The old move was simple. Advertise a low nightly rate, then stack a $250 cleaning fee at the final screen once the guest was already picturing their weekend on the boardwalk. That trick is dead in California. As of July 1, 2024, AB 537 requires Airbnb, Vrbo, and every other platform to fold all mandatory fees, cleaning included, into the rate a guest sees up front. Taxes are the only thing you're allowed to add later. Get it wrong and the civil penalty runs up to $10,000.
So the cleaning fee didn't disappear. It just got dragged into daylight, sitting inside the number guests compare against the unit three doors down. That changes how you should think about it.
The part most hosts miss: San Diego taxes your cleaning fee
Here's the wrinkle that catches people. In the City of San Diego, Transient Occupancy Tax treats "rent" broadly, and the cleaning fee counts as taxable rent. So do pet fees, resort fees, and no-show charges. On top of that, the City's TOT went zone-based on May 1, 2025 — 11.75%, 12.75%, or 13.75% depending on how close you are to the Convention Center downtown, replacing the old flat 10.5%. Add the 0.55% Tourism Marketing District assessment and a Gaslamp high-rise near the water is handing over more than 14% of every dollar, cleaning fee and all.
Airbnb and Vrbo collect and remit that TOT for you, which is convenient right up until you realize a bloated cleaning fee inflates the tax you're passing to the guest. A $400 "cleaning fee" downtown isn't a $400 line item anymore. It's $400 plus roughly $57 in tax, buried inside a nightly rate the guest is now comparing head to head. Padding the fee to skim margin used to be invisible. Now it prices you out of the search results.
What a defensible turnover fee actually pays for
If the fee is out in the open, it needs to survive a guest squinting at it. For a 2-bed coastal unit — think a Pacific Beach condo or a Mission Beach duplex off the boardwalk — a real turnover is more labor than a landlocked apartment. Sand gets everywhere. Salt air corrodes fixtures. Beach towels come back damp, and during May gray and June gloom that marine layer sits over the coast for weeks, so linens and towels stored in a beach unit are one careless fold away from mildew.
Roughly, a defensible fee on that kind of unit covers:
- Full linen and towel turnover — strip, launder or swap, remake. Coastal humidity means you're drying to completion, not close enough.
- Two bathrooms and a kitchen reset to move-in condition, hard water and salt residue on glass and chrome included.
- Sand management — entryways, tracked-in grit under rugs, the stuff that grinds into floors if you skip it two turns in a row.
- Restock and staging — paper goods, coffee, the small consumables guests notice when they're missing.
- An inspection pass — damage notes, low-supply flags, and photos if you ever need to back a claim.
That's the honest cost of the work. It's a number you can point to and explain. What it isn't is a $150 profit center dressed up as sanitation.
Turnover frequency depends on which city you're in
How often that fee even fires depends entirely on where the unit sits, because the region is a patchwork. The City of San Diego runs the STRO ordinance with four license tiers — you need the license, a TOT certificate, and a current Rental Unit Business Tax to operate at all. But cross a line and the rules flip. Coronado bans stays under 26 consecutive nights, which kills true nightly turnover; it's a monthly model, so your cleaning cost is a once-a-month event, not a Sunday-to-Sunday grind. Solana Beach runs a 7-day minimum. Del Mar capped the city at 129 permits and closed its existing-STR window on May 1, 2026. Imperial Beach is friendlier to investors and allows non-owner-occupied rentals, which usually means shorter stays and more turns.
The math is different in each. A weekly-minimum unit up the I-5 in Solana Beach turns four times a month. A San Diego Tier 2 whole-home doing two- and three-night weekends might turn eight or ten times, each one a taxable cleaning fee sitting in plain view. Price the fee to the reality of your zone, not to a number you grabbed from a listing in a different city with different rules.
Where this leaves you
Set the fee to what the work costs, not to what you think you can slip past checkout, because you can't slip anything past checkout anymore. A guest comparing your PB condo against three others will see the all-in number, and the padded fee is the one that loses. Keep it clean, keep it explainable, and keep the tax math in mind before you round up. If you want a turnover cost you can actually defend on a coastal 2-bed, that's the number we'll build with you — tell us about the unit and we'll walk the tiers. More on how we work across the county is on the main page.