Set your cleaning fee from what a turnover costs at your unit, not from what nearby listings typed into the same box. In Miami that cost is knowable before you ever publish the listing: a professional turnover starts at a published $225 per checkout, at every unit size. A reasonable fee recovers a real invoice — it is not a second profit line.
The cleaning fee is the only number in your listing that can have an invoice behind it. It is also the one most often set by imitation: aggregators publish city averages, host forums argue zero fees against three-figure ones, and almost nobody in that argument mentions the only thing that settles it — what it actually costs to make that unit guest-ready for the next check-in.
Start from the number you can actually know
The canonical source is the table on our Airbnb turnover cleaning in Miami page: a 20-item guest-ready reset, with most turnovers taking 1–2 hours with a 2-person team. We restate it here so the answer lives beside the question:
- Studio · 1 hr · from $225
- 1 BR · 1 bath · 1–1.5 hr · from $225
- 2 BR · 2 bath · 1.5–2 hr · from $225
- 3 BR · 2 bath · 2–2.5 hr · from $225
- 4 BR+ · 3 bath · 2.5–3 hr · from $225+
Notice what that table does for your planning: the per-checkout rate holds flat from studio through 3 bedrooms — what grows with size is the hours, not the invoice. And billing follows the calendar rather than the other way around: per the Terms, there is no payment at booking, and after each completed visit an invoice is issued. With iCal sync, each checkout on your calendar triggers its own turnover — so your per-checkout cost is a constant you know before the guest even arrives, which is exactly what a fee needs in order to be set once, honestly.
Why the city average is the wrong anchor
An average of cleaning fees is an average of other people’s decisions: it blends the host who typed zero to look cheap with the host using the fee as a profit cushion. It tells you nothing about your unit — and turnover work is priced by what actually creates the labor: in turnover work, beds matter more than square footage — a two-bedroom that sleeps six with a sofa bed and a rollaway is more linen work than a larger home that sleeps two. Two units with identical square footage in the same building can deserve different fees, and both would be set correctly.
“A fee anchored to an invoice needs no defending. A fee anchored to the listing next door does.”
The calculator, in three lines
Line one: your cleaning cost per checkout. In Miami, the published floor is $225 per checkout. Line two: the consumables each stay burns through. We bring all cleaning supplies and equipment — eco-friendly by default — but linens and consumables work from the stock you keep at the unit: the restocking labor is inside the turnover (and we flag when stock runs low), while the toiletries, the coffee, and the slow replacement of linens come out of your receipts. That second line is yours to write, with your own numbers — we are not going to invent an amount for you.
Line three: decide how much of that total lives in the fee and how much in the nightly rate. That is its own question — we answered it, with the per-night math worked on the published floor, in should I charge a cleaning fee or build it into my nightly rate?. The one thing this guide adds: if you set the fee below the invoice — say $150 against the $225 floor — you are absorbing $75 per checkout out of the nightly rate. That is subtraction on published prices, not a new price, and it can be a perfectly sensible decision for monthly winter stays. It just has to be a decision, not a month-end surprise.
What the fee also recovers, quietly
The turnover makes the unit guest-ready; it is not built to pull out months of buildup. That job is a deep clean, starting at a published $375, and in a short-term rental it lands in the calendar gap — here, that usually means around hurricane season, June through November, when unbooked days finally exist. No single guest caused that deep clean, so no single fee should pay for it whole: divide it across the checkouts you expect in a season and let each fee carry its fraction. That keeps the true cost of running the unit inside your pricing without inflating the fee any one guest sees.
What the fee can never absorb
Every host who has lived through a rough checkout is tempted to raise the fee “just in case”. But turnover pricing assumes normal guest use, and a fee sized for the worst guest overcharges every normal one. For the checkout that genuinely goes beyond normal there is a separate path, already published: we document the condition in photos, tell you what we found, and flag whether the visit needs extra time or a deep clean instead — and that photo record is yours if you need to raise the issue with your booking platform. How that path works, step by step, is in can I charge a guest extra for leaving my Airbnb a mess?. The fee covers the expected; evidence covers the exception.
There is one more reason not to hide cushions in the fee: the guest sees it. Platforms show the cleaning fee inside the total before anyone books, and a figure you cannot explain — to a guest who asks, or in a review reply — quietly works against you. A fee that matches a real invoice explains itself.
Quick answers
What is the average Airbnb cleaning fee?
Aggregators publish city averages, and we are not going to repeat one: an average of what other hosts typed into a box is not a cost. The number a fee can honestly stand on is your own per-checkout invoice — in Miami, a professional turnover starts at a published $225 per checkout, studio through 4 BR+.
Will a lower cleaning fee get me more bookings?
We clean units; we cannot promise booking outcomes, and we will not pretend to. What is arithmetic rather than promise: a fixed fee weighs heaviest on the shortest stays, so where you recover the cost — fee or nightly rate — usually matters more than trimming the amount itself.
Should my cleaning fee cover supplies and deep cleans?
Cleaning supplies and equipment arrive with the crew — eco-friendly by default — so they are already inside the per-checkout price. Consumables come from the stock you keep at the unit, and those receipts are yours to budget into the fee. A seasonal deep clean, starting at a published $375, is overhead to spread across many checkouts, not one guest’s fee.
Is it OK to make a profit on the cleaning fee?
That is a rate decision, not a cleaning decision, so we can only say how it reads from the cleaning side: a fee anchored to a real invoice is one you can explain to any guest who asks. Whatever you charge above cost belongs more naturally in the nightly rate, where nobody expects it to match a receipt.
The short version
Your cleaning fee is your per-checkout invoice — in Miami, from a published $225 — plus the consumables each stay burns, plus each checkout’s fraction of the seasonal deep clean. Split it between fee and rate to match how your stays actually run, and leave the exceptional checkout to the evidence path, not to a cushion. Anything you charge above that is not cleaning — it is rate, and it deserves to be called that.
This guide is part of the JAS operating playbook — written so the fee in your listing can stand on an invoice instead of on an average of other people’s decisions.