Free tool · UK self storage
Self storage profitability calculator.
Put in your unit count, licence fee and running costs. Get monthly and annual profit, and the occupancy you actually need to break even — the number that decides whether a site works.
Your site
Ex VAT. Set this from what nearby sites actually charge.
Monthly running costs
Defaults to zero because it depends on your site's rateable value — get a VOA estimate rather than guessing.
Management software
£68 +VAT
StoreBay’s real published price at 60 units — it moves with your unit count.
The answer
Monthly profit at 80%
£3,212
£38,546 a year · 48 of 60 units let
- Revenue
- £5,280/mo
- Running costs
- £2,068/mo
- Break-even
- 19 units · 32%
Running costs here are fixed, so every unit you let beyond break-even adds £110 a month almost entirely to the bottom line. That is why filling the site, not trimming costs, is the whole game.
All figures ex VAT. Cost defaults are illustrative starting points from our worked example, not published benchmarks — replace them with your own quotes. This is a model, not advice.
01 / Reading the answer
Break-even matters more than the headline profit
Storage economics have an unusual shape, and it is the reason fill-up dominates everything else.
Almost all of a storage site’s costs are fixed. The rent, the rates, the lighting and the software cost the same whether the site is a third full or completely full. Revenue, meanwhile, scales directly with occupancy. The consequence is that a site is loss-making below break-even and then improves very quickly above it — every additional let unit adds its full licence fee to profit, with almost nothing deducted.
That is why the number worth watching is the break-even occupancy rather than the profit at any single occupancy. A site that breaks even at 30% has room to be wrong about demand; one that breaks even at 75% has almost none, because the UK average occupancy is 74.5%. If your break-even sits near or above the national average, the plan depends on beating the market rather than matching it — which is a much stronger claim than most business plans can support.
Two things this model deliberately does not do. It does not amortise your capital — the containers, groundworks or fit-out are not in here, so treat the output as an operating result, not a return on investment. And it assumes a steady state, where a real site spends its first year or two filling up. For the capital side see our build cost calculator, and for the fuller picture is self storage profitable in the UK?
02 / Common questions
Profitability FAQ
Published pricing · unlimited sites · API included