FedEx St. Jude Championship: Memphis Airbnb Pricing 2026

FedEx St. Jude Championship 2026: How Memphis Airbnb Hosts Should Price Event Week

The FedEx St. Jude Championship returns to TPC Southwind August 12 through 16, 2026. It is the first event of the FedExCup Playoffs, which means the top 70 players in the standings are in town, and only the top 50 advance to the next week. Players, caddies, swing coaches, agents, media, corporate hospitality groups, and several thousand spectators all need somewhere to sleep in southeast Memphis for five nights. Most of them are not staying downtown.

Memphis is not a vacation market. It runs on work, medical travel, and family visits, and something like 40% of bookings land within 48 hours of check-in. Event week is the one stretch of the calendar where that flips completely. Tournament demand books weeks out, not hours out, and the host who waits until August to think about pricing has already lost the booking to the host who set it in June.

So here is the playbook: who actually fills up, how to price it without guessing, and the mistakes that cost Memphis hosts the premium every single year.

Geography decides who wins this week

TPC Southwind sits in the Southwind community off Winchester, close to Germantown and Collierville and a short drive from the rest of East Memphis. That is the demand center for tournament week. A two-bedroom in Germantown or Collierville with easy course access is worth more that week than a nicer, larger home twenty-five minutes north, because the people booking are optimizing for a ten-minute drive to the first tee, not for square footage.

Downtown still benefits, but for a different guest: the corporate and hospitality crowd that wants Beale Street and restaurants at night and does not mind the commute to Southwind in the morning. Downtown already runs the highest nightly rates in the city, in the $150 to $200-plus range on event-driven weeks. If you operate near the course, your job is to capture course-proximity demand. If you operate downtown, your job is to capture the nightlife-and-hospitality overflow. Pricing the same way in both places leaves money on the table in one of them.

If you manage in the Germantown and Collierville corridor, the Germantown area property management page breaks down what that submarket does the rest of the year, which is the baseline you are pricing the premium on top of.

Price the premium off your own baseline, not off a hotel rate

The cleanest way to set event-week pricing is to start from your own typical August nightly rate and apply a multiple, rather than chasing what the Hilton off Poplar is charging. Hotels and short-term rentals fill differently, and a host who anchors to a sold-out hotel rate usually overshoots and sits empty until the week before.

Here is the math we actually use, with explicit assumptions so you can run your own number. Say your home normally clears $140 a night in August.

• Conservative: 1.4x premium = $196 a night. Five nights, Tuesday through Sunday, is $980 for the stay. Safe, books early, almost never sits empty.
• Mid: 1.8x premium = $252 a night, or $1,260 for five nights. This is the realistic target for a well-located, well-reviewed home with a clean calendar.
• Aggressive: 2.5x premium = $350 a night, $1,750 for five nights. Achievable for a course-proximity home that sleeps a group, but only if you open the calendar early and hold your nerve.

Notice that the spread between conservative and aggressive on a single five-night stay is $770. That is the entire decision. Get it roughly right and the week pays for a chunk of your year. Reach too far and you trade the whole premium for an empty calendar.

Set a minimum-night stay, and set it honestly

The tournament runs Thursday through Sunday with practice rounds and the pro-am earlier in the week, so most guests want a four or five-night block, not a Saturday one-off. A four-night minimum across event week is reasonable and protects you from chopping the week into low-value single nights. A seven-night minimum is greedy in this market and tends to backfire, because the corporate groups arrive midweek and leave Sunday, not the following Wednesday.

Here is the admission. We have set an event-week minimum too high before, watched the calendar sit untouched into late July, and then had to walk it back to a four-night minimum and a lower nightly rate under time pressure. The lesson stuck: open early, set a four-night floor, price in the conservative-to-mid band first, and raise it only if you are getting inquiries faster than you expected. Discounting under deadline pressure is how you give the premium back, and the data on Memphis short-term rentals is clear that discounts do not actually drive occupancy here the way hosts assume they do.

Before any of this: are you legal to host that week?

Event-week demand is exactly when unpermitted operators try to slip a listing online for a quick payday, and it is exactly when neighbors and the city are paying attention. Memphis Ordinance 5631 governs short-term rental permits, and operating a non-permitted STR during the single highest-visibility week of the Memphis sports calendar is how you end up with a complaint on file and a permit problem that outlasts the tournament. Confirm your permit status first. The Memphis short-term rental permit guide walks through eligibility and the rules before you list.

What separates the hosts who clear the premium

The premium is real, but it goes to operators, not optimists. The Memphis market nightly rate sits around $131 on a normal week, and event week is your chance to run well above that with the demand actually there to support it. The hosts who capture it do three boring things. They open the calendar early, in June, while the planning crowd is booking. They turn the unit fast and clean between the regular-season guest and the tournament guest so the listing photos match what shows up. And they respond to inquiries within minutes, because event-week guests are comparing several listings at once and the slow responder loses.

Run your own number on the Memphis rental investment calculator and see what one well-priced event week does to your annual total. If you would rather have a Memphis operator handle the pricing, the turnover, and the guest communication for you, that is what short-term rental management is for.

The tournament is August 12 through 16. The booking window is open now. The premium goes to whoever priced for it first.

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Andrew Glisson is a Memphis property investor and operator. Longstep Property Solutions manages short-term and long-term rentals across Memphis and North Mississippi.