High Country STR Benchmark
Short-term rental occupancy across nine High Country markets, month by month.
The figures come from a commercial short-term-rental data provider. Market-level averages only, and nothing here describes an individual listing.
What this market’s months have run
Boone, a typical month
The median of 60 months, August 2021 through July 2026. Half of Boone's months ran busier than this and half ran quieter. That is 4.5 occupancy points above the nine-market median.
The spread
A tenth of months fall below the first figure and a tenth run above the second. The distance between them is the number a year's budget has to survive.
Latest month
July 2026 came in at the 52nd percentile of this market's own history, about a normal month.
Busiest month, by revenue
By occupancy alone, Boone fills up most in August. By revenue — rate and occupancy together — its best month is July. A market can run decent occupancy at soft shoulder-season rates, or strong rates at moderate occupancy during a specific event window, and occupancy alone doesn't show you which one this is.
What that would gross
168 booked nights at $365 a night — Boone's own average for July 2026, the average a booked night actually sold for that month, before cleaning fees, platform cut or management. Not a listed rate; a revenue average. Gross booking revenue before fees, cleaning and everything else. Edit the rate above to price your own.
Price a year at your own rate
The year, in occupancy and in revenue
RevPAR is occupancy and rate in one number. It’s what an average night in the market earned across the whole month, booked or empty, which is why it moves when either half moves and why a strong rate at thin occupancy shows up here and not in the occupancy curve above.
Email me the chart and an editable pro forma. A pro forma is a worksheet built on your own assumptions rather than last year’s actuals, and this one adds your own cleaning, platform and management costs, so the gross figure becomes a net one.
Calculations are stored anonymously and feed regional benchmarks; nothing you enter identifies you unless you add an email.
What short-term rental occupancy runs in Boone and the High Country
Nine markets sit inside what people mean by the High Country: Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, Beech Mountain, Sugar Mountain, Seven Devils, Vilas, Valle Crucis and Deep Gap. They don’t run the same year. A ski-side market and a university-side market peak in different months, and a single regional average hides exactly the difference an owner is trying to see. The picker above shows each one against its own history and against the nine together.
The figures cover August 2021 to July 2026 — 60 months of market averages from a commercial short-term-rental data provider. These are market-level aggregates: no individual listing’s occupancy, rate or revenue is used here or held anywhere, and the licence that permits the market figures is the same one that forbids the listing-level ones. The nine markets are a declared list, each pointing at its own occupancy, rate, and revenue series, so adding a market is a question of sourcing those three series rather than of rebuilding the tool. It’s named for the High Country because that’s where the data is, and the instrument travels wherever the data does.
It won’t tell you what your place would do. A market median is the middle of a wide distribution, and the thing that decides where a specific cabin lands in it — the view, the hot tub, the road in winter, the photographs, the reviews already banked — is none of it in this data. Two houses on the same street sit at opposite ends of these percentiles all the time.
The gross figure uses the market’s own average nightly rate (ADR) unless you typed a different one in. ADR is a revenue average, not a listed price: It’s what booked nights actually sold for that month, so it already reflects whatever discounting and demand happened, and it says nothing about a night that never got booked. Nothing here is netted, either — no cleaning, no platform fee, no management, no vacancy beyond what the occupancy already says, and no mortgage.
Reading a percentile without a statistics degree
Line up every month this market has recorded, quietest to busiest. The median is the one in the middle: Half the months were busier and half were quieter. The tenth percentile is a month only one in ten fell below, and the ninetieth is one only one in ten beat. That’s the whole idea, and it’s more useful than an average, because an average of a seasonal market is a number that describes almost none of its months.
The distance between the tenth and the ninetieth is the figure worth sitting with. It’s the range a year has to be budgeted across, and in the steeper markets it’s wide enough that a plan built on the median alone will be wrong in both directions before the year is out. If your business rides that same calendar from the other side, the seasonal planner puts your own twelve months against it, and the High Country dashboard carries the rest of the regional series this is drawn from.
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