Across the six houses we manage in Tulum, average occupancy runs at 70%. Across the wider market it does not: the median Tulum short-term rental ran between 40% and 47% over the year to early 2026, one tracking service puts the largest operator in town at 36%, and rates an eight-property manager its strongest booking performer at 86%. All of those are real numbers. None of them is your number. Below is what a Tulum villa books at, every fee that comes off it — management commission, platform fee, withheld tax — and a worked year of rental income on a four-bedroom house at two different occupancy rates, so you can see where the money actually goes before anyone sends you a proposal.
One clarification first, because these searches mix two audiences. This page is for someone who owns a villa in Tulum, or is about to, and wants to know what letting it out actually pays. It is not about buying property here and it contains no purchase advice. If you are a traveller looking at what a villa costs to rent, that is the other side of the same ledger.
Where a Tulum Villa’s Rental Income Actually Goes
Start with the structure, then the numbers. Money leaves a villa’s revenue in four separate places, and owners routinely discover the third and fourth after signing.
| Line | Who takes it | Published range, Tulum, September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Platform host fee | Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com | 4% or 16% on Airbnb in Mexico · 5% + 3% on Vrbo · Booking.com publishes no standard rate |
| Management commission | Your manager | 15% to 29%, on four different bases — see below |
| Withheld tax | SAT, via the platform | 2.5%, 4% or 20% of gross, depending on your registration |
| Property costs | Suppliers | Utilities, insurance, HOA, consumables, major works — we do not publish a figure for these |
That last row is deliberately empty. A jungle villa with a pool, a condo in Aldea Zamá and a beachfront house have almost nothing in common on utilities, and we are not going to invent an average to fill a cell. Every other line on this page is either published by someone and sourced, or arithmetic you can redo yourself.
Occupancy: Seven Published Numbers, and What Each One Counts
Occupancy is the figure owners are quoted most often and check least. Here is every Tulum number we could find published with a date attached, on 4 September 2026.
| Published figure | Who publishes it | What it actually counts |
|---|---|---|
| 40–47% | A Riviera Maya guide, year to early 2026 | The median Tulum short-term rental, all property types |
| 44% | A Tulum manager, across “more than 13,000 tracked listings” | A market average, not its own portfolio |
| 36% | A rental data service, June 2026 | The largest operator in Tulum, 276 listings |
| 55% | Same service, June 2026 | A fast-growing operator, 84 listings |
| 86% | Same service, June 2026 | A manager with eight listings — labelled “strongest booking performance”, not occupancy |
| “Around 70%” | A Tulum manager, general statement | Not tied to a portfolio size or a period |
| 70% | Us, on our own management page | The six houses we run, averaged |
Read that table twice before you accept anyone’s projection, including ours. The two highest numbers on it belong to the two smallest portfolios, and that is not a coincidence: an eight-house or six-house average is one strong villa away from moving several points, while a 276-listing average is the market itself. Note too that the 86% is not even labelled the same way as the 36% and the 55% on the page it comes from — it is a “booking performance” badge, and the other two are an occupancy column. The same data service tracks 68 managers and 1,690 listings in Tulum, which is the honest denominator here.
Three things move a villa above the median, and none of them is the manager’s enthusiasm. Whole houses behave differently from studios and condos, which make up most of that 1,690. A villa with a full seasonal calendar and a direct booking channel fills differently from one that sits on a single platform. And a house that is blocked for the owner over Christmas has given up the two most valuable weeks of its year before the market gets a vote — the fortnight around Christmas prices at 2.1 to 2.5 times May on the two Tulum rate cards we measured.
One factor no owner controls sits upstream of all three: the flights that bring guests in. We set out how Tulum’s airports affect occupancy with the 2026 passenger numbers. The official hotel series also shows how Tulum’s occupancy has moved since 2024.
