AirCover pays what it was worth,
not what it costs to replace.

AirCover generally pays the actual cash value of a damaged item, not replacement cost. That is its depreciated worth at the moment it was damaged, after age and wear are subtracted. The $3 million figure everyone quotes is a ceiling, not a typical payout.

This is why a repair bill and a reimbursement rarely match. You buy the replacement at today's prices; AirCover reimburses the old item's depreciated value. A three-year-old sofa is valued as a three-year-old sofa. You cannot beat depreciation, but you can stop a reviewer adding a second discount on top for weak evidence.

Documentation sets the difference between the top and bottom of the range. Prove the item's age and good condition, prove exactly what the guest damaged, and attach a real quote, and the payout lands at the top of what the rules allow. The rest of this guide is the math and the method.

Payout basis per Airbnb's AirCover for Hosts terms and the standard insurance definition of actual cash value. Confirm current terms on your own account.

Actual cash value, or ACV, is what an item was worth at the moment it was damaged. It takes the replacement price and subtracts depreciation for age and wear. The contrast is replacement cost value, which pays what it takes to buy the item new. AirCover works on the first basis; most people instinctively expect the second.

A sofa that cost $2,500 three years ago is not valued at $2,500, and it is not valued at whatever a similar sofa costs today. It is valued as a used, three-year-old sofa, which can be a few hundred dollars.

Many dedicated short-term rental policies can be written on a replacement-cost basis, which is one of the concrete reasons hosts add insurance on top of AirCover rather than relying on it alone. The trade-off between the two layers is the whole subject of AirCover vs host insurance. If the difference between depreciated and new matters to your bottom line, that comparison is where to resolve it.

Numbers make the concept concrete. Take a common claim: a guest scorches a laminate countertop and cracks a three-year-old dining chair. Here is how the money actually flows, step by step.

The lesson is not that depreciation is unfair. It is that the two lines behave differently, and evidence decides how much of each you keep. The hard-finish repair holds its value and, well documented, pays close to cost. The soft, aged item depreciates no matter what, so the win there is avoiding a second discount, not fighting the first.

A payout is rarely just the price of an object. Real claims often bundle several kinds of cost, and each is treated differently:

• Repair labour. Recoverable when it is tied to a covered item and backed by a quote or invoice. A contractor's written estimate is what converts labour from a guess into a line the reviewer can approve.
• Specialised cleaning. Abnormal, documented cleaning beyond your standard turnover fee can be claimed, which is the whole subject of smoke, odour and specialised cleaning claims. Your routine cleaning fee is not.
• Lost income from blocked nights. If covered damage forces you to cancel upcoming reservations, some of that lost income may be addressed, case by case, tied to the covered event. General loss of income is excluded.

The pattern across all three is the same: the more precisely you can attach a cost to a covered event with a document, the more of it survives review. Bundled, unexplained totals get trimmed to the part the reviewer can verify.

The payout is not a guess and it is not a fixed table. A reviewer reconstructs the actual cash value from a handful of inputs, and every one of them is something your evidence can strengthen or leave blank:

• Replacement price. What the same or a comparable item costs new today. A current quote or product link anchors this; a vague description leaves the reviewer to estimate low.
• Age. How long you have owned it. A receipt, an order confirmation, or a dated photo of the item in place fixes the age; without proof, older is assumed.
• Expected useful life. How long the category is expected to last. A mattress and a hardwood floor age on very different curves, and the category sets the depreciation slope.
• Condition before the damage. Whether it was well kept or already worn. This is exactly what a check-in baseline proves, and it is the input hosts most often leave undocumented.

Put those together and the ACV is close to arithmetic: a recent, well-kept, clearly-priced item in a slow-depreciating category recovers most of its cost; an old, undocumented item in a fast-depreciating category recovers little. You cannot change the curve, but you can make sure every input is evidenced so the reviewer prices the item at the top of its honest bracket instead of the bottom.

The guides that turn a payout number into a plan.