Airbnb Host Response Time Statistics (2026): 92,597 Listings Analyzed

Airbnb does not publish how fast hosts actually respond to guests. But Inside Airbnb, the independent project that scrapes public listing pages, captures the response-time badge shown on every host profile. We pulled its snapshots for three major US markets, New York City, Los Angeles, and Austin, and analyzed 92,597 listings and 3.4 million guest reviews to see what guest communication really looks like. Every number below comes from that analysis, not from a survey or another blog.

• 28.2% of hosts with a measured response time take more than an hour to reply (18,587 of 65,799 listings, September 2025 snapshots).
• Hosts who respond within an hour are Superhosts at 20x the rate of hosts who take days: 52.6% vs 2.6%.
• About 1 in 6 reviewed listings scores below 4.8 on communication (17.7%) and on check-in (17.9%).
• The word "responsive" appears in 13.2% of reviews written since January 2024, up from 9.4% all-time.
• 77% of explicit communication complaints in reviews are about one thing: messages that never got answered.

28.2% of measured hosts take more than an hour

Across the three cities, 65,799 listings reported a response time as of the September 2025 snapshots (the most recent scrapes that populate this field). Another 26,798 listings, 28.9% of the total, report no response time at all, which Airbnb shows when a host has had no recent inquiries to be measured on. Among hosts that are measured:

The slow tail varies a lot by market. In New York City, 42.6% of measured hosts take more than an hour (of 20,542). In Los Angeles it is 22.8% (of 35,581), and in Austin 17.8% (of 9,676).

Fast repliers hold Superhost at 20x the rate of slow ones

That is a 20.2x gap between the fastest and slowest buckets. Part of it is mechanical, since Airbnb requires a 90% response rate to qualify for Superhost, and fast repliers likely differ in other ways too. It is a correlation, not a controlled experiment. But that is exactly the point: response behavior is one of the few host habits Airbnb formally measures, badges, and ranks on.

Star ratings forgive slow. They do not forgive silent.

Overall review scores are surprisingly flat across the first three buckets: 4.774 for within-an-hour hosts, 4.771 for within a few hours, and 4.785 for within a day. The cliff appears at multi-day silence, where the average drops to 4.644. Guests tolerate a slow afternoon. They do not tolerate being ignored.

One in six listings scores under 4.8 on communication

In the latest snapshots (June 2026 for NYC and LA), 17.7% of reviewed listings score below 4.8 on the communication subscore (11,183 of 63,096) and 17.9% score below 4.8 on check-in (11,289 of 63,088). In New York it is 22.3% on communication. For context, 42.5% of scored listings hold a perfect 5.0 on communication, so sitting below 4.8 puts a listing well behind the pack. We use 4.8 as a benchmark because it is the bar Airbnb applies to overall rating for Superhost; subscores do not directly gate the badge.

What guests actually write in reviews

Scanning all 3,434,826 review texts, the word "responsive" appears in 13.2% of reviews written since January 2024 (174,289 of 1,323,478), up from 9.4% across all time. Among clearly English-language reviews it is 16.8%, roughly 1 in 6. Responsiveness is one of the most-mentioned host traits in the entire review corpus, and mentioning it is becoming more common every year.

Explicit failure phrases like "never responded," "couldn't get in," or "wrong code" appear in 2,782 reviews, about 1 in 1,235. That undercounts reality, because the phrase list is narrow, unhappy guests often skip reviewing, and public reviews skew positive. Two details stand out anyway. First, 77% of those failure mentions (2,138) are about messages that never got answered. Not decor, not parking. Silence. Second, the rate is rising, from 0.08% all-time to 0.11% in reviews written since January 2024. Guests praise responsiveness roughly 116 times more often than they describe an outright communication failure.

What this means if you host

• Reply speed is the highest-leverage habit the data can see. It feeds your response rate, your Superhost eligibility, your communication and check-in subscores, and the exact words guests type into reviews.
• The window that matters is the first hour. That is the line Airbnb draws, and 71.8% of measured hosts already clear it, so being slower is a visible disadvantage.
• The failure guests punish hardest is the unanswered message, and it happens at predictable moments: overnight, during your day job, or mid-flight.
• Multi-day silence is the only thing that reliably drags the overall star rating down.

City by city

We publish per-city breakdowns with the same methodology: New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Nashville, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.. The spread is wide: New York is the slowest market we measured, with 42.6% of hosts taking more than an hour, while Nashville is the fastest at 8.8%.

Methodology and sources

Data from Inside Airbnb (insideairbnb.com), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Snapshots: New York City 2025-09-01 and 2026-06-14, Los Angeles 2025-09-01 and 2026-06-15, Austin 2025-09-16. Response-time stats use the September 2025 snapshots because newer scrapes ship that field empty; cite them "as of September 2025." Listings with no reported response time (28.9%) are excluded from response-time denominators. Review-text matching used narrow, case-insensitive phrase lists with negation checks, and counts each review at most once per category. Three large markets are not a nationally representative sample. Analysis by Rezi.