What a Tulum Villa Books At
Occupancy without a nightly rate is half a number. These are the rates on record, and they disagree with each other for a reason.
| Rate | What it covers | Source, checked |
|---|---|---|
| MXN 1,338 (≈$79) | Median daily rate across 1,690 Tulum listings | Rental data service, June 2026 |
| $150–$160 | Tulum average daily rate, with high-season peaks near $241 | Riviera Maya guide, to early 2026 |
| $800–$2,500 | Professionally run villas, nightly | Tulum manager, 2026 |
| $250–$500 per bedroom | 27 agency-listed Tulum villas with published from-rates | Our own count, 25 August 2026 |
| $300–$989 | Our own published from-rates, four to eight bedrooms | Our villa pages, live |
The $79 median and the $2,500 villa are not contradicting each other. One counts every listing in town, most of which are one-bedroom condos; the other counts whole houses with staff. If a manager quotes you a market average, ask which of those two populations it came from.
The second thing a rate needs is a season. Published from-rates are low-season floors. On the two full-year Tulum rate cards we read in August, the pattern was consistent: mid season ×1.3, high season ×1.8, US holiday weeks ×1.8, and Christmas to New Year ×2.5 on one card and ×2.1 on the other. Weight those multipliers by the length of each season and a villa’s average night across a full year is about 1.4 times its published from-rate. That single factor is what turns a from-rate into an annual projection, and it is the step most owner spreadsheets skip.
How Much Do Vacation Property Managers Charge in Tulum?
Full management in Tulum is charged as a share of what the villa earns, and the published rates run from 15% to 29%. We charge 20% of net rental income. The headline percentage, though, is the least useful part of any quote: five Tulum operators publish a fee, and they apply it to four different bases.
Five published fees, four different bases
Here is every Tulum management fee we could find published on 4 September 2026, with the base each one applies to.
| Operator | Published fee | The base it applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Villas Ambar (us) | 20%, VAT included | Net rental income, no onboarding fee |
| Ola Habitat | 15–25% | Gross rental revenue |
| TUKI | 20% + a monthly fee | Total rental income |
| Cerio | 25% + $50 a month | The nightly price advertised online |
| Vacation in Tulum | 25% + VAT | Not stated — and its own FAQ says “25% + marketing fee” instead |
Four bases, five headline numbers, and no way to compare them without doing the arithmetic on your own villa. On a house grossing $68,400 a year, 20% of revenue net of platform fees and 20% of gross revenue are $2,189 apart — the same percentage, a different sentence. A commission quoted “+ VAT” is 16% higher than it looks, because Mexican VAT applies to the service: 25% + VAT is 29%. Ours is quoted the other way round: the 20% is VAT-inclusive, so 20% is what it costs.
Four other Tulum managers whose pages we read on 4 September — Casago, Jungle Luxe, Mimosa Homes and Virestia — publish no fee at all. One of them answers the question with “contact us for a personalised proposal”. An AI assistant we tested the same day attributed 18% plus $150 a month to a fifth operator; its pages would not load for us, so we are not repeating that figure as fact.
The number that actually moves your income
It is not the commission. It is the share of your bookings that never touches a platform. Vacation in Tulum charges more than we do and argues, reasonably, that it more than makes it back: it says 56% of its bookings come through its own site at zero commission — though another page of the same site says more than 60%, which is its own small illustration of why you should ask for the figure in writing. Run both models on the same $68,400 villa, all else equal, and the totals land closer than the headlines suggest — roughly 33% of gross going to fees at 20% with everything on Airbnb, against roughly 36% at 29% with more than half the calendar booked direct. Apply that same direct share to the lower commission and the figure drops to about 26%. Ask any manager what percentage of last year’s nights came from their own channel. That answer is worth more than five points of commission. On our side of it, every one of our nightly rates is published on its own villa page and bookable from this site without a platform in between.
