Open your Airbnb listing and read your house rules the way a guest would. If you are like most hosts, you are looking at fifteen or twenty lines built up over years, each one added the week after something went wrong. A $200 smoking charge after the stay that cost you three nights of ozone treatment. A late checkout fee after the group that left at 2pm. A line asking guests to start the dishwasher.
On October 20, 2026 Airbnb announced that most of that list stops being binding. For bookings made on or after November 20, 2026, the platform will enforce seven house rules and nothing else. Everything else on your list becomes a request, which guests are encouraged to follow rather than required to.
Reservations booked before November 20 keep the rules that were live when the guest booked, so nothing already on your calendar changes. What changes is every booking that comes in after that date, and you have a month to get the listing ready.
The one distinction that decides everything
Airbnb's help center draws the line in a single sentence: guests must follow hosts' house rules, and are encouraged to comply with hosts' requests.
In practice the difference shows up at exactly one moment. If a guest breaks a house rule, you can cancel the reservation without a penalty. If a guest ignores a request, you cannot. That is the whole mechanism. A request is still worth writing, because most guests are reasonable and will do what you ask, but it has no teeth and you should stop planning as though it does.
There is a second rule attached, and it is the one that will catch people out. Everything has to be visible on the listing before the guest books. Airbnb says hosts may not communicate new house rules or requests in other sections of the listing or after booking. A checkout message reminding guests to lock the door is fine, because the rule already exists. A laminated sign on the fridge introducing a rule that is not in the listing is not.
If your real operating policy lives in a welcome book or a check-in message, move it into the listing this month or accept that it does not exist.
Five rules you already have, with edits
Of the seven enforceable rules, most hosts already run five. The work here is mostly deletion.
Maximum overnight guests. Keep the number, delete the threat. Lines like "extra guests will be removed without a refund" need to go, because Airbnb handles refunds when you cancel a reservation. State the cap and leave it there.
Quiet hours. Keep as is. Our team runs 10pm across the portfolio, and it is the single rule most likely to keep a neighbor from becoming a complaint.
Events. "No parties" stays enforceable. If you are willing to allow a small pre-approved gathering, that belongs in requests, not in the rule.
Pets. Allowed or not, and how many. Use Airbnb's built-in pet fee field rather than writing a fee into your rules text, because a fee written into the rules is now unenforceable. Size, breed and crate preferences move to requests. Service animals are always allowed regardless of your pet setting, which has not changed.
Smoking and vaping. Keep the rule, remove the dollar figure attached to it. You can still recover the cost of a smoke remediation, just not as a flat penalty announced in advance. More on that below.
Two rules that are probably blank right now
Commercial photography and filming. New to most listings. If you do not want a production crew or a branded shoot at your property, switch it on. It takes ten seconds and almost nobody has done it.
Lock up at checkout. Also new. Use it to say how keys or fobs get returned. Keep your lockbox code in the check-in instructions where it belongs, not in the public rules.
Worth noting what is not on the list: exterior camera disclosure is not one of the seven. It still has to be disclosed, in your listing's safety section, exactly as before.
Everything else becomes a request, including the chores
Anything that does not fit the seven moves to requests. Keep writing them. Asking locals or guests under 23 to message you before booking, asking guests to flag a cleaning issue within two hours of arrival, asking guests not to light candles, all of that still sets a tone and most guests still comply. You just cannot cancel over it.
Chores get a specific ceiling. Airbnb says hosts generally may not ask guests to complete tasks that require significant effort or time.
- Still fine to ask: put dishes in the sink, gather used towels in one spot, sort trash into the indoor bins.
- No longer fine: wash the dishes, strip the beds, start a load of laundry, carry trash to an off-site dumpster.
That last list has a cost attached. If your cleaning fee was quietly priced on the assumption that guests would strip the beds and take the trash out, your cleaner's turnover just got longer and your fee is now wrong. Go and look at the actual time on your last ten turnovers before you decide it does not matter. This is the kind of thing that does not announce itself, it just shows up as a cleaner asking for a raise in March.
No fines, no surprise fees
Airbnb's policy is that hosts generally may not impose fines or other penalties on guests, and that any fee for an advertised part of the listing must be included in the price shown at booking.
