Say Goodbye to Dedicated Guest Rooms — People Are Transforming Their Spare Spaces into Something Else

When I think about a guest room, my memory drifts back in time to when I’d spend the weekend at my grandparents’ house or with a close friend’s family in their small extra bedroom. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve come across a classic guest room, with its charmingly sparse furnishings and soft-yet-slightly-stale sheets, in quite some time.

I could chalk that up to living in a big city with high housing costs, but a new report from TaskRabbit shows that in recent years, guest rooms and spare rooms have taken on a new, different role in the home.

Are Dedicated Guest Rooms Common Today?

The 2026 TaskRabbit Trend Report, which analyzes how “TaskRabbit booking and search trends” changed from 2025 to 2026, found that guest rooms do still exist, but they aren’t necessarily being used to host out-of-town pals anymore.…