Louisville, KY Short-Term Rental Market Report: 2026
Typical listings in Louisville earned about $29,490 last year, drawn from 2,167 active rentals on Air ROI's extract filed for the window running August 2025 through July 2026. That single figure, on that single supply base, over that specific twelve-month stretch, is the number this report is built around. Everything else in this piece exists to give that figure context — what drove it, what it looks like broken down by rate and occupancy, and which other numbers floating around this market should not be mistaken for it.
Louisville is a market where more than one figure gets quoted for roughly the same idea, and the gap between them is exactly the kind of thing that trips up a host trying to underwrite a purchase or set a listing price. A different extract, using a different methodology and a different supply base, put Louisville at $25.3K on 3,834 listings. A separate brief printed $34,147 under a different occupancy assumption. Neither of those numbers is wrong on its own terms — they are simply not this number, built on this supply base, over this window. This report sticks to the $29,490-on-2,167 line and treats the others as separate citations that belong on their own lines, not blended into a single average.
There is also a next-door market that shows up constantly in Louisville searches: Jeffersonville, Indiana, sitting just across the river. Jeffersonville listings earned about $29,991 last year from 187 active rentals on the same August 2025 through July 2026 extract — a number close enough to Louisville's that it is tempting to treat the two markets as one regional blend. They are not one market. They sit under different registration desks, different supply bases, and different guest pools, and this report keeps them on separate lines throughout.
This is not legal advice, and nothing here should be read as a revenue projection for a specific property. It is a read of what one extract documented for one city over one window, built so a host can see the whole picture at once rather than picking up fragments of it from five different sources.
The Headline Number and What Sits Beneath It
Typical listings earned about $29,490 last year from 2,167 active rentals. Underneath that top-line figure are three supporting numbers worth knowing individually: the average night was $327, occupancy across the year was 36.6 percent, and RevPAR — revenue per available rental, the figure that blends rate and occupancy into one number — came out to $111.
Those three figures explain the $29,490 rather than simply restating it. A $327 average night is a solidly upscale nightly rate for a mid-size metro, but 36.6 percent occupancy means those nights are only filling roughly a third of the calendar. Multiply the two together, discount for the empty nights, and $111 RevPAR is what actually lands, spread across the full 365-day year, which is the number that produces $29,490 once it is scaled to a full year's worth of available nights.
The occupancy figure is the one worth sitting with longest, because it is the lever most hosts can actually move. A market with strong ADR and weak occupancy — which is roughly the shape Louisville's numbers describe — usually means demand exists but isn't being captured across enough of the calendar. That points toward calendar strategy, pricing on shoulder weeks, and marketing during the months this sample calls weaker, rather than toward chasing an even higher nightly rate on an already strong number.
Supply context matters here too. With 2,167 active listings, Louisville is a sizable, established short-term rental market, not a thin or emerging one. A market this size producing 36.6 percent occupancy suggests real, sustained demand rather than a small handful of stellar operators propping up a thin average — but it also means a new listing is entering a market with real competition already in place, not an underserved gap waiting to be filled.
Year Over Year: Revenue Down, Supply Up
Year over year, revenue is down about 3.9 percent while supply is up about 14.0 percent. Read together, those two figures tell a fairly specific story: more listings entered the Louisville market over the past year than the underlying guest demand grew to support, which put downward pressure on the average outcome per listing even though total citywide booking activity likely held roughly steady or grew modestly.
That is a meaningfully different situation than a market where revenue is falling because demand itself is drying up. A 14.0 percent supply increase against a 3.9 percent revenue decline suggests the pie is being cut into more slices rather than shrinking outright. For an existing host, that means the competitive environment got tighter over the past year even if guest interest in Louisville broadly held up. For someone considering a new listing, it means underwriting should assume a more crowded field than existed a year ago, not the more favorable, less-competitive numbers an older article or projection might still be quoting.
It is worth being specific about what this trend does and doesn't predict. A 3.9 percent year-over-year revenue decline against 14.0 percent supply growth describes what already happened in this sample's window — it is not, by itself, a forecast for the year ahead. Supply growth can slow, demand can rise to meet a larger base, or a particularly strong Derby season or Bourbon Trail push could shift the picture. What this trend does establish is the direction the market moved through the most recently documented year, which is the baseline a host should be underwriting against today, not the flatter or more optimistic baseline from two or three years back.
