Guides
How storage pricing actually works
7 explanations of what the price data shows, written from the same observations as the market pages. Every figure in them is recomputed on each build, so they change when the prices do.
The 7 guides
- The advertised price is not what you keep paying Every Public Storage listing shows two prices. Across 156,768 observations the second is 1.5x the first — a pricing rule, not a second quote.
- Why storage prices double inside one city Across 170 US markets, the cheaper and dearer ends of a 10x10 differ by 109% in the median market.
- Bigger units cost less per square foot A 5x5 costs $1.36 per square foot; a 10x30 costs $0.69 — 49% less for the same cubic space. Why bigger units are cheaper by the foot.
- The cheapest and dearest US storage markets Median 10x10 storage prices across 227 US markets, from $33 to $266 a month.
- What size storage unit do you actually need Storage unit sizes explained, with how common each one is and what it typically costs across US locations.
- How these prices are collected Where Storage Price Index prices come from, what is excluded, and what the figures cannot tell you.
- Why did my storage unit price go up A rate increase is the end of an introductory price. Across 170 markets a 10x10 varies 109% inside one city, and the cheapest branch sits 48% below its median.
How to read them
Each one starts from a measurement rather than from advice, and every figure in it is recomputed on the build that publishes it — there are no numbers here typed in once and left to go stale. That is also why several of them carry a gate: where a guide rests on a rule holding, it states the tolerance and refuses to publish rather than describe a rule the data has stopped supporting.
Where a common rule of thumb is only mostly true, the guide says which part is not. Bigger units are cheaper by the square foot nationally and are not in every market; the advertised rate is a promotional one and the guides name what it reverts to. The figures come from the same observations as the market pages, so a number here and the same number on a market page cannot drift apart.