Platform Fees: Mexico Is Not on the Standard Rate
This is the line where the numbers circulating locally are simply wrong. A Tulum operator’s published fee table lists “Airbnb: 14%”, and an AI search engine repeated that figure back to us on 4 September. Here is what the platforms publish for Mexico.
| Platform | Host fee | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Airbnb, split fee | 4% for listings in Mexico (3% elsewhere) | Guests pay a fee too |
| Airbnb, host-only fee | 16% for listings in Mexico | Mandatory for hosts who use property management software |
| Vrbo, pay-per-booking | 5% commission + 3% payment processing | The 3% is waived if your manager uses property management software |
| Booking.com | No standard rate published | The 15% quoted around Tulum comes from operator pages, not from Booking |
Read the Airbnb rows together, because the consequence is counter-intuitive and it is worth thousands of dollars. Any professional manager runs a channel manager — that is what synchronises your calendar. Using one puts the listing on Airbnb’s single-fee plan, which in Mexico is 16%, not 4%. The same software removes Vrbo’s 3% processing fee. So handing your villa to a manager typically raises your Airbnb bill by twelve points and lowers your Vrbo bill by three. Nobody puts that in a proposal. On the villa modelled below, the Airbnb difference alone is $8,208 a year.
Tax: What Is Withheld Before You See the Money
Two of the taxes owners worry about are not owner costs at all. Mexican VAT at 16% and the Quintana Roo lodging tax are charged to the guest on top of the rate, collected by the platform and remitted for you. What comes out of your side is income tax, withheld at source, and the rate depends entirely on your paperwork.
| Your status | Income tax withheld by the platform |
|---|---|
| Individual with a Mexican tax ID (RFC) | 4% of gross |
| Company with an RFC | 2.5% of gross, new since 1 January 2026 |
| No valid RFC | 20% of gross |
| Non-resident taxed under the flat regime | 25% of gross, no deductions |
Those four rates are the schedule Vrbo publishes for Mexican lodging income, the company rate being new on 1 January 2026; Airbnb publishes the same 20% for hosts who have not registered an RFC. The gap between the first row and the third is sixteen points of your gross revenue. On a villa grossing $68,400 that is $10,944 a year — the price of not registering. These are withholdings, not your final bill — what you ultimately owe depends on your regime and your accountant, and if your bank account is outside Mexico the platform also withholds the full 16% VAT rather than half of it.
One figure we cannot settle for you. The Quintana Roo lodging tax is set at 5% in the state’s own lodging tax law, and our guest-facing pricing guide says 5%. Several 2026 guides — and the AI answers built on them — say 6% for platform bookings. We could not find 6% in the law text. Ask your accountant which applies to your bookings rather than trusting either number, including ours.
The registration nobody mentions until a listing goes dark
Since late 2025, Airbnb and Booking.com have required a Quintana Roo tourism registry number to keep a listing active, and more than 3,500 tourism businesses of every kind across the Riviera Maya are now on the state register. A compliant villa in Tulum needs a state taxpayer registration and operating certificate from the state tax authority, plus the RETUR-Q tourism registry entry from the state tourism department. One Tulum manager publishes its registry number on its own site. Ask yours for theirs before you sign, and check that the villa is registered in your name, not the manager’s. If you are still choosing the house, see what to check when buying a villa in Tulum to rent it out.
A Worked Year on a Four-Bedroom Villa
Everything above, applied to a real house: a four-bedroom jungle villa sleeping ten, published from-rate $300 a night. Apply the seasonal weighting above — it works out at 1.42 on this rate card — and the average night across the year is $425. The only variable left is occupancy, so here it is at both ends — the market average, and the average we run across our own houses.
| Line | At 44% occupancy | At 70% occupancy |
|---|---|---|
| Nights booked | 161 | 256 |
| Gross accommodation revenue | $68,400 | $108,800 |
| Airbnb host-only fee, Mexico (16%) | −$10,944 | −$17,408 |
| Management at 20% of that net | −$11,491 | −$18,278 |
| Income tax withheld, with an RFC (4% of gross) | −$2,736 | −$4,352 |
| Before property costs | $43,229 (63% of gross) | $68,762 (63% of gross) |
| Same villa, no RFC (20% withheld) | $32,285 (47%) | $51,354 (47%) |
| Same villa, all bookings direct, with an RFC | $51,984 (76%) | $82,688 (76%) |
| Utilities, insurance, HOA, consumables, major works | Not modelled — too property-specific to average honestly | |
Three readings of that table. Between 63% and 76% of gross reaches you before property costs, and the difference is entirely the booking channel. Registering for Mexican tax is worth more than a five-point difference in commission. And the two occupancy columns keep the same percentages, because fees are proportional — occupancy changes the size of the pie, the fee stack changes your slice of it, and they are separate problems. We set out what those property costs actually are, bill by bill, in a separate guide.
