How Much Can My Koh Samui Villa Earn?

Short version. A realistic projection is just four numbers: Average Daily Rate (ADR), Occupancy, Seasonality mix, and Operating costs. Multiply the first three, subtract the fourth, and you have your net yield. Anyone quoting a single "expected return" without showing you those four inputs is guessing.

1. Start with ADR, not gross revenue

ADR is the average nightly rate across all booked nights in a year. For Koh Samui, the healthy ADR bands we see for well-positioned villas are:

• 2-bedroom, inland or garden view: THB 6,000–10,000 / night
• 3-bedroom, sea view or near-beach: THB 12,000–22,000 / night
• 4–5-bedroom, beachfront or trophy villa: THB 25,000–65,000 / night

These are pulled from our own managed portfolio and cross-checked against the live Airbnb and Booking.com markets. Comparable listings on public OTA channels for Bophut, Choeng Mon and Chaweng Noi validate these bands. Your villa's actual ADR depends on finish level, view, pool size, beach access and — crucially — photography and listing quality.

2. Occupancy — the number owners get most wrong

The island-wide average masks a huge range. A professionally-managed 3-bedroom villa on Samui can sustainably run at 55–70% annual occupancy. Hobbyist self-managed villas often sit at 25–40%. The difference is almost entirely channel mix, pricing discipline, and responsiveness to enquiries.

Be suspicious of anyone projecting 80%+ occupancy year-round — that's a peak-week figure, not a twelve-month average. High-90s occupancy usually signals under-pricing.

3. Seasonality — two peaks, two shoulders, one quiet month

Samui has an unusual pattern because the east-coast rainy season sits in October–November, not the usual Southeast-Asian May–September window. We plan around five zones:

• High peak (Dec–Jan): Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year — ADR premium of 40–80% and the engine of annual revenue.
• Secondary peak (Jul–Aug): European summer, dry weather on the east coast — solid bookings at headline ADR.
• Shoulder (Feb–Jun, Sep): The bulk of your nights. Pricing is the main lever here.
• Low (Oct–Nov): Monsoon weeks. Occupancy can halve; we use long-stay discounts and relocation packages to defend it.

4. The real cost stack

A clean projection shows every cost line so you can see what you actually keep. For a typical 3-bedroom Samui villa, annual operating costs sit in this range:

• OTA commissions: 15–20% of booked revenue (Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo)
• Management fee: 18–22% of net booked revenue (industry norm on Samui)
• Utilities (electricity + water + internet): THB 8,000–25,000 / month
• Pool + garden: THB 8,000–15,000 / month
• Housekeeping supplies + consumables: 3–5% of revenue
• Insurance, licensing, accounting: THB 30,000–80,000 / year
• Repairs & reserve: 3–5% of revenue (do not skip this line)

Land & Building tax is relatively small for holiday-rental use but must be accrued. Our Thai tax guide for villa owners breaks down the tax layers in detail.

5. The projection, put together

Here's a worked example for a 3-bedroom sea-view villa we actually manage:

• ADR (weighted, all seasons): THB 14,500
• Occupancy: 62% → 226 nights
• Gross booked revenue: THB 3,277,000
• OTA commissions (16% blended): –THB 524,320
• Net revenue: THB 2,752,680
• Operating costs (utilities, pool, housekeeping, insurance, reserve): –THB 560,000
• Management fee (20% of net): –THB 550,536
• Owner net income (pre-tax): ~THB 1,642,000 / year

That's a gross-to-net ratio near 50% — normal for a well-run Samui villa. If your current projection shows 75% net retention, the cost lines are missing.

6. How we build your projection

When we quote a villa, we pull three data sets: (a) your property's real comparables in a 2 km radius using OTA scrape data, (b) our own portfolio's performance for similar bedroom counts and finish levels, and (c) forward-booking pace from Hostaway. You get a one-page forecast with the ADR, occupancy, seasonal split, and every cost line labelled.

No black boxes. Every number on your projection is defendable — and if the villa underperforms the forecast, the first conversation is ours, not yours.