One person paid for the whole place, everyone arrived and left on different days, and the arithmetic is fiddly enough that most groups give up and split it evenly. Tick the nights each person actually slept there and the calculator does the rest.
What it's doing
- Each night goes to whoever was there that night. On a night with two people in the house, those two split it between them. This is not the same as dividing the whole nightly total by everyone's person-nights, and the difference lands on the people staying fewest nights.
- The cleaning fee is split per head. It's charged once because the stay happened, not because it lasted five nights, so its length has nothing to do with it.
- The service fee and taxes are grossed up, not divided. They're a percentage of the subtotal, so every share is multiplied by total ÷ subtotal. That's why the calculator asks for what actually left your card rather than asking you for a fee rate.
Rounding is settled with the largest-remainder method, so the amounts add up to the total charged exactly — no stray cent for someone to absorb.
Read two numbers off your booking
Where it needs your judgement
- Taxes charged per person per night — some cities do this. That line isn't proportional to the subtotal, so take it out of the total and settle it separately by nights stayed.
- Extra guest fees — they belong to the people who triggered them rather than to the group. Add them to those people's shares by hand.
- Unequal bedrooms — nights answer "how long", not "what did you get". If one pair has the big room, agree a weighting before the trip rather than after it.
- Nightly rates that vary — switch on per-night amounts and enter what the breakdown actually shows. Averaging hides weekend pricing and length-of-stay discounts, and whoever stayed the short end pays for it.
The reasoning behind each step, a fully worked example, and the fee mistake that overcharges the shortest stay by about 18% are all in the companion guide: how to split an Airbnb when people stay different nights.
Once you have the numbers, copy them into a Dolio group as a single expense split by fixed amounts, with the person who booked recorded as the payer. Anyone who isn't going to install anything can be added as a ghost participant, and at the end of the trip everything nets down to the fewest payments.