Hotel True Nightly Rate Calculator
Estimate your hotel’s true nightly rate including taxes and fees
Hotel true rate calculator FAQs
What counts as taxes and mandatory fees?
Use the “Taxes and mandatory fees (%)” field for everything charged as a percentage of the base rate: hotel occupancy taxes, city or tourism fees, and required service charges that scale with the nightly price.
How should I handle resort and parking fees?
Add all per-night mandatory extras together and enter the total in the “Extra nightly fees” box. That might include resort fees, destination charges, and overnight parking. If parking is occasional, average it across the stay.
What about loyalty points or free breakfast?
This tool focuses on cash you actually pay. If you want to account for points or free breakfast, you can mentally offset the true nightly rate or compare two offers side by side and decide whether the extra perks are worth a slightly higher cash cost.
Can I use a currency other than USD?
Yes. The calculator shows amounts with a $ sign, but the math works for any currency as long as all your inputs (base rate, fees, and comparisons) are in the same currency.
Turn any hotel quote into a true nightly rate you can actually compare
Hotel pricing is full of surprises. A room that looks like $159 per night at first glance can jump to $220+ once you add city taxes, resort fees, and parking. The Hotel True Nightly Rate Calculator cleans that up by rolling everything you’ll actually pay into a single effective nightly rate, plus a total for the stay and a per-person split if you’re sharing the room.
1. Start with nights and people
Begin by entering the number of nights for this stay and how many people share the room cost. Nights drive the total bill; the people field is just for fairness, so everyone in the group can see their share without opening a spreadsheet.
2. Add Offer A — the main rate you’re considering
For Offer A, copy the hotel’s main nightly rate into “Base room rate per night.” This should be the headline price before taxes and fees. Then enter the combined tax and mandatory fee percentage — for example, if your city charges 14% occupancy tax plus 3% tourism fee, you’d enter 17%.
Next, add any extra nightly fees like resort, destination, or mandatory parking charges that apply each night you stay. Finally, put anything charged only once per stay into “One-time fees”, such as a cleaning fee or one-off service charge. The calculator blends those into the effective nightly rate so you’re not fooled by “only once” language on the invoice.
3. Use Offer B only when you truly need a comparison
Offer B is optional and exists just for comparison. Use it when you’re torn between two rates: prepaid vs. flexible, member vs. public, or two different hotels on the same trip. Enter the same set of fields for Offer B and the calculator will show which one has the lower true nightly rate and how much you save across the whole stay.
4. Read the travel-style summary
After you tap Calculate, the result hero highlights two numbers: true nightly rate for the best offer and per-person cost for that best offer. If you only fill out Offer A, you still see its true nightly rate, total stay cost, and per-person share — a clean single-offer view with no comparison noise. When Offer B is also filled, the hero line tells you which offer wins and how much it saves per night and over the entire stay.
5. Copy the summary into your trip planning
Use the Copy summary button to grab a concise, plain-text snapshot of your inputs and results. Paste it into a group chat, shared doc, or note so everyone sees the same true nightly rate instead of just the promo headline. It’s especially helpful when you’re comparing multiple cities or trips and want a consistent way to judge offers.
This calculator is intentionally input-only and transparent. No hidden assumptions, no scraping, and no guesswork about what your city might charge next year. If fees or taxes change, you just tweak a single number and rerun the estimate. Over time, it can become your go-to way to sanity-check hotel “deals” and spot when a low nightly rate is really hiding high fees somewhere else on the invoice.
How the hotel true nightly rate math works
For each offer, the calculator follows a short chain of steps. Let B be the nightly base rate before taxes, r the taxes and mandatory fees percentage as a decimal, F the extra nightly fees, O the one-time fees for the stay, and N the number of nights.
First, we calculate tax per night:
Tax per night = B × r
Then we compute the total nightly cost including extras:
Nightly total = B + Tax per night + F
The total cost for the stay is:
Stay total = Nightly total × N + O
The effective nightly rate is that total spread across the same number of nights:
Effective nightly rate = Stay total ÷ N
If P is the number of people sharing the room, the per-person cost is:
Per-person cost = Stay total ÷ P
When you enter both Offer A and Offer B, the calculator simply computes these numbers for each and compares the effective nightly rates and stay totals. The difference per night and over the full stay is what you see in the summary.