The Two Markets Not to Blend: AirDNA and the $34,147 Brief
Two other figures circulate for Louisville's short-term rental market, and both deserve a plain explanation of why they sit on their own lines rather than folding into $29,490. The first is an AirDNA read putting the market at $25.3K on 3,834 listings — a materially larger supply count than the 2,167 this report uses, which by itself explains most of the gap in the headline number. Different data providers draw their supply base differently, and a market with nearly double the counted listings is, almost by definition, going to produce a different average.
The second is a brief that printed $34,147 under a different occupancy assumption than the one this report uses. A higher assumed occupancy rate, applied to the same or a similar ADR, produces a higher revenue figure without requiring any actual change in the underlying market — it is a modeling choice, not a documented outcome. Neither figure is fabricated, and neither is necessarily wrong for the assumptions it was built on. But averaging $25.3K, $34,147, and $29,490 together, or quoting whichever one sounds best in a given pitch, produces a number that doesn't describe any real, documented market outcome.
The practical rule for a host or a buyer reading multiple Louisville figures across different sources: note the supply base, note the window, note the occupancy assumption behind each number, and This report's number — $29,490 on 2,167 listings, August 2025 through July 2026 — is the one used consistently throughout, and it is the one worth citing specifically rather than a rounded or averaged composite.
Kentucky Derby Weekend: A Real Spike, Not the Annual Number
Kentucky Derby weekend, running May 1 through 4 in 2026, already happened by the time this report was rebuilt, and it produced a documented spike — a $2,552 clip tied specifically to that weekend. That figure describes four days of extraordinary demand around one of the highest-profile events in American sports, and it is real. It is not, however, a stand-in for the $29,490 annual figure, and treating a Derby-weekend clip as representative of a typical month, let alone a typical year, would badly overstate what most of the calendar actually produces.
This distinction matters most for a host pricing out a new listing or building a pro forma. Derby weekend can and should be priced aggressively — the demand spike is real and well-documented across this market year after year — but a projection that extrapolates Derby-weekend rates across fifty-two weeks would wildly overstate annual revenue. The $29,490 figure already reflects a full year that includes Derby weekend's spike alongside the rest of the calendar's slower stretches; it is the blended, realistic number, while $2,552 is a snapshot of four unusually strong days.
The same logic applies to Bourbon Trail visitation, which drives real demand into the Louisville market at various points across the year. Remaining 2026 Bourbon Trail hours and event calendars should be confirmed on the primary tourism page before a host builds specific pricing around a particular date or stretch, since those hours and schedules shift and this report does not carry a detailed, dated breakdown of them.
Registration: Two Separate Desks, Two Separate Fee Lines
Louisville's short-term rental registration runs through the Louisville Metro Office of Planning and Design Services, which holds the annual short-term rental registration process citywide. A Conditional Use Permit, on top of that annual registration, is required specifically for properties in Old Louisville, in Limerick, and for any non-owner-occupied property regardless of neighborhood — three separate triggers that all point back to the same Planning and Design Services desk.
louisvilleky.gov lists a $200 pre-application fee tied to that CUP process, plus a formal application fee of $560 for an owner-occupied property or $1,260 for a non-owner-occupied one. Those figures sit on top of, not instead of, the annual registration fee itself — and this report is explicit that the remaining annual registration dollar amount should be confirmed directly on the Planning page rather than assumed from a secondary source. A $100 brief and a separate $250 aggregator clip both circulate near this topic, and neither is filed as the confirmed remaining annual registration fee; treat both as separate citations, not as the number to plug into a budget.
On top of the Planning and Design Services registration and any required CUP, a host also has to register separately with the Louisville Metro Revenue Commission — a distinct desk handling the tax and revenue side of short-term rental operation, separate from the land-use and permitting side that Planning and Design Services oversees. A host building a startup budget or a compliance checklist needs both desks represented, since one does not substitute for the other, and confirming both directly, rather than working from a secondhand summary, is the only way to be certain the current fee schedule and application requirements are accurate for the specific property in question.
