Stripping the bed, washing the dishes and taking the rubbish away have long been part of checking out of some Airbnb stays, often on top of a cleaning fee. For bookings made from 20 November 2026, Airbnb won’t let hosts require them.

The change is a platform rule, not a law. It sits in Airbnb’s community policy on reasonable house rules and requests, which applies worldwide and appears on its New Zealand site.

What hosts can and can’t ask

Under the policy, hosts generally can’t ask guests to do tasks that take significant effort or time, or that a cleaner would usually do. Airbnb’s examples are stripping the bed, taking rubbish off site, and washing and putting away dishes. Airbnb says hosts can still ask guests to put used dishes in the sink.

Every house rule and request has to sit in the designated section of the listing when the guest books. Hosts can’t add new ones afterwards by message, by a sign in the home or in person. Fines and penalties are out too, and Airbnb points hosts to its AirCover damage protection instead.

Airbnb says it can make exceptions where local conditions call for them, such as asking guests to keep showers short during drought water restrictions. A host whose rules don’t comply can be asked to update the listing and given warnings. If the problem continues, Airbnb may put a notice on the listing or show it less often in search.

Cleaning fees stay. Airbnb’s ground rules for guests say a host’s cleaning fee covers standard cleaning between stays, such as laundry and vacuuming, and hosts can’t charge guests for skipping a checkout task. Guests are still expected to leave a place without the need for excessive or deep cleaning, and hosts can still review them on cleanliness.

Airbnb has asked hosts to keep checkout requests reasonable since 2022. Its November 2022 guidance said guests shouldn’t have to strip beds, do laundry or vacuum, but could fairly be asked to turn off the lights, throw out food and lock the doors.

How it landed

Airbnb said in a statement that hosts’ house rules had become confusing, onerous and hard to manage. It said it had redesigned them to be easier to find and set, alongside a policy to keep requests reasonable with no surprises.

Consumer NZ spokesperson Jessica Walker said guests would welcome the change. She said people should still leave a property in a reasonable state after paying a cleaning fee, but she understood the frustration of paying one and then facing a list of chores before leaving.

Hundreds of hosts criticised the rules on Airbnb’s community forum, the ABC reported. Townsville host Nadia Di Martino, who doesn’t charge a cleaning fee but asks guests to wash their dishes, said many hosts would have to raise prices and pay someone to do all the cleaning. She said she was considering leaving the platform for permanent flatmates, or banning use of the kitchen.

Massey University marketing expert Bodo Lang said guests who pay a cleaning fee expect to be able to simply leave. He said outliers would test the system and were likely to disappoint hosts, and that newer hosts with few reviews may hold back from an honest guest review for fear of a retaliatory one. In his view, the policy “subtly shifts Airbnb away from its peer-to-peer origins”.

Fees and prices

For business travellers comparing stays, Airbnb has shown the total price, including all fees before taxes, by default in search results worldwide since April 2025.

For accommodation advertised outside the platform, the Commerce Commission’s Fair Trading Act guidance says consumers are entitled to assume an advertised price is the full price, and that fine print shouldn’t be used to disclose extra charges. In June 2026, gym chain CityFitness was fined $1.12 million in a Commission prosecution over a compulsory 3% fee its advertised prices left out.

For hosts, the practical step is to check each listing’s house rules section. Anything not shown there at booking can’t be required.