Before you book
The New York hotel guide
Everything we would tell a friend before they booked a room here — costs, seasons, neighborhoods and the fees that appear at checkout.
What a New York hotel room actually costs
The honest median for a decent, centrally located double room is somewhere between $260 and $360 a night across the year. Below about $180 you are buying either a very small room, an outer-borough address, or a January date. Above about $700 you are buying service and space rather than location, because location has already been paid for at half that price.
Rates move more by day of week than most cities. Sunday to Wednesday is consistently cheaper than Thursday to Saturday in the leisure districts, and the pattern inverts in the Financial District, where the business week sets the peak.
The taxes and fees that are not in the headline rate
New York adds a combined room tax of roughly 14.75%, plus a flat nightly occupancy charge of a few dollars per room. On a $300 room that is comfortably over $50 a night before anything else.
Many hotels also charge a "destination", "urban" or "facility" fee of $25 to $45 a night, which typically bundles wifi, a fitness centre and some credit you will not use. It is disclosed at booking but rarely in the first price you see, so read the total before the card details.
Choosing an area
A useful rule: if you can see the Empire State Building from the window, you are paying for the window. If you can reach it in fifteen minutes on one train, you are paying for the room.
- ▸First visit, want everything walkable: Midtown East, NoMad or Flatiron.
- ▸Theatre-heavy trip: Times Square or Hell's Kitchen — the second is quieter and cheaper for the same walk.
- ▸Eating and drinking: Lower East Side, East Village or Williamsburg.
- ▸Quiet, residential, good for families: Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO.
- ▸Best value for the square footage: Long Island City and the Financial District at weekends.
When to book
For September to December travel, book eight to twelve weeks out. For January to March, four weeks is usually enough and last-minute often beats it. Summer sits in between.
Rates on this site are indicative starting points. The live price on the booking page is the one that counts, and it changes several times a day.
Using the live data on each hotel page
Every hotel page shows the current time in New York, the current weather at that address, and a four-day forecast, drawn from a free public weather service. It also embeds a satellite view of the block so you can see what is actually around the entrance — a loading dock, a park, a six-lane avenue.
If your device is set to a non-US region, the nightly rate is also converted into your own currency using a live exchange rate, so the number in the sidebar means something before you reach the payment page.