Reading Louisville Against Jeffersonville
Jeffersonville, Indiana sits just across the Ohio River from Louisville, and its extract numbers land close enough to Louisville's to invite comparison: about $29,991 last year from 187 active rentals, on the identical August 2025 through July 2026 window. The revenue figure itself is nearly indistinguishable from Louisville's $29,490 — but the supply base tells a very different story. Louisville's 2,167 listings versus Jeffersonville's 187 means Jeffersonville is a dramatically smaller market producing a similar per-listing average, which points toward a smaller, more concentrated guest pool rather than a scaled-down version of Louisville's demand.
Hosts underwriting a Louisville property should keep the $29,490 figure on the 2,167-listing line, call whichever desk matches the actual parcel — Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services for a Louisville address, the equivalent Jeffersonville and Clark County offices for an Indiana one — and leave Jeffersonville's number on its own separate line. The two cities are genuinely different regulatory environments sitting on opposite sides of a state line, and a packet that blends their figures or their registration requirements is building on a mismatched foundation regardless of how close the two headline revenue numbers happen to land.
Reading the Calendar: Where the Peaks and the Hole Sit
this sample names September, May, and April as the strongest stretches of Louisville's calendar, with July showing up as the clearest soft spot in the year. That pattern lines up with what a host would expect from a market anchored partly around Derby season in early May and a strong fall travel and event stretch running into September, with the deep-summer weeks in between drawing less demand relative to the rest of the year.
A 36.6 percent annual occupancy figure is an average across all twelve months, which means it is pulled down by the weaker months and pulled up by the stronger ones — it does not describe every month equally. A host who prices every week of the year the same way, using one flat rate derived from the annual average, is very likely leaving money on the table during September, May, and April while also potentially overpricing and losing bookings during the July stretch this sample flags as soft.
The practical response is calendar-specific pricing rather than a single blended rate: push rates up meaningfully around the named peak months and around Derby weekend specifically, and consider more competitive pricing, added promotions, or minimum-stay flexibility during July to capture more of the demand that does exist in that slower month rather than leaving nights empty at a rate calibrated for September. That kind of seasonal calendar strategy is generally a more reliable way to move the needle on annual revenue than adjusting the base nightly rate up or down across the board.
It is also worth remembering that a soft month in this sample is not the same as a dead month. July still produced bookings across the 2,167-listing supply base — it simply produced fewer of them relative to the named peaks. A host with strong photography, accurate listing copy, and competitive positioning can still perform above the July average even in a month this sample flags as comparatively weak; the seasonal pattern describes the market average, not a ceiling on what any individual well-run listing can achieve.
What This Report Doesn't Cover
this sample documents revenue, rate, occupancy, and year-over-year trend for Louisville short-term rentals over one specific window. It does not include a detailed, dated Bourbon Trail hours or event schedule — confirm remaining 2026 Bourbon Trail hours directly on the primary tourism page before pricing specific dates around trail visitation, since hours and participating distillery schedules shift throughout the year and this report does not carry that level of dated detail.
It also does not carry Jeffersonville's own detailed fee schedule or registration process, beyond the top-line revenue and supply figures already cited. A host with a Jeffersonville property, or considering one alongside a Louisville property, needs to confirm that market's registration requirements directly with the relevant Indiana desk rather than assuming Louisville's Planning and Design Services process, CUP triggers, or fee amounts carry across the river.
Finally, this is a backward-looking extract describing what already happened over a named twelve-month window, not a forecast. The 3.9 percent revenue decline and 14.0 percent supply increase describe direction and magnitude for the period already documented — useful for underwriting against a realistic recent baseline, but not a guarantee of what the next twelve months will produce. A host should treat this report as the most reliable recent baseline available, refreshed against a new extract periodically, rather than as a permanently fixed number.
How to Use This Report When Underwriting a Purchase
For a host or buyer running numbers on a specific Louisville property, the starting point should be the $29,490-on-2,167-listings figure, adjusted for how a specific property compares to the market's overall profile — bedroom count, neighborhood, proximity to Churchill Downs or downtown, and listing quality all push a given property above or below the market average in either direction. The average exists to anchor a projection, not to predict any single property's exact outcome.
From there, the occupancy and ADR breakdown matters more than the top-line revenue figure alone. A property that can realistically command Louisville's $327 average night but only fills 25 percent of the calendar is a different underwriting case than one that fills closer to 45 percent at a slightly lower rate — both could land near the same annual revenue, but they carry different risk profiles and different levers for improvement. Knowing which side of that equation a specific property sits on, based on its own comparable listings rather than the citywide blend, produces a much more useful projection than the average alone.
