BTHE BARATELLI INSTITUTE · Mentoring at Scale
FOR EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS · HOUSE MANAGERS · DEVELOPMENT TEAMS · BOARD CHAIRS

How many family-nights can your house actually serve?

Rooms × length-of-stay × turnover × no-show rate × overbook policy. The operational tool the board chair asks about and nobody has a clean answer for. Built for executive directors and house managers running hospital-adjacent family housing — Ronald McDonald House, hospital foundation lodging, pediatric oncology family residences. Compute realized occupancy, average waitlist days, families turned away, and the overbook strategy that gets one more family in the door.

Capacity
Rooms × nights
Realized
Occupancy %
Waitlist
Days & turn-aways
Overbook
No-show offset
YOUR HOUSE
1
House capacity
2
Current demand
3
Priority criteria
4
Overbook & forecast
5
Recommendations
STAGE 1 OF 5

House capacity setup

Defaults are typical for a mid-size hospital-adjacent family house (~24 rooms, pediatric oncology + cardiology + transplant referral mix).

The clinical service lines that drive the bulk of your referrals. Shapes length-of-stay distribution, not the math.
Bedrooms available to host families. Don't count staff offices, shared spaces, or rooms under renovation.
Annual average — deep-clean rotations, repairs, capital projects. Typically 3-8% of room inventory at any moment.
House policy cap. Most houses run 30-90 days; some extend indefinitely for transplant and long-stay oncology. Set high if effectively unlimited.
365 for 24/7/365 hospital houses. Lower only if you close for holidays / capital projects.
Clean / linen / inspection time between checkout and next check-in. Typical: 2-6 hours. Treated as fractional nights in the math.
Snapshot count of families with active referrals who couldn't be placed when they asked. Many houses don't measure this — start now.
What this tool actually measures. Most family-housing nonprofits report a single occupancy number to the board ("we were 87% full this year") and nothing else. That number hides the operational truth: how many families you turned away, how long the waitlist ran, and whether your no-show rate means you're leaving rooms empty every night. This builds the full operational picture — capacity, demand, waitlist depth, turn-away count, and the overbook policy that can recover 4-8% more family-nights without a single capital dollar.
STAGE 2 OF 5

Current demand

Length-of-stay distribution, no-show pattern, and the family mix. The single most important number in this whole tool is average LOS — it determines turnover frequency and therefore how many families you serve per year.

Length of stay by family type

Different clinical referrals stay different lengths. Enter the % of families in each bucket and the average LOS for that bucket. They don't need to be precise — directionally accurate is enough.

Short stay — outpatient / surgery follow-up
Typical LOS: 3-7 nights
% of families
%
Avg LOS (nights)
Medium stay — chemo cycle, cardiac workup
Typical LOS: 14-30 nights
% of families
%
Avg LOS (nights)
Long stay — transplant, NICU, long oncology protocol
Typical LOS: 60-180 nights
% of families
%
Avg LOS (nights)
Tip: the three % values should add to roughly 100. If they don't, the tool normalizes them — but you'll see a flag in the math panel.
No-shows, late-cancels, and early-checkouts
Confirmed referrals that never arrive (family discharged early, decided not to come, lost-to-followup). Typical hospital-house range: 5-15%.
%
% of stays that end earlier than booked (child discharged unexpectedly, treatment paused). Adds inventory — but unpredictably. Typical: 8-18%.
%
New family-housing referrals from hospital social workers / care coordinators each week. Drives the demand side of the math.
% of referrals that meet your eligibility criteria (distance from hospital, age, treatment type, financial). Typical: 70-85%.
%
Patient + caregiver(s) + siblings. Doesn't affect room count, but informs the "people served" narrative — a stat boards love.
The median family in your house lives this far from the referring hospital. Higher = more dependent on you as housing.
STAGE 3 OF 5

Priority criteria

When demand exceeds capacity (and it usually does), who gets the room? Every house has an implicit priority order — written down or not. Set the weights you actually use. The tool reports the implied turn-away pattern.

Why this matters. Priority criteria look like an HR-language abstraction until you realize they determine, in plain operational terms, which family sleeps in a hotel and which family sleeps in a bed. Writing them down — and being honest about which criteria you actually weight heavily — is the single most-requested governance artifact when houses get audited or apply for large grants. (Charity Navigator, large family foundations, and some hospital partners will ask for the document.)
Distance from hospital
Families living > 50 mi away typically can't commute daily — true housing dependency.
9
Treatment intensity
Inpatient chemo, transplant, ICU, BMT — high medical fragility means the family can't tolerate hotel-grade hygiene risk.
10
Financial need
Documented inability to afford alternative lodging. Many houses now serve all referrals regardless of income — recognizing housing as standard-of-care.
7
Child age
Younger children (especially under 5) drive higher caregiver presence and lower hospital-staffing autonomy. Some houses prioritize them; some serve all ages equally.
5
Length of expected stay
Some houses prioritize short stays (more families served); others prioritize long stays (deeper need). Both are defensible — be explicit.
6
Single-parent / sole caregiver
No backup caregiver at home. Often the highest-vulnerability bucket and the easiest to under-serve if you don't track it.
8
Average waitlist days a family waits

When a family is referred and a room isn't available, how many days do they typically wait? If you don't measure this — most houses don't — leave the default and the model will estimate from waitlist depth ÷ turnover rate.

