Which Turo Earnings Plan Pays More? The Break-Even Math for 70%, 80% and 90%

Turo's three earnings plans for hosts look like a question about risk appetite. Read the numbers side by side and they turn out to be something tidier: a sum you can do on the back of a receipt.

Since January 7, 2026, US hosts choose between More peace of mind (you keep 70% of the trip price and pay the first $250 of any damage), Balanced (80%, $1,500) and More earnings (90%, $2,750). Each step up the ladder adds exactly 10 points of host share and exactly $1,250 of damage responsibility. Because the spacing is that regular, one number settles the choice between any two plans: $12,500 of trip revenue per serious damage claim. Bring in more than that between claims and the higher-share plan pays more. Bring in less and the lower one does.

What follows is that math worked through, the cases where it shifts (small claims, mostly), and a slightly surprising result about the middle plan. Every plan term below comes from Turo's own help center pages, linked at the end. Plan terms change, so check the current version before you switch.

The three plans, side by side

	More peace of mind	Balanced	More earnings
Host share of trip price	70%	80%	90%
Damage responsibility, per incident	$250	$1,500	$2,750
Third-party liability	Up to $750,000 (New York: up to $300,000)	Up to $750,000 (New York: state minimums)	Up to $750,000 (New York: state minimums)
Window for fuel, charging and mileage invoices	5 days	4 days	3 days

Two definitions matter. Host share is your percentage of the trip price; in the US it also applies to Extras and delivery fees. Damage responsibility is what you pay on each incident of physical damage before Turo reimburses anything above it, up to the car's actual cash value (capped at $200,000) on a total loss.

Liability cover is the same $750,000 on every plan except in New York, where only More peace of mind carries more than the state minimum since June 17, 2026. That's the one non-money reason a New York host might pick the 70% plan. Everywhere else the plans differ only in share, deductible and the invoice window.

The one number: $12,500 of revenue per claim

Call your annual trip revenue on a car G (trip price plus Extras and delivery, the money the share applies to). Ignore running costs for a moment, because they're the same whichever plan you pick. What you keep is roughly:

host share × G − (number of claims × your damage responsibility)

Take a claim large enough that you pay your full responsibility on any plan, which is any eligible repair bill of $2,750 or more. Moving from 70% to 80% earns you an extra 10% of G. It also costs you an extra $1,250 on each claim. The two cancel when 0.10 × G = $1,250 × claims, which is when G divided by the number of claims equals $12,500. The step from 80% to 90% has the same 10 points and the same $1,250, so it breaks even at the same place. That's why all three lines in the chart above meet at a single point.

For a car that earns $20,000 a year, $12,500 per claim means 1.6 claims a year. Below that, More earnings wins. Above it, More peace of mind wins. At exactly 1.6 claims, all three plans leave you with $13,600.

You can turn it into trips, too. If your trips average $300, $12,500 is about 42 trips. A car that goes more than 42 trips between serious damage claims makes more money on the 90% plan. One that gets a serious claim more often than that is paying for its own crashes, and the 70% plan is cheaper.

This is a real business decision, so a warning about the input. A single bad month says very little about your claim rate. Use at least a year of history per car, or a whole fleet's history if each car is new.

Small claims change the math

Not every claim reaches $2,750. A curb-rashed bumper or a cracked windshield might cost $800, and then your damage responsibility on the bigger plans is capped by the size of the bill itself: you can't pay $2,750 of a $800 repair. Your out-of-pocket cost on a claim of size D is whichever is smaller, D or your plan's damage responsibility.

That changes the break-even point, and it always pushes toward the higher-share plans. The table shows how much trip revenue you need per claim, for claims of a given size, before the higher-share plan of each pair pays more.

Repair bill per claim	70% vs 80%	80% vs 90%	70% vs 90%
$500	$2,500	$0 (90% always wins)	$1,250
$1,000	$7,500	$0 (90% always wins)	$3,750
$1,500	$12,500	$0 (90% always wins)	$6,250
$2,000	$12,500	$5,000	$8,750
$2,750 or more	$12,500	$12,500	$12,500

Read it like this: if your typical claim is a $1,000 repair and you earn more than $3,750 of trips per claim, More earnings beats More peace of mind. If your claims are $1,500 or smaller, More earnings beats Balanced no matter how often they happen, because both plans make you pay the whole bill and the 90% plan keeps 10 points more of everything else.

Real claims come in mixed sizes, so the true break-even for your car sits somewhere between the small-claim rows and $12,500. The $12,500 figure is the worst case for the high-share plan. If you're above it, you can stop calculating.

Why the middle plan almost never wins on money

Here's the result that surprised us. On expected profit alone, Balanced can never beat both of the other plans at once. It can tie, and it can beat one of them, but there's always another plan that does at least as well.

The reason is the spacing. Balanced's 80% share is exactly the average of 70% and 90%. Its $1,500 damage responsibility is exactly the average of $250 and $2,750. But your cost per claim isn't an average: on any claim of $250 to $2,750, Balanced makes you pay more than the average of what the other two plans would. On a $1,000 repair, for example, More peace of mind costs you $250 and More earnings costs you the full $1,000, an average of $625. Balanced costs you $1,000.

