Youth-targeted retirement homes have been a viral hit for two years, how is this "laid-back business" doing now?
This National Day holiday, young people are still as busy as ever.
Some booked flights and hotels one month in advance, while others took 3 days of leave to get a 13-day holiday, achieving the "great outcome" for office workers; others chose the opposite path, looking for a place that requires no arrangements at all: no need to rush for early morning flights, no need to make travel guides, wake up naturally when they want, get meals served, have people to chat with, go for a walk nearby when they feel like going out, or just sit in the yard all day if they don't want to move.
This kind of demand has brought new room for discussion about the "Youth Retirement Home" that became a huge hit two years ago.
Around 2024, "Youth Retirement Homes" began to appear intensively on social platforms. With a monthly rent of 1,000 to 2,000 yuan covering food and accommodation, activities like growing vegetables, fishing, drinking tea and sunbathing, plus a rule that "only people under 45 are allowed to check in", "early retirement for young people" quickly became a traffic code.
Two years later, this more or less joking concept has not completely disappeared. There are still homestays taking "youth retirement lifestyle" as their core selling point, featuring three meals a day, arranged surrounding routes and group activities;
However, when the novelty of "early retirement" and "lying flat for a few days" fades away, the problems become more realistic: can the traffic attracted by "lying flat" support the operation of a youth retirement home? And after the first round of concept boom, what stage have such projects developed to now?
Two years on, young people are still living the "retirement lifestyle"
Strictly speaking, the "Youth Retirement Home" has never been a retirement home in the true sense.
It has no medical care, nor a long-term care system for the elderly. Most projects are more like a hybrid of homestays, youth hostels, farms and youth communities: in addition to accommodation, they are equipped with shared kitchens, tea rooms, reading areas, camping spaces, as well as activities such as hiking, vegetable planting, handicraft making and reading clubs.
Compared with ordinary homestays, "what to do after checking in" has become a more important selling point for such products.
Around 2024, "Youth Retirement Homes" ushered in the first round of widespread public attention. Data provided by Tujia at that time showed that since the beginning of 2024, the number of homestay products of the "Youth Retirement Home" type has increased by more than 55% year on year, and the booking volume has increased by more than 1.5 times year on year. The guests are mainly post-90s, with an average stay of 2.63 days.
Most of the youth retirement homes reported publicly at that time were located in the outer suburbs of cities, counties or around scenic spots, with monthly fees concentrated at around 1,000 to 2,000 yuan. Some projects also allowed guests to exchange for accommodation and meals by cooking, operating social media accounts, organizing activities and other ways.
From the very beginning, the "Youth Retirement Home" has a strong color of conceptual packaging.
For the same homestay located in the suburbs, if it is only advertised as "1500 yuan per month", its appeal to young people may be limited; but if it is named "Youth Retirement Home", it will be easily understood and spread.
Even the academic circle has begun to pay attention to this phenomenon. A paper published in the journal Beijing Youth Research in January this year defines the "Youth Retirement Home" as an immersive experience project for working youth, which believes that it meets the needs of young people to temporarily escape from the high-pressure working environment, slow down their life pace and build social connections.
But looking back two years later, what has really survived among "Youth Retirement Homes" does not seem to be the "early retirement" thing, but a lifestyle between tourism and short-term residence.
Yiou observed when browsing relevant information that people living in youth retirement homes include college graduates who have just graduated, office workers who quit their jobs without new offers, freelancers and short-term travelers.
Not many people really stay for half a year or even a year for a long time, and the demand of more people is only to temporarily break away from their original life rhythm.
Some stay for two or three days on weekends, some stay for a week or two, and some include such projects in their Gap Month or long-distance travel.
In other words, young people do not really plan to "retire".
Therefore, today, the "Youth Retirement Home" is increasingly difficult to be regarded as a completely new accommodation format alone. After removing the most eye-catching label of "retirement for the young", it actually has a lot of overlaps with the rapidly growing long-stay travel, long-term rental homestays and youth communities in recent years.
Trapped in the business model
Traffic is one thing, but actual operation is another.
The most attractive selling point of youth retirement homes is often the hardest part in their business model — low price.
In the public quotations around 2024, many youth retirement homes only charged 1,000 to 2,000 yuan per month, even covering food and accommodation. Such prices are very friendly to consumers, but it means that operators have to bear the costs of rent, decoration, utilities, labor, catering, activity organization and customer acquisition at the same time.
The accounts will soon become tight.
Take a youth retirement home in Xishuangbanna as an example. According to public reports, its initial renovation investment was about 400,000 yuan, and the annual rent for more than ten rooms was about 70,000 yuan.
In order to spread the decoration and operation costs, the operator directly signed a 15-year lease with the landlord. At that time, the monthly rent for a large bed room in the store was 1680 yuan, excluding meals, and only a public kitchen was provided. Even if the rooms were almost fully occupied in the first three months after opening, the operator still judged that the final annual profit might only be tens of thousands of yuan.
Another youth retirement home located in Chongqing once faced similar problems.
When Yiou consulted the project earlier, the shop owner mentioned that there were many people making online inquiries, and the feedback from consumers who had already stayed was good, but the number of people who were really willing to stay for a long time was not as large as expected. In order to increase the occupancy rate, the shop owner once considered further adjusting the price, while adding more parties and daily activities, hoping to make the "long-term stay" more attractive.
