How much to charge or pay for couch surfing?
• 201 words • 1 min • updated
First of all, you should arguably not charge:
- good or close friends
- apartment swapping1
- reciprocal couch surfing
If you determine that charging is appropriate, even if only symbolically, Splitwise has a “Guest Calculator”:
- What is the rent for your apartment?
- How often do you pay rent? (weekly / fortnightly / monthly)
- How many people normally live in the apartment?
- How many nights is the guest staying?
Example simulation:
- $1000 / month
- 1 person
- 4 nights
…yields ~$53. Splitwise suggests a gift instead of a cash payment.
The standards of courtesy and hospitality vary wildly from subculture to subculture, locale to locale, person to person. What you offer your friends is your own business, but in this article we use survey data to explore what baseline you ought to expect as a guest or host
[…]
Most people feel that letting someone crash on a couch for a few nights lies well within the boundaries of good old fashioned hospitality. After that, things get less clear.
[…]
After five nights, 45 percent would already be expecting some form of payment, so to be safe, you may want to offer sooner if you are the guest
-
Unless, perhaps, if they are significantly different. ↩︎