For a typical listing, that means deleting:
- the $200 smoking charge
- the $50 late checkout fee
- the mailing fee for items left behind
- the extra cleaning charge for a unit left excessively dirty
Three things survive in some form. Paid late checkout can stay as an optional add-on offered in your requests. Damage waivers still work on Airbnb, but the cost has to be built into your nightly rate rather than bolted on as a separate line, which is a different pricing exercise than it sounds and one we have worked through before. Security deposits are the murkiest: industry reporting suggests many hosts can no longer charge one, so check what your own listing settings actually allow rather than assuming. If you have never been clear on the difference between a deposit and a hold, this is the piece to read.
You still get paid for damage, you just have to document it
Removing the flat fee does not remove the recovery. It moves you from charging a number you decided in advance to charging the number it actually cost, which in most cases is the larger of the two anyway.
The sequence:
- Photograph everything before you clean or repair. Before. Once the cleaner has been through, your claim is a story rather than evidence.
- File in the Resolution Center within 14 days of checkout. Miss the window and the claim is dead.
- Attach the photos and the invoice. The guest then has 24 hours to pay, pay part, or decline.
- Escalate to Airbnb for an AirCover review if they decline or go silent.
AirCover covers guest-caused damage and specialized cleaning, including smoke odor, pet accidents and stains. It does not cover ordinary turnover cleaning, normal wear and tear, or anything that happened on a stay booked outside Airbnb. We went through the fine print of what it does and does not pay for here.
So the $200 smoke claim is still a $200 smoke claim. The difference is that it now needs a $200 invoice behind it instead of a number in your house rules. If smoking is a recurring problem at your property, that is an argument for detection that timestamps the event, because a sensor reading plus a remediation invoice is a far stronger claim than a cleaner's word.
Rental agreements, guest ID and the local-law exception
Airbnb now says hosts generally may not ask guests to sign a separate contract or rental agreement. The exceptions are narrow: agreements required by law or an HOA, optional amenities such as a golf cart or a boat, stays of 28 nights or more, and Luxe listings. If you fall into one of those and you keep your agreement, it has to be uploaded to the listing itself, where it is publicly visible, so strip out anything personal before you post it.
Guest data follows the same logic. ID copies, phone numbers, background checks and required third-party sign-ups are out, with limited exceptions. Keyless entry apps are still fine as long as a guest can ask for another way in.
The exception that matters most is local law. Airbnb allows collection where it is needed to comply with applicable law or a documented community association rule. In Riverside County, California, the county requires a copy of guest ID and a signed Good Neighbor acknowledgment, so our team keeps collecting both at the property we manage there. If you are in that position, say in your requests what you collect and why, and keep a copy of the ordinance somewhere you can produce it in under a minute.
The part that matters more than the rule changes
It is reasonable to be annoyed by this. Some of those lines were real protections, written after real incidents.
It is also worth being clear-eyed about why it happened. Airbnb spends an enormous amount marketing listings it does not own, and like Marriott or Hilton it has decided to run one consistent set of policies across its inventory. Guests get a predictable product. Hosts get less discretion. That trade is not going to be renegotiated because a group of us dislike it.
Which is the real lesson for anyone building a portfolio rather than running one listing. This is the second platform policy change in two months that unilaterally rewrites how your property operates, after Vrbo moved to a 12% host fee. Neither was negotiable. Neither came with a vote. If a single channel can shorten your house rules by memo, you already know the answer: the channel is a sales tool, not the business.
On your direct booking site, none of this applies. Your full rental agreement, your deposit, your ID collection and your own cancellation terms all stay exactly as you wrote them. That is not a reason to leave Airbnb, which still fills calendars better than anything else available. It is a reason to make sure Airbnb is not the only place your guests can find you. If you have never audited that exposure, start with the five signs you are too dependent on one platform and then the case for your own booking site.
The 30-minute audit
You have until November 20, and the work genuinely is about half an hour per listing.
- Open your house rules and paste the whole thing into a document.
- Sort every line into one of three buckets: one of the seven, a request, or deleted.
- Delete every dollar figure, fine and penalty in the rules text. Move legitimate fees into Airbnb's own fee fields.
- Turn on the two new rules, commercial filming and lock up at checkout.
- Pull your rental agreement unless you have a legal or HOA exception, and move it to your direct site.
- Rewrite your requests properly, in plain language, as asks rather than demands. They still work on most guests.
- Check your cleaning fee against what your cleaner now has to do.
Our team has rebuilt our own house rules template for the new policy, with an Airbnb version that fits inside the seven and a direct booking version that keeps everything the platform no longer allows. It is free below.
And if you are rewriting rules across a portfolio and want a second set of eyes before November 20, book a strategy call and we will go through your listings with you.
This article was inspired by this episode of the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast.