Long Beach STR Report 2026: $35,478 on 1,288 Listings

Thomas Garner
2 days ago
12 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Empty downtown Long Beach California waterfront skyline, no people

Long Beach doesn't need a borrowed number. It has its own extract: 1,288 active short-term rental listings, a typical yearly revenue of about $35,478, and a market shape distinct enough from its coastal neighbors that blending in Huntington Beach or Signal Hill data does real damage to a host's pricing decisions or a buyer's underwriting. This report walks through what Long Beach's own data actually says, month by month and category by category, and keeps the two neighboring cities on their own separate lines throughout.

Guests who type "Long Beach" into a search bar are looking for Belmont Shore, downtown, or a genuine city night near the water, not a generic Southern California beach placeholder and not a Huntington Beach caption pasted onto a different address. Getting the city right in a listing's copy starts with getting the market's own numbers right first, and getting the underwriting right starts the same way.

Where this report touches permit or tax detail, treat it as a pointer toward the city's own resources, not as legal advice. Confirm current fees and registration rules directly with Long Beach Short-Term Rentals before making a filing decision. What follows is organized the way a host or buyer would actually use it: the citywide number first, then who runs this market, then the calendar, then the guest, then the registration desk, and finally the two neighboring cities that keep getting blended into Long Beach's own file. This is not legal advice.

Long Beach's Own Extract: $35,478 on 1,288 Listings

AirROI's trailing twelve months, August 2025 through July 2026, put typical Long Beach listings at about $35,478 in annual revenue across 1,288 active rentals. The average night runs $267, with citywide occupancy at 45.0 percent and revenue per available night at $124, the figure that best reflects what a listing actually nets once vacancy is priced in rather than the headline nightly rate alone.

Year over year, revenue moved down 5.6 percent while active supply grew 9.7 percent, a combination worth sitting with. More listings entered the market at the same time revenue softened, which points toward a market absorbing new competition rather than one where demand simply dried up. A host or buyer reading this year's numbers should treat the supply growth as the more actionable signal: differentiation, not just presence, is what separates a listing that holds its share from one that gets diluted by the newcomers.

1,288 active listings is a genuinely sizable sample for a single city, large enough to give real confidence in the shape of the market rather than a thin, easily skewed extract. That size is part of why this figure deserves to stand on its own rather than getting folded into a regional or county-level average that smooths over exactly the detail a host needs.

It's worth being clear about what $35,478 actually represents: a typical, or median-adjacent, figure across the full range of listings on the extract, not a ceiling and not a guarantee. Individual properties well above or below that number are normal in any market this size. The value of the citywide figure isn't predicting any single listing's outcome, it's giving a host or buyer a real baseline to measure a specific property against, rather than guessing from a national average or a neighboring city's headline.

Who Runs This Market: Superhosts, Not Management Companies

Superhost share on the Long Beach extract runs 59.3 percent, a strong majority of listings held by hosts who have cleared Airbnb's own experience and responsiveness bar. Professionally managed listings make up just 7.8 percent of the market, with the largest single operator on record, Greta, holding nine listings. That's a meaningfully different picture from a corridor dominated by a handful of large management companies running dozens of units apiece.

For an independent host, this matters directly: competing against mostly other independent operators, not against a management company's scale advantages in photography, pricing software, and guest-communication systems. It also means the market rewards genuine listing quality and copy, since there isn't a dominant professional layer setting the pricing and presentation bar city-wide. A host who invests real effort into photos, an accurate description, and honest specifics about the neighborhood is competing on comparatively even ground here.

That said, 7.8 percent professional management is not nothing. Nine listings under a single operator, Greta, is enough scale to notice in a booking search, and any independent host should assume at least a handful of well-run, professionally managed competitors exist within their same neighborhood and price tier. The takeaway isn't that professional management is absent from Long Beach, it's that it hasn't yet consolidated the market the way it has in some other cities, which leaves real room for an independent host who takes the work seriously.