So Balanced's revenue is the average of the other two plans, while its claim costs are at least the average. Its profit therefore sits at or below the average of the other two, and the better of those two always matches or beats it. This holds for any mix of claim sizes, and it holds in the variable-share markets too (below), because the plans stay 10 points apart there.

That doesn't make Balanced a bad choice for everyone. It's a sensible pick when a $2,750 hit would wreck your month but 70% leaves too little on the table. That's a cash-flow and peace-of-mind argument, not a profit one, and it's a perfectly reasonable argument for a host with one car and thin savings. Just know that's what you're paying for.

Variable host share markets

In Austin, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Maui, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego and Seattle, the host share depends on how far ahead the guest books:

Days booked in advance	More peace of mind	Balanced	More earnings
28 or more	80%	90%	100%
14 to 27	75%	85%	95%
3 to 13	70%	80%	90%
0 to 2	65%	75%	85%

The bands move, but the gap between plans stays 10 points in every row, and the damage responsibilities don't change. So the $12,500 break-even, the small-claim table and the result about Balanced all hold in these cities. Lead time changes how much you earn, not which plan earns the most.

Estimating your own claim rate

This is the hard input, and Turo doesn't publish how often host cars are damaged. The closest public benchmark is from ordinary car insurance: according to the Insurance Information Institute, citing ISO, 4.16% of collision policyholders had a collision claim in 2024, and the average collision claim was $5,489. That's for privately insured cars driven by their owners. A car shared with dozens of strangers a year will be worse; how much worse depends on the car, the city and the guests.

Two takeaways from that benchmark anyway. First, the average collision claim is well above $2,750, so serious crashes really do land in the "$2,750 or more" row of the table. Second, even if your shared car were ten times more claim-prone than a privately insured one, it would still be far from 1.6 claims a year.

Your own records are the better source. For each car, add up trip revenue over the last 12 months and count the damage incidents that cost more than $250. Divide one by the other. If the answer is comfortably above $12,500, the 90% plan is very likely paying you more. If you've had a rough run on one car, that car alone can move to a lower plan.

What no plan changes

Some costs land on you on every plan, so they shouldn't sway the choice, but they do belong in your numbers:

• Exclusions. Exterior wear and tear (dings, dents and scratches of 3 inches or less, even if several add up to more), interior wear, tire and mechanical deterioration, mechanical failure and diminished value aren't reimbursed on any plan.
• The damage responsibility is yours to keep. If a claim goes through Turo, the responsibility isn't refunded even when the guest pays their share, and you can't pursue the guest or anyone else for that claim separately.
• Repair pricing. Where Turo names a preferred vendor (glass or keys, for example), reimbursement is capped at that vendor's price. Since August 18, 2026, repairs at certain listed facilities aren't reimbursed at all. Check the list before you book a shop.
• Photos and deadlines. Pre-trip photos must be taken within 24 hours before the trip and uploaded within 24 hours after it starts; post-trip photos within 24 hours of the end. Photos without date, time and location metadata are invalid. Filing a damage claim without pre-trip photos costs a $25 fee.

These rules matter more to the math than they first seem. A claim that's denied for missing photos costs you the full repair bill on every plan. That makes the expensive plans more expensive, in practice, for hosts whose check-in routine is loose.

One consolation: what you pay toward repairs is a business expense. If you report hosting income on Schedule C, as most active hosts should, it's deductible like any other repair. Our guide to how Turo hosts are taxed covers where it goes.

Switching plans

You choose a plan per car, and you can change it at any time. A change applies to new bookings only: pending requests, booked trips and trips in progress keep the old plan. In variable-share markets, the share is fixed at booking too.

That makes the plan a lever you can pull car by car. A reasonable approach is to put each car on the plan its own history supports. A reliable sedan with two years of clean trips probably belongs on More earnings. A car that keeps coming back with bent wheels might belong on More peace of mind until you've worked out why. Revisit it once or twice a year, not after every incident.

Run the numbers on your own fleet

The whole decision comes down to two figures per car: trip revenue and the cost of damage. Most hosts have both somewhere in Turo's earnings export and their own receipts, but few have them side by side.

Fleetiqo, which publishes this blog, is built to put them together. It syncs your Turo trips and imports Turo's earnings export, and you log repairs and other costs against each car. Its break-even report then shows, per vehicle, what the car earns a month, how many booked days a month it needs to cover its costs, and how long it will take to pay itself back. That's the per-car history you need to choose a plan on evidence rather than a hunch. See everything Fleetiqo tracks.

Sources

1. Turo Help Center, Earnings plans in detail | US hosts (2026-11)
2. Turo Help Center, Earnings plans in brief | US hosts (2026-05)
3. Turo Help Center, Earnings and host share (2026-11)
4. Turo Help Center, Turo's damage claim process | US hosts (2026-11)
5. Turo Help Center, Repair facilities ineligible for reimbursement from Turo earnings plans | US hosts (2026-11)
6. Insurance Information Institute, Facts + Statistics: Auto insurance (ISO claim frequency and severity, 2024) (2026-11)