But looking back two years later, Yiou found that the social media account of this project stopped updating last year.
The suspension of project updates cannot be simply equated with business failure, but it at least illustrates one point: The online attention brought by youth retirement homes does not necessarily translate steadily into long-term stays and continuous revenue.
We can also see that youth retirement homes have fallen into a somewhat contradictory business model. The lower the price is, the more it fits the imagination of "low-cost lying flat"; but providing three meals a day, organizing activities and maintaining public areas, every additional service will further eat into profits.
What is more tricky is that some guests also hope that the place has a warm daily atmosphere. For a yard that claims to allow people to make friends, eat together and chat around campfires, if there are only two or three guests for a long time, the "social" function will hardly work.
So operators have to keep organizing activities. Hiking, reading clubs, movie nights, fruit picking, handicraft making, camping... These contents can retain guests, but it is difficult to charge separately for them.
The operator of the above-mentioned youth retirement home in Chongqing told Yiou that the willingness to participate in paid activities is not high, but if no activities are organized, guests will easily get bored after staying for a period of time.
This has turned the youth retirement home from an accommodation business that can be run by opening a few rooms into a business that relies heavily on operation capabilities.
Obviously, "lying flat" only happens on the consumer side, and the operators are not relaxed at all.
That is also why obvious differentiation has emerged since the first round of boom two years ago. Some operators have successfully revitalized abandoned rural houses and homestays with low occupancy rates; many other projects have just put up a new signboard of "Youth Retirement Home" for their original homestays.
Some so-called youth retirement homes in the market are essentially just homestays, and the "Youth Retirement Home" label mostly functions to attract the attention of young people.
Even after the concept reached its peak, discussions such as "avoiding pitfalls" and "hidden tricks" have also increased.
Whether there are extra consumption behind the low-price accommodation, whether activities require additional fees, and whether the so-called "healing courses" are worth paying for have all become new problems.
This is actually a hurdle that the "Youth Retirement Home" has to cross if it wants to develop from an internet-famous concept to long-term operation.
Keywords such as "early retirement" and "low-cost lying flat" can indeed quickly attract the first wave of attention; but when consumers actually move in, the measurement standards will soon return to the most realistic level.
Youth retirement lifestyle: iteration and new development
Therefore, when discussing youth retirement homes two years later, perhaps it is no longer appropriate to regard it purely as a "boom business".
It is being integrated into more mature business formats. Some projects are renamed "light retirement experience", some turn to youth long-stay travel and digital nomad communities, and some are essentially homestays, farms or wellness bases, which only add shared workspaces, community activities and long-term living spaces on the basis of basic accommodation services.
For example, in August this year, a homestay named "Banshanye" in Wanning, Hainan still directly uses the concept of "Youth Retirement Home", but it actually provides a typical youth long-stay travel product: in addition to accommodation, it also provides shared meals, surfing, coffee making, campfire parties and other life experiences.
Local media also summarized this model as "light retirement experience" in relevant reports.
Similar changes are taking place in more places. In Dali, the NCC Digital Nomad Community is renovated from Bai ethnic residential houses. In addition to accommodation, it also provides shared offices and public libraries, with a minimum lease term of one month. In the first half of 2026, the number of long-stay travelers in Dali has approached 200,000.
As early as the end of 2021, Anji, Zhejiang, saw the emergence of digital nomad communes, which have gradually expanded from a single community to youth talent communities, shared workspaces and startup projects since then.
Data shows that Xilong Township in Anji has attracted a total of 15,000 person-times of digital nomads to travel, work and live there; projects such as e-commerce live streaming, homestays, cycling and music performances have also been launched around the Yucun Digital Nomad Community.
This also reflects a market change behind it: Young people's tourism is extending from "visiting a place for a few days" to "living in a different place for a period of time".
China Long-stay Travel Accommodation Market Insight Report 2025 shows that young people already account for 31% of the long-stay travel market, among which freelancers have particularly prominent participation; in terms of length of stay, medium-term long-stay travel of 1 to 3 months accounts for the highest proportion, and the average monthly accommodation budget of most long-stay travelers is within 6,000 yuan.
Similar changes are also taking place in the homestay market. In 2025, post-2000 users accounted for 59% of the platform's total homestay users, and homestay orders in county-level regions increased by 36% year on year; at the same time, homestay orders for consecutive stays of 30 days or more increased by 20% year on year.
Even the "digital nomad community" itself has developed from a few individual cases to a small industry. People's Forum disclosed earlier this year that by the end of 2025, the number of digital nomad communities across the country had reached 77, among which 33 new communities were added in 2025 alone.
In the view of Yiou, the previous popularity of youth retirement homes is more like a market test. The concept of "low-cost lying flat" has concentratedly exposed a group of originally scattered demands.
From this perspective, the "early retirement" that young people talked about two years ago may not eventually grow into a segmented industry called "Youth Retirement Home", but is being integrated into the larger cultural and tourism consumer market.
As long as urban life remains fast-paced enough, this business about "slowing down" will still have room for re-packaging and re-pricing.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Yiou" (ID: i-yiou), written by Li Qiongru, published with authorization from 36Kr.