Net Rate vs Rack Rate vs BAR: Hotel Pricing Terms Explained (2026)

The glossary, at a glance

Four terms cover most of what you'll run into when a hotel price gets discussed in industry language rather than consumer language:

Term	What it means	Who sees it
Rack rate	Published maximum, before any discount	Posted publicly, rarely charged
BAR	Lowest publicly listed price right now	Anyone searching a public site
Net rate	Pre-commission price sold to a reseller	Travel agents, wholesalers, trade platforms
Commissionable rate	Public price minus a commission paid after booking	Agents booking through standard channels

Two more terms sit close enough to these four that it's worth naming them here rather than leaving a gap: a wholesale or trade rate, covered in full in our hotel wholesale rates explained guide, is a specific kind of net rate. And a corporate negotiated rate, covered further down, is its own fourth column that doesn't map cleanly onto any of the above.

Rack rate: the ceiling almost nobody pays

Rack rate is the oldest term on this list, dating back to when a hotel's prices sat on a physical rack behind the front desk, printed and unchanging until someone walked over and swapped the card. It's the theoretical maximum a hotel charges for a room type with zero discount applied: no loyalty rate, no promotional code, no seasonal adjustment.

In 2026, almost no hotel actually sells at rack rate to a normal booking. It survives mainly as a reference ceiling: a walk-in guest with no reservation and no status might be quoted something close to it, and some hotels still print it on an in-room rate card for exactly that scenario. Everyone else, booking ahead through any channel, pays a price set well below that ceiling.

BAR: today's floor, not a fixed number

Best Available Rate is the lowest price a hotel is showing the public at a given moment for a given room and date, and unlike rack rate, it moves. A hotel's revenue-management system adjusts BAR constantly against occupancy, demand, and how many nights remain unsold, which is why the same room can price differently searched an hour apart.

In most modern hotel pricing systems, rack rate and BAR have effectively merged into the same number for practical purposes: many properties simply set their rack rate to move with BAR rather than maintaining two separate figures. When you see the public price on Booking.com, a hotel's own site, or Expedia, you're almost always looking at that day's BAR, kept consistent across all three by the rate-parity agreements covered in our why hotels have two prices guide.

Net rate: the pre-markup price sold to resellers

A net rate, sometimes called a travel-agent rate, is the price a hotel sells directly to a reseller, a travel agent, tour operator, or wholesaler, before that reseller adds its own margin. Unlike BAR, a net rate is usually fixed and pre-negotiated for a stretch of time rather than moving daily, and it's never shown to a member of the public directly.

This is the mechanism behind the trade or wholesale rate: a hotel or the bedbank distributing its inventory (see our bedbank explainer for how that supply chain works) sets a net price, a reseller marks it up by however much they choose, and the traveler pays whatever the final marked-up number comes to. A net rate 30 percent below BAR doesn't automatically mean a traveler saves 30 percent, it means the reseller has that much room to work with before matching or beating the public price.

Commissionable rate vs net rate: a subtle but real difference

A commissionable rate looks similar to a net rate from a distance but works differently underneath. Instead of selling a room below the public price and letting the reseller mark it up, the hotel keeps its consumer-facing price the same for everyone and pays the agent a commission afterward, typically 10 to 15 percent of the booking value, once the stay is confirmed. The traveler pays the same number either way. The difference happens entirely behind the scenes, in who gets paid and when.

Net rate deals shift pricing power to the reseller: they decide the final markup, so two agents selling the same net-rate room could quote a traveler two different prices. Commissionable-rate bookings don't have that variance, since the hotel controls the price the whole way through and the commission is a separate, fixed cut. Most standard travel-agent bookings through major hotel chains run on the commissionable model; the deeper wholesale and trade rates this site is built around are net-rate deals specifically.

Corporate and negotiated rates: a fourth column entirely

A corporate negotiated rate is a fixed discount a company arranges directly with a hotel chain for its employees' business travel, typically 10 to 20 percent below BAR, in exchange for a minimum volume of room-nights booked across a year. It doesn't route through a bedbank or a travel agent at all, and it isn't tied to loyalty status, an employee gets it automatically through their company's travel-booking tool regardless of how many nights they've personally stayed at that chain.

It's worth naming separately because travelers sometimes lump it in with "wholesale" or "trade" pricing when comparing notes, and the mechanism is genuinely different: a corporate rate is a volume discount tied to one specific company, not a resale arrangement open to any traveler who finds the right channel.

A worked example: one room, four labels

Numbers make the distinctions above easier to hold onto. Here's an illustrative room, not a specific property, priced under each label to show how the same inventory produces four different figures:

Label	Illustrative price	Who pays this
Rack rate	$340	A walk-in guest with no reservation, rarely anyone else
BAR (public rate)	$210	Anyone booking on the hotel's site or a major OTA
Commissionable rate	$210, minus an agent's commission paid by the hotel	A traveler booking through a standard travel agent
Net rate	$150, before a reseller's markup	Whoever the reseller sells to, at whatever price they set

The traveler booking BAR and the traveler booking through a standard commissionable-rate agent pay the same $210 in this example, the difference is invisible to them and only affects how the hotel and agent split the money afterward. The net-rate traveler is the one who can see a genuinely different total, $150 plus whatever margin the reseller adds, which is exactly why the net-rate gap is the one worth actively checking rather than the others.

Why the terminology matters when you're comparing two prices

Knowing which term applies to a number changes what a comparison actually tells you. Comparing a hotel's rack rate to its BAR tells you almost nothing useful, since barely anyone pays rack rate. Comparing BAR across two OTAs tells you very little too, since rate parity keeps them close by design. The comparison that reveals something is BAR against a net rate: that's the one gap in this list that reflects two genuinely different price lists for the identical room, rather than the same list viewed through a different label.

That's also the comparison our real price examples guide runs on every hotel we've checked: public BAR against the net rate available through the trade channel, on the same room, same dates, so the gap you see is the one that actually matters.

Myths, debunked

"Rack rate is what most people pay if they don't have a discount code."

No. Almost every booking today, with or without a promo code, lands at or near BAR, not rack rate. Rack rate mainly survives as a reference ceiling for walk-in pricing, not the default a typical traveler pays.

"A net rate and a commissionable rate are the same thing with different names."

They produce a similar outcome, a lower effective cost for the reseller, through different mechanics. A net rate is sold below the public price with the markup left to the reseller. A commissionable rate keeps the public price fixed and pays the seller afterward.

"BAR means the price can't get any lower, so there's nothing left to check."

BAR only describes the lowest price shown to the public. It says nothing about the net rate sitting behind it on the trade side, which isn't a public number and was never included in what BAR is measuring in the first place.

Frequently asked questions