180 Days of Inventory: Pricing a Capped Calendar

A cap turns a year into a fixed number of sellable nights. Price the nights you have, not the nights you wish you had.

Last updated: October 31, 2026

A cap doesn't shrink your costs. It shrinks the number of nights that can pay for them. That single asymmetry is the whole pricing problem: a mortgage, an insurance premium and a set of rates stay the same size, while the nights available to recover them get fewer. Everything below follows from that one move.

Key Takeaways

• Read the cap as inventory, not as a rule. It's the size of your product for the year, and a smaller product changes what each unit has to earn.
• A capped year is a budget. Nights are spent, not offered. A cheap night in a quiet month is a night you can't sell in a busy one.
• The floor comes from cost, not from hope. Annual fixed cost divided by sellable nights gives you a floor, and a floor isn't a forecast.
• Keep per-stay costs out of the floor. Cleaning, linen and consumables attach to a booking, not to the year, and mixing the two hides which number is actually broken.
• Recount every quarter. Nights sold, nights left, and the rate you actually achieved tell you whether the plan still holds.

The cap as an inventory number

Most hosts meet a cap as a compliance line, and stop there. That's the wrong frame for pricing, because a compliance line tells you what not to do and an inventory number tells you what you have.

Treat it as inventory and the rest of the year organises itself. Your product is no longer 365 nights. It's the published figure, and that figure is a budget you spend across twelve months.

The published figure for non-hosted short letting in Greater Sydney is 180 nights a year, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald on 24 October 2026. Whether it applies to your unit, and how your nights are counted, is a question for the competent authority rather than for a blog. What matters for pricing is the shape of the constraint, and the shape is the same everywhere a cap exists.

Here's the shift that catches people. In an uncapped year, an empty Tuesday is a missed opportunity. In a capped year, a Tuesday sold at a discount in a soft month is a night you no longer have in December, when the same room would have gone for more. The cost of that discount isn't the discount. It's the peak night you traded away.

Where the ceiling actually lands

A cap that runs annually is not a monthly allowance. You can't divide it by twelve and forget it, because the nights aren't worth the same in every month.

So the real decision is allocation. Which weeks get the nights, and which weeks stay empty on purpose. Three questions make that decision concrete.

Which weeks carry your highest rate? Not the busiest weeks by volume — the weeks where the achieved rate is highest and demand is least price-sensitive. Those are the weeks you protect.

Where does booking pace actually turn? Look at when a month starts filling rather than when it fills. A month that books late and cheap is a candidate for fewer nights, not for a discount.

What happens if you run out early? If the nights are gone by October, November earns nothing at any price. A cap makes the last quarter of the year a planning question rather than a selling question.

The weekly habit that makes this workable is a running count. Nights sold this year, nights remaining, and the weeks you've deliberately left open. That count belongs next to the rate, not in a folder you open when the year ends.

It also helps to write the allocation down before the season starts, even as three lines in a notes app. Which weeks you're protecting, which weeks you're willing to let go cheap, and the point in the year where you'd change your mind. A written plan is what stops a slow month from turning into a panicked discount on a week you'd already decided to keep.

Rebuilding a rate floor

Now the arithmetic, stated as a formula and nothing more: your rate floor is the annual fixed cost of the property divided by the number of sellable nights. That's the whole calculation. This article won't run it for you, because the numerator changes with every mortgage, premium and levy, and a number from someone else's building is worse than no number at all.

What belongs in the numerator is the cost of holding the property for a year whether or not a guest arrives. Debt service or rent. Insurance. Council rates. The subscriptions and channel costs that run monthly. What doesn't belong is anything that only happens because a booking happened.

That second list matters more than it looks. Cleaning, linen, welcome supplies and the wear that comes with a stay are per-booking costs. They belong in the price of a stay, recovered each time. Fold them into the annual floor and you'll overstate the floor, price yourself out of the soft weeks, and blame the market for the result.

The floor also has a second job. It tells you which nights are worth selling at all. A night priced under the floor still costs you the night, so the question stops being "is this booking better than nothing" and becomes "is this booking better than the peak night I'm giving up".

One more input belongs beside the floor, and it's the one most hosts skip: what each channel is actually showing. The calendar at localsbnb.com shows each connected channel's source price and status. Compare that with the rate you set, on the same screen, before you decide whether a week is underpriced or simply unsold.

Reviewing it every quarter

A floor built in January is a guess by April, because costs move and occupancy doesn't arrive on schedule. Four reviews a year is enough to keep it honest.

Count the nights. Sold, remaining, and the split by month. If the count is ahead of plan, the decision in front of you is whether to hold nights back for peak rather than whether to discount.

Check the achieved rate. Not the rate you set. The average daily rate the dashboard reports is the one that happened, and it's the only one that tells you whether the floor is holding.

Check RevPAR. Occupancy and rate together describe a week better than either alone. A full calendar at a rate under the floor is a busy month with nothing in it.

Re-run the cost side. A refinance, a levy increase or a new insurance quote changes the numerator, and the floor moves with it. Nothing else about the plan needs to change.

The dashboard at the same address reports occupancy, ADR and RevPAR for the property, which is the three-number version of this review. It won't tell you which weeks to protect. That's a judgement about your market, and it's the part worth doing yourself.

FAQ

Does a cap mean I should raise my rates?

Not by itself. A cap changes how many nights carry the annual cost, and the floor follows from that. What the market will pay in a given week is a separate question, and a floor is a constraint on your pricing rather than evidence about demand.

Do nights already booked count toward the cap?

That depends on how the authority counts a short-let night, and the answer varies by jurisdiction and sometimes by the type of letting. Ask the competent authority how your nights are counted before you plan the year around an assumption.

What happens if I reach the cap in October?

You stop selling for the rest of the year, and the remaining months earn nothing whatever you charge. That's why the allocation decision belongs in the first quarter rather than in the last, and why the count needs a weekly look rather than an annual one.

None of this needs a spreadsheet model. It needs one formula, one count, and a decision about which weeks you're protecting. Do that and the ceiling stops being a shock in November. localsbnb.com keeps the nights, the rates and the channel view in one place, so the quarterly review takes minutes instead of an afternoon of exports.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. Night caps, how they're counted and who they apply to are set by the competent authority and change over time. This article gives a method and a formula, not a figure for your property. Confirm the current rules for your listing and take advice on your own cost base before you reprice.