Airbnb’s new checkout rules: what Toronto owners need to change before November 20
From November 20, Airbnb hosts can no longer require guests to strip the beds, wash the dishes or haul the garbage off the property before they leave. Airbnb’s new checkout rules apply to every booking made on or after that date, and CBC, TechCrunch and Skift all ran the story within two days of the announcement. A lot of hosts are angry. We aren’t, because we never asked guests to do any of that, and nobody books a weekend in Toronto to finish it with housework.
Here’s what changed, who it costs money, and the five things to fix on your listing before the 20th.
What Airbnb’s new checkout rules say
Airbnb’s policy on reasonable house rules and requests says hosts are generally not allowed to ask for anything that takes real time or effort, or that a cleaner would normally do. Its own examples are stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, and washing and putting away dishes. Airbnb’s guidance for hosts adds starting a load of laundry. You can still ask guests to put used dishes in the sink or gather the towels in one spot.
House rules now come in two parts. There are seven standard rules you switch on or off: maximum overnight guests, quiet hours, events, pets, smoking (vaping included), commercial photography, and locking up at checkout. Everything else goes in one requests box, and Airbnb reviews what’s in it. Guests must follow the rules. Requests they’re only encouraged to follow.
Four more changes get less attention but matter more to an owner:
- No fines. You can’t charge a guest for skipping a checkout task or set penalties of your own. Damage goes through AirCover. If your condo board or the City could fine you for something a guest does, you warn guests in the listing’s local rules section; you don’t bill them.
- No extra charge for anything you advertise. If the listing shows parking or a hot tub, any fee for it has to be in the price at booking. Optional add-ons (Airbnb’s example is breakfast) can still be priced in the requests.
- No separate contracts and no copies of guest ID, unless the law requires it or one of a few exceptions applies: monthly stays, Airbnb Luxe, optional amenities, and rules your condo corporation imposes.
- One place for rules. Anything that isn’t in the house rules and requests section when the guest books doesn’t count. Not a welcome message, not the house manual, not a laminated sign by the door.
Hosts do get something back. If a guest breaks a house rule during the stay, or tells you before check-in that they’re going to, you can cancel without a penalty.
Do the new rules apply to bookings I already have?
No. The policy covers reservations booked on or after November 20, 2026. A guest who books on November 19 for a stay in January keeps the rules that were on the listing when they booked, and anything you add later doesn’t apply to them. The new rules editor is already live, so there’s no reason to wait for the date.
Can I still charge a cleaning fee?
Yes. Airbnb hasn’t touched cleaning fees, and you still set your own. What’s changed is what the fee is understood to buy: a full turnover by your cleaner, not a turnover the guest half-finished for you. And you can’t add a charge because a guest left the dishes.
What happens if your listing breaks the policy
Airbnb flags requests that don’t pass in the listing editor and emails the host. If it isn’t fixed, the policy allows a notice on the listing warning guests, lower placement in search, and other action under the terms of service. Skift reports that can run as far as cancelled bookings, loss of Superhost or Guest Favorite status, or account suspension. A warning on the listing will cost you bookings long before any of that.
Who loses money on this
Hosts who priced their cleaning around the guest doing part of it. If your cleaner used to walk in to stripped beds and an empty dishwasher, that work now lands on the cleaner, and the cleaning fee may not cover it. For a downtown condo that could be an extra half hour a turnover. For a four-bedroom house, more.
Also anyone running the place from signs and scheduled messages. If “garbage to the bin room, no shoes inside” lives on the fridge, from November 20 it doesn’t bind the guest unless it’s also in the rules box.
Who this is good for
Owners whose managers already did the work. We’ve run Toronto rentals for years without asking guests for a single chore. Our cleaning team strips the beds, runs the dishwasher, takes the garbage out and resets the unit, because that’s what the cleaning fee is for. Guests notice. The ones who’ve stayed somewhere with a checklist taped to the counter tell us about it.
So we think this is a good change, and a late one. A host who can’t make the numbers work without free labour from guests has a pricing problem, not a guest problem. (The trade-off is real: a full turnover takes longer than a half one, and that time gets paid for somewhere. We’d rather it show up in an honest cleaning fee than in a guest’s review.)
What to do before November 20
If you run your own listing:
- Open the listing editor and read your rules and requests as a guest would. Anything that sounds like a job (strip, wash, start, take out) gets rewritten as a tidy-up (gather, stack, leave in the sink) or deleted.
- Pull the same text out of your scheduled messages, house manual and any signs in the unit.
- Switch on the seven standard rules and set the numbers. Most Toronto hosts should use both the guest maximum and lock-up-at-checkout.
- Delete every fine or penalty from your listing and messages. If your building fines owners for guest behaviour (noise, the wrong elevator, visitor parking), put that in the local rules section instead.
- Ask your cleaner what the change adds to a turnover, in minutes, and check your cleaning fee against it.
If you rent furnished by the month, the exception for monthly stays still lets you use a written agreement. That’s the model behind our mid-term rental management, and stays of 28 nights or more sit outside Toronto’s short-term rental rules.
Toronto’s own requirements don’t change. Your registration number still goes on the listing, and guests still get the emergency contact and exit diagram the City requires. Those are compliance items, not house rules; the Toronto rules in plain English covers where they belong.
If you’d rather someone else read the fine print, that’s what we do, and we’ve run listings the way Airbnb now requires since before it required it. Send us the address and we’ll tell you what your listing’s rules should say.
Sources
- Airbnb Help Centre, “Reasonable house rules and requests” (applies to reservations booked on or after November 20, 2026).
- Airbnb Resource Centre, “Important changes to house rules”, October 20, 2026.
- Airbnb Help Centre, “Find a listing’s house rules and requests”.
- CBC News, “Airbnb limiting the checkout chores hosts can ask guests to do”, October 2026.
- Skift, “Airbnb’s new policy for hosts: don’t ask guests to wash dishes or strip beds”, October 21, 2026.
- Hosting Unfiltered, “Airbnb’s new house rules policy”, October 20, 2026.
Last updated: October 25, 2026.