Airbnb is likely nearing its ceiling. On top of that comes margin stagnation driven by still-acute reinvestment and development requirements.
2025 therefore looks strikingly like 2024, meaning that everything we wrote last year at this time remains largely relevant. Worse, management says 2026 should follow precisely the same path.
As often, spending on stock options and the like is enough to make one wince. It reached $1.6bn in 2025, versus $1.4bn the previous year, or 13% of revenue and nearly two-thirds of net income.
To be sure, this is a ‘new normal' in the US technology sector; it remains plainly excessive, all the more so when profitability and growth appear under pressure.
A subtlety of Airbnb's model is that the group is paid largely - a quarter of pre-tax profit - through interest on the deposits that users of its platform entrust to it, which it holds and intermediates.
In 2024, with rates at their peak, $818m flowed into the coffers; in 2025, as rates fell, that figure drops to $705m.
At the same time, interest expense rises from $40m to $112m as Airbnb - as one might expect - begins to take on debt to finance share buybacks. These reached $3.8bn in 2025, with exactly half used to absorb the cost tied to stock options.
With a few adjustments to enterprise value - notably to restate customer deposits and commissions awaiting receipt, currently recorded as liabilities - Airbnb implies an enterprise value of around $65bn, i.e., a multiple of 21X its pre-tax profit.
Assuming a buyer finds that multiple attractive and slashes stock-option compensation - for example by cutting it in half - the multiple would fall to 16x pre-tax income. Seen from that angle, it is not impossible to find the group's valuation potentially interesting.
However, no acquisition project of any kind appears to be in the works, while Airbnb remains dangerously exposed to a regulatory environment that could tighten.