One simplification we will name rather than hide: this spreads occupancy evenly across the year. It is not. The same 44% concentrated in high season and Christmas earns materially more than 44% spread flat, which is why which weeks you fill matters as much as how many. A monthly owner report that shows nights and revenue by month, rather than a yearly total, is the only way to see which one you have.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average vacation rental management fee in Tulum?
Published rates in Tulum run from 15% to 29% of rental income, and the market summaries that quote a range put it at 18–25%. We charge 20% of net rental income, VAT included, with no onboarding fee. But the percentage on its own tells you very little, because operators here apply it to four different bases: net rental income, gross rental revenue, total rental income, and in one case the nightly price advertised online. A fee quoted “plus VAT” is 16% higher than the headline, so 25% + VAT is 29%. Before comparing two proposals, ask each manager three questions: what exactly is the base, is VAT included, and is there a fixed monthly fee on top. Two of the five Tulum operators that publish a rate also charge $50 or a monthly management fee alongside it, and four more publish no rate at all.
What occupancy rate should I expect for a villa in Tulum?
The median Tulum short-term rental ran between 40% and 47% over the year to early 2026, and a manager tracking more than 13,000 listings publishes 44%. Portfolio figures spread much wider: a data service tracking 68 Tulum managers put the largest operator in town at 36% in June 2026, and badged an eight-listing manager its strongest booking performer at 86%. We average 70% across the six houses we manage. Treat any projection above the mid-forties as a claim that needs a mechanism behind it — a direct booking channel, a full seasonal rate card, no long owner blocks in high season — rather than a number to plug into a spreadsheet. Ask which population an average was drawn from, too. Most Tulum listings are condos and studios, and whole villas do not behave like them. Ask also over what period: an average taken across a high season is not an annual figure, and the two get quoted interchangeably.
How much does a villa in Tulum earn per year?
Take the published from-rate, multiply it by about 1.4 to get the average night across a full year, then multiply by 365 and your occupancy. A four-bedroom villa published from $300 a night averages roughly $425 across the seasons: at the market-average 44% that is about $68,400 of gross accommodation revenue, and at 70% about $108,800. What reaches you is between 63% and 76% of that before property costs, depending on whether bookings come through a platform or direct, and drops to about 47% if you have no Mexican tax registration. The 1.4 factor comes from two full-year Tulum rate cards we read in August 2026: mid season ×1.3, high season ×1.8, Christmas and New Year ×2.5, weighted by the length of each season. It assumes occupancy spread evenly through the year, which no villa achieves; fill the high season and the same percentage earns more.
What is the average rent in Tulum, Mexico?
It depends which market you mean, and the search results mix all three. For holiday lets, the median daily rate across 1,690 tracked Tulum listings was 1,338 pesos in June 2026 — about $79 a night — and the average listing grossed roughly $2,000 to $2,100 a month. That population is mostly studios and one-bedroom condos. Whole villas are a different market: agency-listed Tulum villas run $250 to $500 per bedroom per night, and our own houses publish from-rates of $300 to $989 for four to eight bedrooms. Long-term residential rent — what someone living here pays monthly on a lease — is a third market again, and we do not measure it, so we will not quote a figure for it. If you are working out what your own villa should charge, the rate per bedroom is the number that travels best between properties.
What does “20% of net rental income” actually mean?
