Baltimore MD STR Market Report 2027: 2026 Data, Fresh Read
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a host's spreadsheet in late summer, the kind that comes right after a strong booking season and right before the next year's calendar has to get built. If you operate a short-term rental in Baltimore, Maryland, this is where you likely find yourself right now: looking at 2027 on the horizon and wondering what number to write in the revenue column. We want to be straightforward about where this report's numbers come from, because that honesty is the whole point of it being useful to you.
Everything in this report is drawn from a 2026 vintage dataset, an AirROI-style extract covering Baltimore listings over a trailing twelve-month window running roughly from August 2025 through July 2026. We are publishing it under a 2027 URL because that is when Baltimore hosts are doing their planning, budgeting, and repricing work, and last year's real, dated numbers are a far better planning anchor than no numbers at all, or worse, a guess dressed up as a forecast. What you will not find here is an invented 2027 occupancy rate or a made-up revenue projection. We do not have 2027 data yet, and neither does anyone else who is being straight with you.
So consider this a snapshot with a timestamp stapled to it: this is what Baltimore's short-term rental market actually did over the most recent twelve months we have solid numbers for, presented plainly enough that you can use it as a baseline while you plan the year ahead. Before you finalize pricing or occupancy targets for 2027, we would encourage you to re-pull the current vendor pages closer to when you are actually making those decisions, since markets move and a report frozen in time is a starting point, not a substitute for a fresh look.
We also want to name why this matters so much for a city like Baltimore specifically. This is a market with real neighborhood-to-neighborhood variation, from the tourist draw of the Inner Harbor and Fells Point to the quieter, more residential feel of neighborhoods further from downtown, and a single citywide average, even an honest one, can mask a lot of local texture. That is exactly why we are laying out not just the headline revenue figure but the occupancy, rate, seasonality, and year-over-year trend behind it, so you can see the shape of the market rather than just one flattened number and decide for yourself how your own property likely compares.
This is not legal advice, and none of the marketing guidance on this page replaces reading your own contracts or confirming local rules with the relevant office.
The 2026 Baltimore Snapshot, By the Numbers
Let's start with the headline figures, because Baltimore hosts deserve to see the whole picture before we start interpreting it. Across 1,413 tracked listings, the 2026 AirROI-style extract puts Baltimore's typical annual revenue at $17,408. That is the number most hosts will care about first, and it is worth sitting with for a moment: it represents a full year of bookings across a sample large enough to smooth out the noise of any single property's quirks, while still being small enough a market that individual neighborhood character clearly matters.
Occupancy for the same window came in at 38.8 percent, with an average daily rate of $159 and a RevPAR, or revenue per available rental, of $63. Put those together and you get a market that leans more on rate discipline than on filling every night of the calendar. A host averaging under two nights booked out of every five is not failing; in a market like Baltimore, that occupancy figure paired with a respectable ADR tells a story of a city where demand clusters around specific windows rather than spreading evenly across the year, which is a pattern we will dig into shortly.
It is worth being precise about what this dataset covers and what it does not. The trailing-twelve-month window runs from roughly August 2025 through July 2026, which means it captures a full cycle of seasons, including the ballpark crowds, the harbor tourists, and the slower stretches of deep winter. It does not capture anything from calendar year 2027, because that year has not happened yet. Any host who tells you they have 2027 Baltimore occupancy numbers in hand right now is either guessing or fibbing, and we would rather hand you an honest 2026 number than a fabricated 2027 one.
It is also worth appreciating the sample size behind these figures. A dataset built on 1,413 listings across Baltimore proper is large enough to represent genuine market behavior rather than the quirks of a handful of standout properties, while still being manageable enough that neighborhood-level patterns do not get completely washed out. That balance is part of why we feel comfortable presenting these figures as a solid planning baseline, even while being upfront that they describe last year's market rather than a live read on this one.
Reading the Occupancy and Rate Story Together
Numbers in isolation rarely tell you much, so let's put occupancy and rate side by side. A 38.8 percent occupancy rate against a $159 ADR is the profile of a market where hosts are, on balance, choosing to protect their nightly rate rather than chase every possible booking with steep discounts. That is not necessarily a strategic choice every host made on purpose; it is often simply what the demand curve in a city like Baltimore looks like when you average across an entire year, including the quieter months.
