn from how hosts behave fill another, and the last compares home prices with what rentals earn nearby. Every grade is benchmarked against markets in the same country.

London, United Kingdom

No city in the world carries more short-term rental inventory than London. Hosts across the capital keep 59,943 listings active on Airbnb $ABNB, Vrbo, and Booking.com, a count AirDNA puts roughly 19,300 ahead of the next-largest market anywhere and larger than the combined inventory of Tokyo and Mexico City. A visitor scanning dates in central London picks from a pool no other city matches, while........

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