It means the commission is calculated after the booking platform has taken its cut, not on the headline booking value. On a villa grossing $68,400 a year with everything booked through Airbnb’s single-fee plan in Mexico, the platform takes $10,944 first, and 20% is charged on the $57,456 that remains — $11,491, against $13,680 if the same 20% were applied to gross. That $2,189 is the whole difference between two proposals that both say “20%”. This is the single most useful question you can ask a prospective manager, and it is why we state the base on our own management page rather than only the percentage. Ask also whether VAT is added to the fee — ours is inclusive, so the 20% is the whole number — and whether anything — housekeeping coordination, reporting, listing photography — is invoiced separately from the commission.
Do I need a Mexican tax ID (RFC) to rent out my villa?
You can let a property without one, and the platforms will pay you, but it costs sixteen points of your gross revenue. Vrbo’s published schedule for Mexico withholds 4% income tax from an individual host with a valid RFC, 2.5% from a company with one since 1 January 2026, and 20% from anyone without; Airbnb publishes the same 20% for unregistered hosts. On a villa grossing $68,400 a year that gap is $10,944. If your bank account is outside Mexico, the platform also withholds the full 16% VAT rather than half of it. There is a separate flat regime for non-residents at 25% of gross with no deductions. Which of these routes is right depends on where you are tax resident and how you hold the property, so this is an accountant’s question rather than a manager’s — but no manager should let you discover the 20% on your first payout.
What registrations does a short-term rental in Quintana Roo need?
Three, plus a digital mailbox. You need a state taxpayer registration and a state tax compliance certificate from the Quintana Roo tax authority, and an entry in the RETUR-Q state tourism registry held by the state tourism department. Since late 2025 Airbnb and Booking.com have required that tourism registry number to keep a listing active, and more than 3,500 tourism businesses of every kind were on the state register by 2026. This matters more than it sounds: an unregistered villa is not a fine risk so much as a delisting risk, and a delisted villa earns nothing at all. Ask any prospective manager for their registry number — at least one Tulum company publishes its own on its website — and confirm whose name the villa is registered under. It should be yours, so that changing manager does not cost you the listing. Registration itself is a form-filling exercise, not a hurdle.
Is it cheaper to manage a Tulum villa myself?
On paper, yes: you keep the commission. In practice you take on the calendar, the pricing, the guest messages at three in the morning, the housekeeping rota, the pool, and finding an electrician from another country on a Sunday. The measurable part of the trade is the revenue side. A villa with a full seasonal rate card and a direct booking channel earns more per night and fills more nights than one sitting at a flat price on a single platform, and an unoccupied house in this climate deteriorates faster than an occupied one. The honest test is not the percentage. It is whether your villa, run the way you currently run it, is filling more or fewer than the market-average 44% of nights — and whether the gap is worth more than the fee. Our own comparison, line by line and including what we do not cover, is published in full.
What is not included in a Tulum management commission?
Ours covers listing and distribution, pricing and calendar, guest screening and check-in, housekeeping, linen and laundry, pool and garden, on-call repairs during stays, and a monthly owner report. Billed separately: utilities, guest consumables, lodging tax filing and accounting, property insurance, major works and replacement furnishings, listing photography, and platform host fees passed through at cost. Every operator draws that line somewhere different, and the low headline rates tend to be the ones that draw it earliest — housekeeping coordination, maintenance call-outs and reporting invoiced on top of a 15% fee can cost more across a year than an all-in 20%. Ask for both lists in writing before comparing any two quotes, and ask what a mid-stay repair costs you: parts at cost, parts plus a margin, or a call-out fee each time.
Written by the Villas Ambar team in Tulum, where we have operated for fifteen years and currently manage six houses of our own. Fee, occupancy, rate and tax figures were compiled on 4 September 2026 from the operators’ own published pages, the platforms’ published fee schedules, the Quintana Roo state lodging tax law and a short-term rental data service, converted at 17.0 pesos to the dollar; where two sources disagreed we have shown both rather than pick one. Nothing here is tax advice — withholding rates, registrations and lodging tax should be confirmed with a Mexican accountant for your own situation. If you own a villa in Tulum and want to know what it would earn under management, our commission and what it covers are set out on our property management page, the houses we run are here, and you can tell us about yours.
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