The RevPAR figure of $63 is the number that actually reconciles rate and occupancy into something comparable across different property types and sizes. It tells you, roughly, what an average available night in the Baltimore market was worth once you account for the nights that stayed empty. If your own listing is running meaningfully below that RevPAR, the gap is usually explained by one of two levers: either your occupancy is lagging the market because of pricing, photography, or listing quality, or your rate is underpriced relative to what your specific neighborhood and property type can actually command.
None of this means every Baltimore host should expect to land exactly on $17,408 for the year. That figure is a market-wide typical year across 1,413 listings, spanning studio conversions near the stadiums, rowhouses in Fells Point, and everything in between. Your own property's location, size, and amenities will pull your realistic number up or down from that midpoint, sometimes substantially. Treat the $17,408 figure as a compass heading, not a guarantee, and use it mainly to sanity-check whether your own results are broadly in line with the market or meaningfully out of step with it.
Peak Season in May, and the Quiet of February
If there is one operational takeaway from the 2026 dataset that every Baltimore host should tattoo onto their pricing calendar, it is this: May is peak season, and February is the trough. That is a wider seasonal swing than some East Coast cities see, and it rewards hosts who actively manage their calendar rather than leaving a flat rate in place year-round.
May's strength in Baltimore tracks with a city coming alive after winter: mild weather, blooming green space around the harbor and in neighborhoods like Roland Park, a run of spring events, and travelers who have simply had enough of cold-weather trip planning and are ready to move. If your calendar is not already priced up meaningfully for May relative to your annual average, that is the single fastest adjustment you can make heading into 2027 planning, assuming next year's demand pattern rhymes with this one, which seasonal patterns in mature markets usually do even as the exact dollar figures shift.
February, on the other end, is when Baltimore's short-term rental demand bottoms out. Cold weather, a lull between the holiday travel season and spring break, and fewer outdoor draws all combine to soften bookings. Smart hosts do not fight February; they lean into it. That can mean sharper promotional pricing to capture the price-sensitive traveler who is still out there, a minimum-stay discount for longer bookings, or simply using the slow window for the maintenance, deep cleaning, or renovation work that is hard to schedule during a fully booked spring.
The gap between May and February is really the whole seasonal story of this market compressed into two data points, and it is a useful shorthand as you sketch out a full-year pricing strategy. Rather than setting one rate and leaving it in place for months at a time, treat the calendar as a curve that climbs into spring, holds through the warmer months, and eases back down as winter sets in. Hosts who build that curve into their pricing tools well before the season arrives tend to capture more of the May upside and lose less ground during the February lull than hosts who react to demand after the fact.
The Year-over-Year Dip, and What It Might Mean
The 2026 extract shows a year-over-year change of negative 3.7 percent for the Baltimore market. That is a real, if modest, softening, and it deserves an honest read rather than either panic or dismissal. A dip in that range is consistent with a market that is maturing and normalizing after a period of rapid short-term rental growth, rather than a market that is collapsing. Baltimore added a meaningful number of listings in recent years, and when supply grows faster than demand for a stretch, average performance per listing tends to soften even if the overall market is healthy.
For an individual host, a market-wide 3.7 percent decline is worth using as a benchmark rather than a verdict on your own property. If your bookings tracked roughly in line with that figure, you were performing in step with the broader Baltimore market, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome in a market that is settling into a more mature phase. If your own numbers fell by considerably more than that, it is worth looking hard at your pricing strategy, your photos, your response times, and how your listing compares to newer competition that may have entered your specific neighborhood.
It is also worth remembering that a single year-over-year figure is a snapshot of a trend, not the trend itself. We do not yet have the 2027 data that would tell us whether this softening continues, stabilizes, or reverses, and we are not going to pretend otherwise by inventing a number. What we can say is that a modest single-digit decline, paired with still-healthy occupancy and a competitive ADR, does not read as a market in trouble. It reads as a market where the easy growth phase has ended and where operational discipline now matters more than simply being present in the marketplace.
Baltimore Is Not Towson, and the Distinction Matters
One of the more common mistakes we see in market research for this region is treating Baltimore and Towson as interchangeable, or worse, quietly blending their numbers together into a single regional figure that represents neither market accurately. We want to be explicit here: this report is about Baltimore, Maryland specifically, and the $17,408 typical year, the 38.8 percent occupancy, and every other figure above reflects the Baltimore dataset alone.