June, August, and March Carry the Year

The three strongest months on the Long Beach extract are June, August, and March, with June running as the single busiest month. January is the slowest revenue month, and occupancy itself dips lowest in July even though July's revenue holds up reasonably well thanks to elevated summer rates. Those are two separate seasonal problems, not one: July needs demand, January needs honest pricing.

A market report is only useful if it turns into a rate calendar. June, August, and March deserve protected, aggressive pricing; January deserves a real discount rather than a token nudge; and July deserves attention to occupancy without reflexive discounting, since the month's rate strength is still doing real work. This pattern, specific to Long Beach's own extract, should not be assumed to transfer to Huntington Beach or Signal Hill, whose seasonal shapes aren't documented in this same dataset.

March deserves particular attention because it's the strong month most likely to get missed entirely. A host thinking in generic "beach season" terms will naturally protect June and August but may not think to raise rates in March, leaving real revenue on the table during a month the data shows performing on par with the other two peak months. Building a calendar off this sample rather than off assumption is exactly what closes that gap.

Who Books Long Beach, and How Far Ahead

Most guests arrive from Los Angeles, with Long Beach residents themselves as the second-largest origin, booking local stays for their own reasons rather than the out-of-town leisure trip a generic beach-city pitch assumes. Typical stay length is 7.5 nights, booked about 46 days ahead, a rhythm closer to a genuine week-plus visit than either a quick weekend or a full-month sublet.

About 600 Long Beach listings, 46.6 percent of the market, have set a 30-night minimum stay in their listing settings. That's a real filter choice affecting nearly half the market, but it doesn't change the underlying stay-length data: actual typical bookings still run 7.5 nights. A host reading this number as evidence of strong monthly-rental demand is misreading a settings toggle as a guest preference.

The 46-day lead time is also worth building a workflow around. A host who checks booking pace at roughly that mark, rather than waiting until the final two weeks before a date, still has real room to adjust price or promotion before demand for that date is fully locked in. Waiting until the last two weeks to react to a soft calendar generally means competing on discount alone, since most of the guests who plan ahead have already booked elsewhere by then.

Registration, Fees, and Where to Confirm Them

Long Beach regulates short-term rentals under Chapter 5.77. Hosted stays in a primary residence carry no night cap; unhosted primary stays are capped at 90 days per registration period, with a 275-day cap on the primary home overall. Non-primary registrations sit under an 800-unit citywide cap and an Application of Interest waitlist, with one registration of each type allowed per person. ADUs and JADUs are not qualified dwelling units under this framework.

On fees, the live city portal lists $500 for application and renewal, while the same city page also cites $400 elsewhere under operating requirements. That's a real discrepancy between two published sources, not a range to split the difference on. Confirm the current figure directly with Long Beach Short-Term Rentals at 562-570-6141, Code Enforcement at 562-570-2633, or in person at City Desk, 411 West Ocean Boulevard, before budgeting for registration.

Occupancy is capped at two persons per bedroom plus two, with a household maximum of eight, and the transient occupancy tax runs 13 percent monthly. AirROI's own registration-evidence figure, an 81 percent registration rate in this sample, reflects a scrape of public listing data rather than the city's own permit file, so treat it as directional evidence, not a substitute for confirming a specific address's status with the city.

The registration-type structure is worth understanding before a listing goes live, not after. A host planning to be present for most stays should confirm whether that qualifies as a hosted primary-residence registration, which carries no night cap, versus an unhosted arrangement, which caps at 90 days per registration period. Getting this classification wrong at the outset creates real friction later, since a registration type generally isn't something a host can casually switch mid-year without going back through the city's process. This section is a map of what to ask about, not a substitute for asking, and the answers change often enough that a call placed six months ago shouldn't be treated as current.

Huntington Beach Runs a Separate, Higher-Revenue Extract

Huntington Beach listings earned about $44,625 last year across 534 active rentals on the current AirROI extract, a genuinely different market at a different price point from Long Beach's $267 average night. That gap is large enough that pasting Huntington Beach's revenue figure onto a Long Beach listing description or investment packet meaningfully overstates what a Long Beach property will actually earn.

