What is the Occupancy Rate?
The Occupancy Rate represents the ratio of occupied to total rental units. The formula for calculating the occupancy rate divides the number of occupied rooms by the total number of available rooms, which yields the percentage of occupied rental units relative to the total rental units available for rent.
How to Calculate Occupancy Rate?
The occupancy rate measures the number of occupied rental units at a specific point in time relative to the total number of rental units available.
In particular, the occupancy rate is a key performance indicator (KPI) within the hospitality sector, namely hotels, since the metric quantifies the proportion of a rental property that is actually being utilized.
Common examples of industries wherein occupancy is an important determinant of revenue are as follows.
- Hospitality Sector, e.g. Hotel Properties
- Apartment Complex
- Hospitals
- Healthcare Assisted Living Facilities
- C2C Rental Platform (i.e. Airbnb)
Since an unoccupied rental unit such as a hotel room generates no revenue, a hotel strives to achieve as high of occupancy as possible.
What is a Good Occupancy Rate?
The closer that a hotel’s occupancy is near 100% — i.e. the full utilization of all available rental units — the closer the hotel is to reaching its full revenue capacity, all else being equal.
But higher occupancy does not necessarily always translate into higher revenue because other factors such as the average daily rate (ADR) and the revenue per available room must also be considered.
For instance, a hotel with 85% occupancy could bring in more revenue than a competitor with 100% occupancy if the former were to charge sufficiently higher pricing.
- Higher Pricing → Lower Occupancy Rate
- Lower Pricing → Higher Occupancy Rate
Simply put, a hotel with above-market pricing will have a business model that reduces its reliance on near-full capacity occupancy to reach its target revenue.
In order to maximize revenue generation, the trade-off between pricing and occupancy must be understood by hotel owners and renters when setting prices.
Occupancy Rate Formula
The formula for calculating the occupancy at a hotel is as follows.
For example, if a hotel with 100 available rooms currently has 85 rooms booked, the occupancy is 85% on the given day.
- Occupancy = 85 ÷ 100 = 0.85, or 85%
The inverse of the occupancy rate is the vacancy rate, which is the percentage of empty, vacated rooms.
Occupancy Rate Calculator
We’ll now move to a modeling exercise, which you can access by filling out the form below.
Hotel Occupancy Rate Calculation Example
Suppose a hotel has a total of 250 rooms available for customers to book.
On this particular date, the number of occupied rooms is 225, so only 25 rooms are vacant.
- Number of Occupied Rooms = 225
- Total Number of Available Rooms = 250
Given these assumptions, the occupancy is 90% on this specific day, which we calculated by dividing the number of occupied rooms by the total available rooms.
- Occupancy Rate = 225 ÷ 250 = 90%
In conclusion, we can also back-solve the vacancy rate by subtracting the hotel’s occupancy from one.
- Vacancy Rate = 1 – 90% = 10%
