Guide · updated
The cheapest and dearest US storage markets
A 10×10 runs $33 a month in Port Charlotte and $266 in Honolulu — 8.1× more for the same hundred square feet.
Storage is a land business wearing a logistics costume. What you are really renting is a share of a building's footprint, so the price tracks local property values far more closely than it tracks anything about the unit. Below are the median 10×10 rates across the 227 markets where we hold at least fifteen observations.
- York, PA $50
- Macon, GA $50
- Fort Myers, FL $50
- Ocala, FL $48
- Punta Gorda, FL $47
- Amarillo, TX $46
- Clovis, NM $41
- Sherman, TX $39
- Huntsville, AL $34
- Port Charlotte, FL $33
- Honolulu, HI $266
- San Juan, PR $252
- Del Rey Oaks, CA $243
- Brooklyn, NY $234
- Los Angeles, CA $226
- Santa Cruz, CA $203
- Norwalk, CT $202
- Boca Raton, FL $201
- San Francisco, CA $196
- Goleta, CA $188
Cheapest markets
| Market | Units | Median 10×10 |
|---|---|---|
| Port Charlotte, FL | 48 | $33 |
| Huntsville, AL | 101 | $34 |
| Sherman, TX | 21 | $39 |
| Clovis, NM | 21 | $41 |
| Amarillo, TX | 61 | $46 |
| Punta Gorda, FL | 25 | $47 |
| Ocala, FL | 188 | $48 |
| Fort Myers, FL | 148 | $50 |
| Macon, GA | 42 | $50 |
| York, PA | 29 | $50 |
Most expensive markets
| Market | Units | Median 10×10 |
|---|---|---|
| Honolulu, HI | 102 | $266 |
| San Juan, PR | 79 | $252 |
| Del Rey Oaks, CA | 36 | $243 |
| Brooklyn, NY | 324 | $234 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 1184 | $226 |
| Santa Cruz, CA | 38 | $203 |
| Norwalk, CT | 17 | $202 |
| Boca Raton, FL | 58 | $201 |
| San Francisco, CA | 346 | $196 |
| Goleta, CA | 21 | $188 |
A market is not cheap or dear on its own — only for a size
Everything above ranks on the 10×10, because it is the one size almost every branch stocks. That makes the ordering easy to read and easy to over-read: it invites you to treat "cheap market" as a property of the place. Ranked separately within each size, it is not.
Across the 222 markets we can rank on five or more sizes, the typical market moves 25 percentile points depending on which size you want, and 20 move more than fifty — from one end of the national distribution towards the other, in the same town.
| Market | Sizes ranked | Cheapest it ranks | Dearest it ranks | Swing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gainesville | 16 | 1th pct | 91th pct | 90 pts |
| Spring Hill | 13 | 4th pct | 86th pct | 82 pts |
| Fort Pierce | 8 | 10th pct | 86th pct | 76 pts |
| Tuscaloosa | 8 | 21th pct | 89th pct | 68 pts |
| Naples | 7 | 13th pct | 78th pct | 65 pts |
| Florence | 10 | 16th pct | 80th pct | 64 pts |
The practical consequence is that a table like this one answers "where is storage cheap in general", which is rarely the question anyone actually has. If you know the size you need, read the ranking for that size on its own page rather than inferring it from the 10×10.
Read this with care. These are medians of advertised online rates, not of what people pay — the regular rate is half as much again, and there is no adjustment here for unit features. A market with mostly climate-controlled indoor stock will look dearer than one with mostly drive-up units even if the underlying land is worth the same.
The ranking is also only as good as our coverage. Markets appear here when we hold at least fifteen 10×10 observations, so a genuinely cheap market we have barely crawled is simply absent rather than wrongly ranked. That is the safer failure, but it does mean this is a table of the markets we know well, not of every market in the country.