The two cities also carry different regulatory desks, different neighborhoods, and different guest bases. A Belmont Shore driveway is not a Huntington Beach lot, and copy or underwriting that treats them interchangeably because they sit close together on the coast is doing real disservice to whichever property is actually being marketed or evaluated.

It's worth naming why this mistake happens so often: both cities share a beach-adjacent Southern California identity that makes it tempting to write one regional pitch for both. But a guest searching specifically for Huntington Beach is not indifferent to ending up in Long Beach instead, and a buyer comparing the two markets on revenue alone, without accounting for the roughly $9,000 gap in typical annual revenue between them, will misprice whichever property they're actually underwriting.

Signal Hill Is a Smaller, Separate Extract Too

Signal Hill listings earned about $23,738 last year across just 26 active rentals on the current extract, a much smaller sample than Long Beach's 1,288-listing base. That smaller sample size means the Signal Hill figure carries more statistical noise and shouldn't be treated as equally reliable evidence, let alone folded into a Long Beach citywide average.

Signal Hill is its own municipality with its own city government, sitting almost entirely surrounded by Long Beach geographically but administratively separate. A host or buyer working across both cities needs two separate files, two separate rate calendars, and two separate registration confirmations, not one blended regional pitch.

The small sample size cuts both ways for a Signal Hill host, too. A market this thin means a handful of exceptionally well-performing or poorly performing listings can swing the citywide average meaningfully, so a Signal Hill host should be cautious about assuming their own results will track the extract's $23,738 figure closely in either direction. Individual listing performance data, where available, is more reliable than a 26-listing citywide average for underwriting a specific Signal Hill property.

Belmont Shore, Downtown, and the Aquarium Are Visitor Demand, Not Occupancy

Belmont Shore, downtown, the Aquarium of the Pacific, and Alamitos Bay all pull genuine visitor traffic into Long Beach, and that traffic is real evidence a listing can lean on in its copy. But visitor foot traffic and a specific named weekend event are demand signals, not proof of booked occupancy. Confirm actual 2026 event dates on the primary city or venue page before pricing a listing around them, rather than assuming a festival or event repeats on the same weekend every year.

The strongest use of these landmarks in a listing description is specificity: naming the actual walk to Belmont Shore's shops, the actual distance to the Aquarium, or the actual view toward Alamitos Bay, rather than a vague claim of proximity to "attractions." A guest evaluating a Long Beach stay against other options in the same price range is reading for exactly this kind of concrete detail.

It's also worth separating downtown from Belmont Shore explicitly rather than treating both as interchangeable Long Beach shorthand. A guest booking near the Aquarium and downtown convention district generally wants a different kind of trip, walkable urban energy, than a guest booking a Belmont Shore stay closer to the sand and the shopping strip along Second Street. Naming which of these a specific listing actually serves helps the right guest self-select rather than booking against a mismatched expectation and leaving a review that reflects the gap.

How a Buyer or Manager Should Read This Map

A buyer or manager working across this stretch of coastline should file three separate occasions: Long Beach is Belmont Shore, downtown, and genuine city nights, at $35,478 typical revenue on 1,288 listings; Huntington Beach is a separate, higher-revenue city at $44,625 on 534 listings; and Signal Hill is a smaller, separate city at $23,738 on just 26 listings. None of the three should carry another's average night, occupancy rate, or seasonal pattern.

This matters just as much for a manager scaling a portfolio across all three cities as it does for a single-property buyer. A pricing model, seasonal calendar, or marketing template built off Long Beach's data and then copy-pasted onto a Huntington Beach or Signal Hill listing will misfire in specific, avoidable ways, from mispriced peak months to a registration process that doesn't match the actual host obligations in that separate city.

A packet built for a Long Beach purchase should cite the $35,478 figure on 1,288 active listings, note active supply up 9.7 percent year over year against revenue down 5.6 percent, and include the city's own permit-desk number, 562-570-6141, so a reviewer can confirm current registration status directly. Keeping Huntington Beach and Signal Hill data on their own separate lines isn't just accuracy for its own sake; it's the difference between a packet that survives real scrutiny and one that collapses the first time someone checks a cited number against its actual source city.

