How Much Can You Charge for Storage Units? Cost per Sq Ft, Worked

October 31, 2026 · Homes and property

What you can charge for a storage unit starts with what each rentable square foot costs you a month: all the facility’s bills divided by the rentable sq ft. Your rent per sq ft has to sit above that, by enough to cover the units that are empty. In the illustrative facility below, bills of $11,800.00 a month over 20,000 rentable sq ft cost $0.59 a sq ft; at a rent of $1.10 a sq ft, a 10 by 10 unit rents for $110.00 a month, and the facility breaks even at 53.6% occupancy.

None of these figures is a market rent, a lease term or a build price. Every rent, bill, stay length and fee belongs to one made-up owner, and late fees and admin fees are whatever your own lease sets within the rules that apply to you.

The storage unit cost formula

cost per sq ft      = (the year's facility bills / 12) / rentable sq ft
unit rent           = unit sq ft x your rent per sq ft
left a month        = rented sq ft x rent per sq ft - facility bills
break-even sq ft    = facility bills a month / rent per sq ft
break-even occupancy = break-even sq ft / rentable sq ft

Step 1: a storage unit cost calculator, line by line

Only rentable sq ft counts, so aisles and the office are paid for by the units. Yearly bills are spread over twelve months, and the owner’s own pay is a bill like any other, inside management at $2,600.00 a month:

That $0.59 is owed on every rentable sq ft each month, rented or empty.

Step 2: rent by unit size

At one rate of $1.10 a sq ft for every size, the four example units rent and carry like this:

Each unit keeps 46% of its rent after cost, and rent is 1.86 times cost, but only while it is rented. If you charge small units more per sq ft, work each size on its own rate.

Step 3: occupancy is the real price test

With 16,000 of the 20,000 sq ft rented, occupancy is 80%. Rent is $17,600.00 a month and $5,800.00 is left after the bills. The 4,000 empty sq ft would bring $4,400.00 a month, $52,800.00 a year at this occupancy.

Break-even is the bills divided by the rate: about 10,727 sq ft rented, or 53.6% occupancy, so this example is well above it.

Here is the insight the whole price rests on. The $0.59 cost per sq ft assumes every sq ft is rented. At 80% occupancy, each rented sq ft carries $0.74 of bills, because the rented units pay for the empty ones. Price against cost per rented sq ft at the occupancy you can actually hold, not cost per rentable sq ft. A rent set a few cents over $0.59 looks profitable and is not.

Step 4: what a free first month costs

A first-month-free offer on a $110.00 unit gives away $110.00 per renter. No cash changes hands, but it is still money given up. If a renter stays 10 months and pays a $20.00 admin fee at move-in, they bring in $1,010.00 over the stay, or $101.00 a month.

Whether the offer pays depends on how many extra renters it brings. Without it, the example gets 8 move-ins a month, worth $8,960.00 over their stays. If the offer lifts that to 10, those move-ins are worth $10,100.00: $1,140.00 more over their stays. Break-even is 8.87 move-ins with the offer, so it pays only if it brings at least 9, one more than without. The stay length comes from your own rent roll; a shorter stay makes the free month a bigger share of what each renter pays.

Step 5: a rate increase against move-outs

An 8% increase takes the $110.00 unit to $118.80, $8.80 more a month. Across 100 renters that is $10,560.00 a year if every one stays. Each renter who leaves over it costs $277.60: 2 empty months at the new rent plus $40.00 to turn the unit over. So the increase still pays unless more than 38.04 renters leave over it, 38% of them. With 38 leaving, the year still comes out ahead of no increase; with one more, it does not. How many would leave is yours to judge from your own history; nothing here assumes how renters react.

How much to charge for storage space you already have

The same arithmetic works for a garage or spare room rented as a side hustle. Say a 500 sq ft space rents for $250.00 a month, rented 10 months a year, with a 10% listing or card fee, $240.00 a year of extra insurance, $15.00 a month of extra utilities and 2 hours a month of your time, valued at $20.00 an hour. It leaves $1,460.00 a year, $146.00 per rented month, with your time already paid. Each hour you spend on it earns $93.00, well above the value you put on it. That rent is $0.50 a sq ft, below the $1.10 of the facility example, which only shows the two are separate decisions. Check your lease, HOA and insurer before renting out any space.

Payback on building more units

Adding 2,000 sq ft at $25.00 a sq ft plus $8,000.00 of other one-time costs comes to $58,000.00. At the same rent, 75% rented and $0.15 a sq ft a month of added running cost, the new space nets $1,350.00 a month. It pays back in 43.0 months, 3.58 years, counted from the month it reaches that occupancy: 43 whole months of net rent cover the build. The months it takes to fill the new units add to that, and loan interest is not counted; if you borrow, add it to the running cost.

How these were calculated

Cost per sq ft is each year’s facility bills divided by twelve, then by the rentable sq ft. Unit rent is sq ft times the rate. Occupancy is rented sq ft over rentable sq ft, and break-even sq ft is the month’s bills over the rate. Cost per rented sq ft is the month’s bills over the rented sq ft. A renter on the offer pays the rent each month of the stay less the discount in the first, plus the admin fee. The move-outs a rate increase can absorb are the year’s extra rent divided by what one move-out costs in empty months and turnover. Payback is the build cost over the net rent a month. Figures are carried from one step to the next to the cent, as the spreadsheet shows them.

Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the pack below and once by an independent program that adds up each renter’s stay month by month, tests the rate increase against whole counts of move-outs and counts the payback months one at a time, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not market rents, fees or build costs. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice, and fees follow your own lease and the rules that apply to you.

To run this on your own bills, unit mix and rent roll, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from cost per sq ft to a check on whether a month hit your target.