Towson is a distinct, nearby market with its own dynamics, driven in part by its role as a county seat and a university town anchored by Towson University, and it deserves its own dedicated look rather than a footnote borrowed from a neighboring city's numbers. Hosts who operate in Towson specifically should seek out Towson-specific data rather than assuming Baltimore's figures apply directly to their property, and hosts who operate in Baltimore proper should be similarly cautious about any report that seems to have quietly averaged the two markets together.
This distinction matters most for hosts who are evaluating a potential acquisition or trying to benchmark an existing property against the right comparison set. A rowhouse in Baltimore city and a colonial near the Towson University campus are competing for different kinds of trips, from different kinds of travelers, at different price points, and lumping their markets together in a report does a disservice to hosts in both places. We would rather tell you clearly what we do not cover here than blur two markets into a muddy average that helps no one make a good decision.
What Baltimore Hosts Should Actually Do With a Year-Old Snapshot
Given that everything above is a 2026 vintage snapshot, the fair question is what a Baltimore host planning for 2027 should actually do with it. The honest answer is: use it as your baseline, not your forecast. The $17,408 typical year, the 38.8 percent occupancy, the $159 ADR, and the $63 RevPAR give you a solid, real-world reference point for what a well-functioning Baltimore listing achieved over a recent full year. That is genuinely useful information for setting expectations, building a budget, or evaluating whether a property under consideration is priced sensibly relative to its likely returns.
What this snapshot cannot do is tell you exactly what 2027 will bring, and we are not going to pretend it can. Markets shift with interest rates, local regulation, new supply, and traveler behavior in ways that a single dated extract cannot capture. The responsible move, and the one we would make ourselves, is to treat these 2026 figures as your starting assumption and then re-pull current data from your vendor of choice closer to when you are actually locking in pricing strategy or making a go or no-go call on a property. A few minutes spent refreshing the numbers before a real decision is a small cost against the size of the decisions these figures inform.
In the meantime, the seasonal pattern embedded in this data, May strong, February soft, is the piece most likely to hold steady even as the exact dollar figures shift year to year, since seasonality in an established market tends to be more durable than any single year's revenue total. Build your 2027 calendar around that rhythm now, and layer in updated rate and occupancy targets once fresher numbers are available.
It also helps to think about this report as one input among several rather than the single source of truth for your 2027 plan. Your own historical performance, direct feedback from past guests, and whatever you are hearing from other hosts in your specific Baltimore neighborhood all belong alongside a market-wide report like this one. The 2026 figures here give you the citywide backdrop; your own data and instincts fill in the local detail that a broad dataset simply cannot capture at the level of a single street or block.
Positioning Your Baltimore Listing for the Year Ahead
With the numbers laid out honestly, the practical work is in the details of your own listing. Start with your calendar's shape rather than a single flat rate: price up meaningfully into May and the surrounding spring window, hold a steady, competitive rate through the stronger summer and early fall stretch, and plan deliberately for February softness rather than being surprised by it each year.
Look honestly at where your own occupancy and rate sit relative to the market's $63 RevPAR. If you are well above it, you likely have something working, whether that is location, presentation, or reputation, and the job is to protect and reinforce it. If you are meaningfully below it, that gap is diagnostic information, not a verdict, and it usually points toward a specific, fixable lever: photography that undersells the space, a rate that has not been touched in too long, or a listing description that is not speaking to the traveler actually booking in your neighborhood.
And finally, hold onto the discipline this report is trying to model: separate what you know from what you are guessing. You know, with real confidence, what Baltimore's short-term rental market did over the 2026 window. You do not yet know what 2027 will bring, and neither does anyone selling you a confident-sounding forecast dressed up as fact. Plan from the real number, build in room to adjust as fresher data arrives, and treat every seasonal pattern here as a strong hint about your calendar's shape rather than a locked-in guarantee.
Related Reading
These neighboring Crest & Cove Creative posts stay on the same marketing desk for independent hosts - listing clarity, owned search, and direct-booking choices without mixing in finance or legal work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the numbers in this Baltimore report actually come from?
Every figure in this report comes from a 2026 AirROI-style dataset covering 1,413 Baltimore, Maryland short-term rental listings, reflecting a trailing twelve-month window running roughly from August 2025 through July 2026. We are publishing this analysis under a 2027 URL for planning purposes, but the underlying data is explicitly last year's, not this year's, and we have labeled it that way throughout rather than presenting it as current.
Why doesn't this report include 2027 occupancy or revenue figures?
