RV Life Camping Costs

This is the first in a series where we’ll share our RV life costs. This post will discuss our real-life camping costs for the first 10 stops on our 2021 RV Trip.

I was talking to an old friend yesterday and he was saying how he could swing RV life if only the overnight camping costs weren’t so expensive. His point is that by the time you make payments on the RV & a vehicle, RV life is already pretty costly. We’ll write about controlling those costs in another post, but for now – let’s address the overnight camping costs being expensive.

Our first experience at a full-fledged RV resort was Sun-N-Fun. During peak season (winter) it’s about $80-120/night. There’s a slight discount for weekly and monthly stays, but not much. So that’s the high-end of what camping can cost. Comparably, Disney’s Fort Wilderness is $110-180/night to camp this time of year.

So we’ve set the top of the bar for nightly cost at about $100/night. That’s $3,000/month. And undoubtedly a fairly expensive proposition!

Our favorite park, Lazydays RV Resort, is about $70/night in the winter of 2020-2021. So quite a bit cheaper already! Staying there for a month would run you $2,100.

On the other end of the spectrum, staying somewhere further north and inland – perhaps Leesburg, Florida- we spent $250 for a week-long stay. That’s about $1,000 a month.

*The cheapest RV park, with full hookups, that we ever stayed at was in Deming, NM, where they charged us $12/night. That included water, power, cable, sewer, and wifi!*

We have to remember that Florida is most expensive in the winter. Rates at Sun-N-Fun are about $50-80/night in the summer. Lazydays charges $30-40/night in the summer.

Anyhow, we spent our first 11 days of this trip paying full retail rates. We spent $525 for a week at Pioneer Village – which is a pretty standard rate for a no-frills sort of park with a pool. That would have been $2,100/month – about $70/night.

By joining Thousand Trails after those first 11 days, we’ve been able to drastically cut our camping cost – even including the annual fee.

The Thousand Trails Camping Pass lets us stay at member parks for up to 2 weeks without paying a dime! It was only $889, which paid for itself on the first 2-week stay!

Without further ado, here are our real-life costs!

	Name	Nights	Cost	Cost/Night		Running Cost	Running Cost/Night		Total Nights
1	Lazydays	4	$293.08	$73.27		$293.08	$73.27		4
2	Pioneer Village	7	$525.00	$75.00		$818.08	$74.37		11
	Thousand Trails Camping Pass & Encore		$889.11			$1,707.19	$155.20		11
3	Pioneer Village	10	$0.00	$0.00		$1,707.19	$81.29		21
4	Sun-N-Fun	4	$448.00	$112.00		$2,155.19	$86.21		25
5	Lazydays	7	$480.83	$68.69		$2,636.02	$82.38		32
6	Pioneer Village	14	$0.00	$0.00		$2,636.02	$57.30		46
7	Club Naples	7	$448.20	$64.03		$3,084.22	$58.19		53
8	Pioneer Village	14	$0.00	$0.00		$3,084.22	$46.03		67
9	Riverside RV	7	$469.00	$67.00		$3,553.22	$48.02		74
10	Pioneer Village	14	$0.00	$0.00		$3,553.22	$40.38		88

As you see, included our camping pass purchase, we’ve gotten our nightly rate down to $40/night! That’s just $1,200/month….

BUT…

Now that we’ve made that purchase, our realized costs are more like $700/month. We spend ~$525 every 3 weeks.

I don’t know what your housing costs are, but living for $700/month is cheap living! That includes our water, sewer, electricity, and cable!

What are your realized RV costs? Or traditional housing costs? Is $700/month a good value or not? What other RV Life Costs should we explore in this series?