iGMS Releases Free World Cup Report, Finding Short-Term Rental Rates Rose About 20% as Occupancy Fell

New iGMS research across 385,000 short-term rental listings finds asking rates rose about 20% in the ten U.S. host metros during the 2026 tournament, while the share of nights filled fell about 4%

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — iGMS today published The World Cup Effect , research that measures the impact of the 2026 FIFA World Cup on short-term rental income in the 10 U.S. host metros. The full report is free to read online with no registration. The finding runs against the common assumption: host cities did not fill up. Hosts charged more for the nights they were already going to fill.

The study compared ten host metros against seven similar non-host metros over the June 12 to July 19, 2026 window, against the same calendar weeks in 2023 and 2024. Across roughly 385,000 listings and 10.9 million booked nights:

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– Asking rates rose about 19.8% against matched control metros. Six separate estimators, spanning two statistical frameworks and two independent datasets, all land between +16% and +20%. – The share of nights filled fell about 4.2%. Occupancy declined in nine of the ten host metros by roughly 6 percentage points on average relative to control cities. – Income per listing rose about 13.9% , driven almost entirely by rate rather than occupancy. All ten host metros showed a positive lift.

“We wanted to answer a single question: when a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup comes to your city, what actually happens to your rental income?” said Sem Leontev, the iGMS data scientist who led the research. “Intuitively, we expected the tournament to fill host cities up, with occupancy and rates rising together. The data said otherwise. Across ten U.S. host metros, asking rates ran roughly 16 to 20% above matched non-host markets during the tournament, while nights filled edged down about 4%. This was a pricing event, not a booking boom. What mattered most was proximity to a venue, not the city itself: roughly 30 to 42% above control markets within 2 km of a stadium, against about 7% beyond 30 km.”

The report also rules out the more ordinary explanation that this was simply a downtown premium. With distance to the stadium and distance to the city center modeled simultaneously, only the stadium slope was distinguishable from zero.

The premium also tracked the match calendar. Going from zero to two matches in a metro-week widened the gap between near-venue and far listings by roughly 17 percentage points.

“We ran this because hosts kept asking us what to do about the World Cup, and we didn’t actually know,” said Ivan Levchenko, CEO of iGMS. “The most useful answer isn’t a percentage. It’s about $55 a night. The event added roughly a fixed dollar amount, so what percentage that represents depends entirely on what you already charge. A host in Philadelphia and a host in Los Angeles made similar money on very different starting prices.”

Baseline nightly price explains about 80% of the variation between cities; match volume explains none of it.