Honest answer: 3-14 days for most hospital houses, longer at peak season (Mar-Apr, Sep-Oct).
Demand surge during the 90 days of highest referral volume — typically Mar-May and Sep-Nov for pediatric oncology. 1.3 = 30% above average.
STAGE 4 OF 5

Overbook strategy & forecast

If no-shows are 10% and you never overbook, 10% of your rooms sit empty when families are sleeping in their cars. Airlines figured this out decades ago. Houses are catching up. Conservative overbook is 4-8%; aggressive (and risky) is 12-15%.

Confirm more families than rooms by this %. Should track at or slightly under your no-show rate. Default: 5%.
%
Partner hotel rooms, sister-house overflow, vouchers — emergency capacity when an overbook collision happens. Set to 0 if you have no overflow plan.
Total operating cost ÷ family-nights served. Most hospital houses run $75-180/night fully loaded (staff, utilities, food, supplies, allocated overhead). Leave at 0 if unknown.
$
Many houses ask for a voluntary contribution ($5-25/night) that almost no one declines. Net of waivers — what actually comes in. Set to 0 if you don't collect.
$
Many hospital systems contribute a per-family-night subsidy or block-grant equivalent. Convert annual support to per-night here. 0 if none.
$
Computed from the inputs above as cost − contribution − hospital. This is the fundraising line every family-night.
The honest math nobody puts on the wall. Every family-night your house provides has a real cost that someone is paying — usually it's philanthropy filling the gap between what hospitals contribute and what families voluntarily give. Knowing the gap, in dollars per night, is the precondition for any honest conversation about expanding capacity. A 6-room addition isn't a $1.2M capital question; it's a $1.2M capital question plus a recurring 6 rooms × 350 nights × $75 gap = $157K/year operating commitment.
STAGE 5 OF 5

Recommendations & full operational picture

The numbers — and what they say about where the next capacity dollar should go.

THE FULL HOSPITAL-ADJACENT HOUSING TOOLKIT

Occupancy is one of the operational questions. There are more.

Per-family-night cost detail, capital-campaign sizing, hospital partner agreement modeling, in-kind-donation valuation for furnishings and food, volunteer-hour valuation, planned-giving program design for legacy donors. Built for the kind of nonprofit where the executive director, the house manager, and the development director all need to be looking at the same operating reality. Here, try these. They may help.

Browse all 122+ tools Family Office Guide
Practitioner reference for nonprofit operational planning. Outputs are estimates based on user inputs. Run with your actual booking and waitlist data; cross-check with your house management software (Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, Apricot, Bloomerang, custom AirTable, etc.) for true occupancy. Hospital partner subsidy agreements vary widely and are subject to specific contract terms — confirm with your hospital finance partner. This is not financial, tax, legal, or clinical-operations advice.
WANT THE METHODOLOGY BEHIND THIS TOOL?
This calculator pairs with the Family Office Guide and EPD-in-a-Box.
The tool gives you the operational picture. The guides cover the surrounding workflow — family-philanthropy operating model (FO Guide), nonprofit-side tax discipline including 990 Schedule O reporting, designated-purpose restricted gift handling, hospital-partner agreement structure, and the in-kind valuation rules that determine how furnishings, food donations, and volunteer hours show up on your audit (EPD-in-a-Box).
Here, try these. They may help. No email gate, no signup wall.
Family Office Guide → EPD-in-a-Box → All 122+ tools
PROFESSIONAL DISCLAIMER · PLEASE READ

Educational and informational purposes only. This calculator and any output it produces are intended solely for general educational and decision-support purposes. They do not constitute investment, tax, legal, accounting, appraisal, lending, insurance, nonprofit-operations, or any other professional advice, and they do not create a fiduciary, attorney-client, accountant-client, or advisor-client relationship of any kind.

Estimates based on your inputs. All results are estimates derived from the data and assumptions you provide. Hospital partner agreements, eligibility frameworks, accounting standards (including FASB ASC 958 and IRS Form 990 reporting), regulations, family circumstances, and the specific facts of your house can materially change the answer. Industry occupancy benchmarks cited are approximate and drawn from publicly available family-housing-nonprofit reporting; your hospital catchment area, referral mix, and local lodging market will determine your actual right-sized targets. The Baratelli Institute, its affiliates, and any co-branding professional make no warranty of accuracy, completeness, currency, or fitness for any particular purpose, and disclaim all liability for decisions made in reliance on the output.

Consult your own qualified professionals. Before acting on anything calculated here, consult your own attorney, CPA, financial advisor, nonprofit-operations consultant, hospital-partner finance contact, or other qualified professional licensed in your jurisdiction who has reviewed your specific facts and applicable current law. The Baratelli Institute is a publisher of practitioner reference material. It is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, law firm, accounting firm, appraisal firm, lender, or nonprofit-operations consultancy.

Co-branded versions: If a professional advisor's name and contact information appear on this tool, that advisor has elected to make the tool available to clients as a courtesy. Inclusion of an advisor's name does not constitute the advisor's endorsement of any specific result, nor does it transfer professional responsibility for the underlying methodology to that advisor. The disclaimer above applies regardless of co-branding.

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