Registration costs belong in that underwriting math as a fixed, known cost rather than an afterthought: the $200 CUP pre-application fee where applicable, the $560 or $1,260 formal application fee, remaining annual registration dollars confirmed directly with Planning and Design Services, and separate registration with the Revenue Commission. None of those figures move the needle on annual revenue potential, but all of them are real, confirmable costs that belong in a complete pro forma rather than being estimated or skipped.
Related Reading
More Louisville and Ohio River host reading on desks, calendars, and listing clarity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Louisville listings earn in this sample?
Typical listings earned about $29,490 last year from 2,167 active rentals, on the Air ROI extract covering August 2025 through July 2026. The average night was $327, occupancy across the year was 36.6 percent, and RevPAR came out to $111. That figure sits on its own line, separate from the AirDNA and brief-sourced numbers also circulating for this market.
Why do other sources quote different Louisville revenue numbers?
Because they use different supply bases and different occupancy assumptions than this sample does. An AirDNA read puts the market at $25.3K on 3,834 listings — nearly double the supply base used here — and a separate brief printed $34,147 under a different occupancy assumption entirely. Neither figure is wrong for its own methodology, but averaging any of them with $29,490 produces a composite number that doesn't describe any single documented market outcome.
Is Kentucky Derby weekend revenue representative of the annual figure?
No. Derby weekend, running May 1 through 4 in 2026, produced a documented $2,552 clip tied specifically to those four days, which is a real but short-lived spike. The $29,490 annual figure already includes that spike blended with the rest of the calendar's slower stretches, so extrapolating Derby-weekend rates across a full year would badly overstate realistic annual revenue.
What does the year-over-year trend actually show?
Revenue is down about 3.9 percent year over year while supply is up about 14.0 percent, meaning more listings entered the market than demand grew to support over that period. That points to a more competitive environment for existing hosts and suggests new listings should underwrite against a tighter market than existed a year earlier, not an older, less crowded baseline.
Does Louisville require a Conditional Use Permit for every short-term rental?
Not every one. A CUP is required specifically for properties in Old Louisville, in Limerick, and for any non-owner-occupied property regardless of neighborhood. Owner-occupied properties outside those two named neighborhoods may fall under a different track, so confirming a specific parcel's requirement directly with Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services is the reliable path rather than assuming based on a similar listing.
What are the actual Louisville CUP and registration fees?
louisvilleky.gov lists a $200 pre-application fee, plus a formal application fee of $560 for owner-occupied properties or $1,260 for non-owner-occupied ones. Remaining annual registration dollar amounts should be confirmed directly on the Planning page rather than assumed, since a separate $100 brief and $250 aggregator clip both circulate near this topic without being the confirmed registration fee itself.
Do I need to register anywhere besides Planning and Design Services?
Yes. Beyond the annual registration and any required CUP through Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services, a host must also register separately with the Louisville Metro Revenue Commission for tax purposes. As a practical matter, both desks need to be checked off before advertising a listing, since one registration process does not substitute for the other, and confirming both directly protects a new host from an avoidable compliance gap.
How does Jeffersonville compare to Louisville in this sample?
Jeffersonville earned about $29,991 last year from 187 active rentals, on the same window as Louisville's $29,490 on 2,167 listings. The revenue figures land close together, but the supply bases are dramatically different sizes, and the two cities sit under entirely separate registration desks across a state line, so their numbers should stay on separate lines in any packet.
What should a host take away from the occupancy figure specifically?
At 36.6 percent occupancy against a strong $327 ADR, the Louisville numbers suggest demand exists but isn't filling most of the calendar. That points toward calendar and pricing strategy — targeting shoulder weeks and the months this sample identifies as weaker — as the more productive lever than pushing an already solid nightly rate even higher.
Work with Crest & Cove Creative
Three different numbers circulate for Louisville's short-term rental market, and only one of them matches this sample's 2,167-listing supply base and its August 2025 through July 2026 window. Name the failure mode the guest can check on the listing.
Let's build a listing and pricing strategy around the documented $29,490-on-2,167 figure, not a blended average pulled from three sources that never measured the same thing. Name the failure mode the guest can check on the listing.
Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.
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