Finally, treat this report as a starting point rather than a finished underwriting document. A citywide extract, even a 1,288-listing one, is a baseline against which a specific property gets compared, not a substitute for pulling that property's own comparable set. The strongest use of everything in this report is as a sanity check: does a specific Long Beach listing's projected revenue, seasonal pattern, and registration status line up with what the city's own extract actually shows, or does it depend on borrowed numbers from somewhere else on the map. That single check catches most of the errors this report exists to prevent.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did a typical Long Beach short-term rental earn last year?

AirROI's trailing twelve months, August 2025 through July 2026, puts typical Long Beach listings at about $35,478 across 1,288 active rentals. Average night was $267, occupancy sat at 45.0 percent, and revenue per available night landed at $124. Year over year revenue is down 5.6 percent while active supply grew 9.7 percent.

What share of Long Beach hosts are Superhosts or professionally managed?

Superhost share runs 59.3 percent of the extract. Professionally managed listings make up just 7.8 percent, with the largest single operator, Greta, holding nine listings. This is still a market run overwhelmingly by independent hosts rather than large management companies.

When is Long Beach's peak season?

June is the strongest revenue month, with August and March also running strong. January is the slowest month on the calendar, and occupancy itself dips lowest in July even though July's revenue holds up better than January's thanks to elevated summer rates.

Do I need a permit to run a short-term rental in Long Beach in 2026?

Yes. Long Beach regulates under Chapter 5.77. Hosted primary-residence stays are unlimited; unhosted primary stays cap at 90 days per registration period, with 275 total days allowed at a primary home. Non-primary registrations sit under an 800-unit citywide cap on an Application of Interest waitlist, and ADUs or JADUs don't qualify as dwelling units. Confirm current details with Long Beach Short-Term Rentals at 562-570-6141.

What does a Long Beach STR permit actually cost?

The live city portal lists $500 for application and renewal, though the same city page also shows $400 elsewhere under operating requirements. That's a real discrepancy between two published sources, not a range to average. Confirm the current figure directly with the city desk before budgeting.

Is a 30-night minimum the same as strong occupancy in Long Beach?

No. About 600 of Long Beach's 1,288 active listings, 46.6 percent, have set a 30-night minimum in their listing settings, but typical stay length across the market is still 7.5 nights with about 46 days of lead time. A minimum-stay toggle is a filter choice, not proof of monthly demand.

Who books a Long Beach stay?

Most guests come from Los Angeles, followed by Long Beach residents themselves booking local stays. Urban travelers gravitate toward Belmont Shore and downtown specifically. Huntington Beach and Signal Hill pull separate, different guest bases and shouldn't be folded into the same listing description.

How does Huntington Beach's market compare to Long Beach's?

Huntington Beach earned about $44,625 last year across 534 active rentals, a different market at a different price point from Long Beach's $35,478 across 1,288 listings. in any listing description or investment packet.

How does Signal Hill's market compare?

Signal Hill earned about $23,738 last year across just 26 active rentals, a much smaller sample than Long Beach's 1,288-listing base, which means the figure carries more statistical noise. Signal Hill is its own municipality and should never be treated as a Long Beach stand-in.

What should a buyer or investor packet cite for a Long Beach STR purchase?

Cite the $35,478 typical-year figure across 1,288 active listings, note active supply up 9.7 percent year over year against revenue down 5.6 percent, and include the permit-desk number, 562-570-6141, so a reviewer can confirm registration status. Keep Huntington Beach and Signal Hill figures on their own separate lines rather than blending a regional average.

Work with Crest & Cove Creative

If a Long Beach listing or packet still borrows Huntington Beach's revenue number because the cities sit close together, the underwriting is already wrong before a single photo gets taken. Name the failure mode the guest can check on the.

We build Long Beach marketing and listing copy off Long Beach's own extract, not a blended coastal average that quietly imports a neighboring city's year. Name the failure mode the guest can check on the listing.

Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.