The Airbnb damage policy,
from checkout to payout.

What hosts mean by the phrase is the set of rules inside AirCover for Hosts, the program Airbnb introduced when it retired the traditional cash security deposit. Instead of holding a guest's money against damage, Airbnb now backs the host directly. That shift, from a deposit you controlled to a claims process Airbnb controls, is the single biggest change in host protection in the last decade, and most hosts never adjusted their habits to match it.

Two halves: damage and liability

AirCover has two distinct parts. Host Damage Protection covers guest-caused damage to your property and belongings up to $3 million per stay. Host liability protection covers up to $1 million if a guest is injured, or their property is harmed, and you are found responsible. This guide is about the first half, the damage side, which is where almost every host claim lives. For the liability half, see the host liability insurance guide.

It is a program, not insurance

This distinction matters more than it sounds. AirCover is administered by Airbnb, on Airbnb's terms, with an internal review team and no external arbitrator. There is no policy document you can cite, no adjuster you can appeal to outside the platform, and no published evidence specification. That is why two hosts with identical damage can get different outcomes: the difference is the evidence, and how well it fits the unwritten standard. Many experienced operators carry separate short-term-rental insurance precisely because AirCover is not a contract they can enforce.

AirCover is not an automatic payout. It is a process you run correctly, on a deadline, with evidence that meets a standard Airbnb never spells out in advance.

The rest of this guide is that process, in the order it actually happens: how a claim moves, the deadline that ends most of them, what is covered, what it pays, the 2026 evidence rules, and how to file one that survives review.

The Airbnb damage policy gives you a filing window, and missing it ends the claim no matter how strong the evidence is. The rule is: file within 14 days of checkout, or before your next guest checks in, whichever comes first.

That second clause is the trap. On a back-to-back turnover, the window is not 14 days. It is the few hours between one guest leaving and the next arriving. A host who plans to file "this week" can be out of time by the afternoon. This is the exact mechanism the damage claim time limit breakdown covers in detail.

The practical takeaway is that the deadline is really a documentation deadline. If the damage is captured, dated, and sealed at checkout, the filing itself is quick and the window is never the thing that beats you. Hosts who run same-day turnovers should treat every checkout as if the clock is measured in hours, because for them it usually is. Building a turnover system that fits documentation into the gap between guests is the single highest-leverage habit for protecting claims.

Here is the expectation gap that catches hosts off guard: AirCover generally pays the depreciated value of an item, not the price of a new one. A sofa you bought three years ago is valued as a three-year-old sofa, not at today's replacement cost. Insurers call this actual cash value, and it is why a payout can land well below what you paid to fix the problem.

A $2,500 couch damaged after three years is not a $2,500 claim. Depreciation can cut the payout to a few hundred dollars, so the number you request should reflect the item's real, current value, backed by proof of its age and condition.

This is not a reason to skip the claim. It is a reason to file it correctly and claim the right number. Padding a claim to "make up" for depreciation usually backfires, because an amount that does not match the evidence reads as inflated and costs you credibility on the whole claim. The full breakdown of actual cash value, depreciation by item type, and how to claim the top of the honest range is in how much AirCover actually pays, and the Guest Damage Cost Estimator works the figure out before you file.

Denials cluster around a short list of failures, and none of them is bad luck. Each one is a documentation problem you control, decided before the damage ever appears:

Every one of these traces back to habits set before checkout. The damage claim guide maps the denial patterns in full, the evidence guide defines the standard that separates proof from a photo that proves nothing, and the claim statistics page collects the citable figures behind these patterns. If a claim is denied, you can still appeal it, though new evidence added at appeal carries less weight than evidence filed the first time.

Deep dives on the parts of the policy that decide real money.