What a Bali Villa Actually Returns: Gross and Net, Nothing Hidden

Across 22 managed villas in Bingin and Pererenan, gross yield ran 14–17% over the year from July 2025 to July 2026, with our strongest individual villas reaching 23%. Net yield — after platform fees, management, operating costs and Indonesian tax — was 7–8%. The distance between those two numbers is the whole story most villa marketing leaves out.

Search for Bali villa returns and you'll find 18–25% figures with no sample, no date and no cost breakdown attached. Some may even be gross numbers that happen to be true for one villa in one month. What they aren't is net, and what they aren't is sourced. We can source ours because we don't just sell these villas — we build them and we manage them afterwards, and we have a full year of trading data and reconciled owner statements behind every figure on this page.

‍Gross tells you what it earns. Net tells you what you keep.

A 15% gross yield and a 15% net yield are not the same claim, and treating them as if they are is the most common move in Bali villa marketing. When we say gross, we mean before costs. When we say net, we mean what actually reaches an owner's account.

Here's how one becomes the other. Take a villa grossing $100 in rental income:

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Roughly two-fifths of gross income goes to the cost of turning a building into a working rental business — the platforms that fill it, the team that runs it, and the tax on what it earns. That's not a Bali Spaces quirk; it's what operating a short-stay villa actually costs, whoever does it. The only difference is whether it's disclosed. A headline yield that skips this step isn't wrong so much as incomplete — it's quoting the top line of a business and calling it profit.

On our portfolio, that waterfall takes a 14–17% gross range down to 7–8% net. That’s a real number, and it survives the arithmetic — which is more than most published yields can say.

Yield by villa type

Once you use real purchase prices, all three villa types cluster close together on gross yield:

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Net yield after management, operating costs and Indonesian tax is lower across every type here — we'll model your specific villa before you commit.

In dollars, that lands where it matters. A one-bedroom villa around $199,000 nets roughly $16,700 a year; a two-bedroom near $230,000 nets around $16,600; a three-bedroom near $300,000 nets about $20,800. The percentages sit close together, but the take-home rises with size — a larger villa earns more in absolute dollars even as its yield holds steady. Which number matters more depends on whether you're buying for return on capital or for total income, and that's a genuine choice rather than a case of one villa being simply better than another.

Individual villas vary well beyond these type averages. Across the same portfolio, gross yield by individual villa ranged from 12.6% to 20.3%, with our two strongest reaching higher still. Two villas in the same complex, at the same price, can differ by four percentage points — location, condition, review volume and marketing all move the number. The type average is where a conversation starts, not a promise for any specific villa.

What occupancy actually looks like

Annual occupancy across the portfolio averaged around 72%. That average hides a real seasonal swing: 80–92% in peak season (July–September) against 58–69% in low season (October–January). We publish both together on purpose — quoting peak occupancy alone, without the low-season figure beside it, is exactly the half-number that makes a villa look better than it performs across a full year.

It's worth putting that against the wider market. Independent short-term-rental data from AirROI puts the average Uluwatu-area listing at around 50.6% occupancy over the year to mid-2026, across 62 tracked listings. Our portfolio's ~72% sits more than twenty points above that. Occupancy is where good operation shows up most clearly — the same villa, well-run and well-reviewed, simply sells more nights than the market average.

That sits against a growing demand base. Bali recorded 6.94 million international arrivals in 2025, up 9.7% (source: BPS Bali). The 2026 target set by the Bali Tourism Office is 6.63 million — deliberately below 2025, a signal the island is managing growth toward higher-value visitors rather than chasing volume. Rising arrivals support occupancy and pricing over time, but they don't erase the low-season dip, and no honest yield conversation should pretend they do.

New villas ramp — they don't launch at full yield

A villa's first year understates where it settles. Across our portfolio, average daily rate rose roughly 40% from launch to month 11 — while occupancy stayed broadly flat. That climb is driven by one thing: reviews. A new villa has no track record on Airbnb or Booking.com, so it competes on price in its first months. Once it accumulates reviews, it holds a higher rate at the same occupancy. Reviews buy pricing power, not volume.

This is why every figure on this page is labelled as first-year, and why we republish these numbers annually. A villa in month three and the same villa in month fifteen are not the same investment — and if you're modelling a return off first-year numbers alone, you're likely underestimating where it lands once it's established.

If you plan to use the villa yourself, that changes the number

Every yield figure on this page assumes the villa is let year-round. If you're buying partly as a lifestyle asset — a few weeks in Bali each year — your real net yield is lower, because a night you're staying in the villa is a night it isn't earning.

The cost is smaller than you'd guess. Two weeks of personal use trims net yield by roughly 0.4 of a percentage point — around $900 a year on a typical two-bedroom. It's softer than a straight pro-rata calculation because owners tend to visit outside peak season, when the villa would be earning less anyway, and because at around 78% occupancy you're only giving up the nights that would actually have sold. The published figures here assume two weeks of owner use; block out six or eight and the net yield eases further, which we'll model honestly for you rather than quietly assuming you'll never set foot in the place.

How this compares to the wider market

Two independent reference points, neither of them ours and neither with a stake in the answer:

• AirROI puts the average Uluwatu short-term rental at 50.6% occupancy and about $31,160 in annual revenue across 62 listings (2026). Our portfolio averages ~72% occupancy — more than twenty points higher.
• Global Property Guide puts Bali villa gross yields in the 4.4–6.9% range, a city average near 6%. Our first-year gross figure is 14–17%.

These are the kinds of figures worth holding side by side: an independent, market-wide read against a concentrated, actively managed portfolio in a strong sub-market. They measure different things — a broad average smooths over exactly the gap between a well-run villa and a poorly run one that this whole article is about — but they're a useful floor to check any claim against, ours included.

Worth noting on the yield figures specifically: the occupancy platforms like AirROI report revenue and occupancy, not yield — they don't know what anyone paid for their villa, so they can't publish a yield figure at all. We can, because we have the cost basis. It's the one number that has to come from an operator rather than a data feed, which is exactly why the market is thinnest on it.

The honest starting point

If you take one thing from this: ask for net, not gross, and ask what sample and date sit behind whatever number you're given. Gross yield tells you what a villa generates before anyone takes their cut. Net yield tells you what actually reaches your account after management, operating costs and Indonesian tax — and it's the only figure that should inform a real decision. Ours currently sits at 7–8% net against a 14–17% gross range, on 22 villas across a full year, with the strongest villas higher and the newest still climbing. That's where the conversation starts. We'll model any specific villa against these numbers before you commit — because a portfolio average is a starting point, and your villa is the actual question.

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