Because those numbers do not exist yet and we are not willing to invent them. Reliable short-term rental data for a given period only becomes available after that period ends, so a genuinely accurate 2027 figure cannot exist this early in the year. Rather than fabricate a plausible-sounding projection, we are giving you the most recent real data available, clearly dated, so you can plan from something solid instead of a guess.
What was Baltimore's typical annual short-term rental revenue in the 2026 dataset?
The 2026 extract puts Baltimore's typical year at $17,408 in revenue, drawn from a sample of 1,413 tracked listings across the city. This is a market-wide midpoint, not a promise for any individual property, and results for a specific listing will vary based on its neighborhood, size, amenities, and how actively its calendar and pricing are managed throughout the year.
How does Baltimore's occupancy rate compare to its average daily rate?
Baltimore's 2026 data shows 38.8 percent occupancy alongside a $159 average daily rate, producing a RevPAR of $63. That combination describes a market where rate discipline matters more than filling every possible night, since demand concentrates in specific seasonal windows rather than spreading evenly. Hosts in this kind of market generally benefit more from smart seasonal pricing than from chasing occupancy with steep, across-the-board discounts.
When is peak season for Baltimore short-term rentals?
According to the 2026 dataset, May is Baltimore's peak month for short-term rental demand. Mild spring weather, blooming outdoor spaces around the harbor and surrounding neighborhoods, and a run of seasonal events all combine to lift bookings well above the annual average. Hosts planning their 2027 calendar should expect this same seasonal lift and price accordingly, even as the specific dollar figures may shift somewhat from last year's numbers.
Which month is the slowest for Baltimore hosts?
February is Baltimore's slowest month in the 2026 dataset. Cold weather, the lull between holiday travel and spring break, and fewer outdoor attractions all soften demand during this stretch. Rather than treating this as a problem to fight, many hosts use February for sharper promotional pricing to capture price-sensitive travelers, or for scheduling maintenance and deep cleaning that is harder to fit into a busier calendar the rest of the year.
What does the negative 3.7 percent year-over-year change mean for Baltimore hosts?
It reflects a modest softening in average per-listing performance across the Baltimore market during the 2026 window, likely tied to supply growth outpacing demand growth as the market matures past its earlier rapid-growth phase. A single-digit decline like this, paired with still-solid occupancy and rate figures, does not suggest a market in trouble. It is a signal to sharpen pricing and presentation rather than a reason for alarm, and it is worth comparing against your own year-over-year performance.
Is Towson's short-term rental data the same as Baltimore's?
No, and this report intentionally does not blend the two. Towson is a distinct nearby market with its own character, shaped in part by Towson University and its role as a county seat, and it deserves its own dedicated data rather than being averaged into Baltimore's figures. Every number in this report, including the $17,408 typical year and 38.8 percent occupancy, reflects Baltimore specifically, and Towson hosts should seek out Towson-specific figures instead.
How should I use this 2026 data to plan my 2027 Baltimore listing calendar?
Treat it as a baseline rather than a forecast. Use the $17,408 typical year, the 38.8 percent occupancy, and the May-peak, February-trough seasonal pattern to set reasonable expectations and shape your pricing calendar. Then, closer to when you are actually finalizing 2027 rates or making a purchase decision, re-pull current vendor data to confirm those assumptions still hold, since markets shift and a year-old snapshot is a starting point rather than a final answer.
My Baltimore listing is underperforming the market's RevPAR. What should I check first?
Start with the fundamentals: whether your photography and listing description accurately sell your space, whether your nightly rate has been adjusted recently for seasonal demand, and whether your calendar reflects Baltimore's May peak and February trough rather than a flat year-round price. A RevPAR gap below the market's $63 figure is usually explained by one or two fixable issues rather than something structural about your property or neighborhood.
Can Crest & Cove Creative help me make sense of my own Baltimore listing's numbers?
Yes, that is exactly the kind of conversation we like to have. A marketing audit of your listing can help you see how your photos, description, and pricing strategy compare to what is actually working in the Baltimore market right now, and where the easiest wins might be sitting. It is a practical, no-pressure way to turn a market report like this one into decisions specific to your own property.
Work with Crest & Cove Creative
Baltimore's 2026 numbers are in, and they are worth a close read before you build your 2027 calendar. Ask for a marketing-only read of the listing.
If you are weighing what these Baltimore numbers mean for your own listing, a marketing audit from Crest & Cove Creative is a good next step. We will look at your photos, your description, and your pricing approach against what is actually working in this market, and hand you clear, practical suggestions you can act on right away.
Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.
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