Airbnb has rewritten its house-rule policy, and the change targets the chores guests are asked to do at checkout. Hosts can no longer tell guests who pay a cleaning fee to strip beds, take rubbish offsite or wash dishes, according to the company's new guidelines as reported by the BBC.

Every reservation booked on or after 20 November falls under the new rules, which gives guests with existing bookings a fixed line between the old system and the new one.

What hosts can no longer ask

Airbnb's test, as the BBC describes it, is whether a task would "require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner." The company's examples are stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, and washing and putting away dishes.

Cleaning fees are why the topic keeps returning. Guests already pay it, so being asked to do part of the cleaning themselves has been a long-running complaint, and the new policy is written around that overlap between a fee and a chore list.

What hosts can still do

Under the updated guidelines, hosts can set seven standard house rules and add other "reasonable" requests. The company said it may grant exceptions in some circumstances and gave one example: guests can still be asked to limit shower time where local drought-related water restrictions apply.

House rules will be shown more prominently to guests and will appear in reservation reminders. Contracts are allowed only in limited circumstances, including where the law or homeowners association rules require them.

Hosts keep control of their own rules and requests. They cannot impose fines, but if a request does not follow Airbnb policy the issue is flagged, and the owner can appeal.

Why Airbnb says it changed the rules

The company's own explanation, given to the BBC: "House rules help guests understand what hosts expect, but we've heard from our community that they can be confusing, onerous and hard to manage. So, we've redesigned them to make them easier to discover and clearer to set, alongside a new policy that keeps requests reasonable, with no surprises."

Behind the change sits a public argument about host standards. Viral TikTok videos from two hosts in the US state of Georgia, Cassie and Jon, showed them inspecting their rental closely after guests left. One video accused guests of "disrespecting the house rules" for leaving a television remote out of place. The couple were criticised over their strict standards, said their content had been misinterpreted, and other creators made parodies of the format, according to the BBC.

What the report does not settle

That account summarises the policy. It does not list the seven standard house rules, and it does not explain how Airbnb will judge "reasonable" in a borderline case.

Nor does it describe what happens to a host who keeps asking for banned chores beyond the flagging and appeal process. The cleaning fee itself is not changed by the policy: it appears in the report as the condition that makes the new guest protections apply, not as a charge the update alters.

What it means for a booking

A guest booking after 20 November should not find bed-stripping, dishwashing or rubbish removal on the checkout list, and the house rules should be easier to see before arrival.

A host has a narrower menu: seven standard rules plus reasonable extras, with the banned chores treated as cleaner work.

Anyone holding a booking made before that date keeps the terms attached to that reservation, because the cutoff is the booking date rather than the check-in date.

The question that stays open

The argument about cleaning fees and host inspections continues in a narrower form: what counts as reasonable, and who decides when a host and a guest disagree.

That question will be settled in practice, listing by listing, after the November cutoff. For now the policy sets the floor, and the seven-rule limit is the part that will be easiest for a guest to check against the listing in front of them.