Start here.
A question every self-storage investor hits sooner or later: “What would it cost to build this myself?”
Until this month, the answer was a guess. Developers had their own data and kept it. Brokers had ranges and held them close. The gap between what people thought building cost and what it actually cost was wide enough to lose money in.
In October 2026, TractIQ and ARCO/Murray Design Build released the first public benchmark dataset covering self-storage construction costs. One hundred-plus projects. Twenty-seven states. Nearly 20 million square feet. A decade of hard cost data from 2016 through 2026.
This is submitted contract data — what builders actually paid, not what estimators guessed.
The numbers
Median hard cost for a class A building of three stories or less: $84.23 per gross square foot.
That is the building itself. Steel, concrete, drywall, doors, HVAC, electrical, plumbing. The physical structure.
Hard costs rose 47 percent between 2021 and 2024. Vertical-construction costs — multi-story buildings — rose 28 percent in the same period.
Sitework — the cost to prepare the land before a single block is laid — went from under 8 percent of project budget in 2016 to nearly 20 percent today. Grading, drainage, utilities, pavement, landscaping. That line item almost tripled as a share of total cost.
Building efficiency: a typical three-story facility runs about 74 percent net rentable square footage relative to gross. Every square foot of hallway, elevator shaft, stairwell, and loading area is square footage you pay to build but cannot rent.
And that is just hard cost. Land, soft costs (permits, fees, architecture, legal), financing during construction, and lease-up sit on top.
Why this matters for an acquisition investor
The most direct use of construction cost data is for someone evaluating a ground-up build. But for the acquisition investor — the person who buys existing facilities — these numbers matter in three ways.
One: replacement cost for insurance. Your carrier underwrites the building at replacement cost. If construction costs rose 47 percent since 2021, the replacement cost on your policy may be understated. We have seen facilities where the insured value was set at $60 per square foot when the actual cost to replace was above $84. That gap exposes the owner. Call your agent. Check the declared value against real construction cost data.
Two: the build-versus-buy decision.When a seller’s asking price per square foot approaches what it would cost to build new — adjusted for land and lease-up — the math changes. Building new means you get a custom-designed facility at today’s specifications, but you carry lease-up risk and a 24- to 36-month timeline before stabilization. Buying existing means you pay a premium for stabilized cash flow. The TractIQ/ARCO-Murray data gives you the reference point for the build side of that equation.
Three: market-level supply discipline. When construction costs are high enough that new projects cannot pencil at current street rates, existing facilities gain a structural moat. The data says costs are up 47 percent since 2021. Street rates over the same period are flat to down in most markets. That gap means less new supply competes with your existing asset.
The honest limits of this data
The $84.23 figure is a median across 27 states. Your market may be higher or lower. California and the Northeast run well above it. The Southeast and Texas may run below it, depending on labor availability and site conditions. The data is also skewed toward projects ARCO/Murray built — class A, multi-story, professionally developed facilities. Single-story drive-up in a tertiary market costs less per square foot and the data may not capture that range.
Use the benchmark as a starting point. Call a local contractor who has built storage in your market. Get a real number. Conservative underwriting is your shield.
Run the numbers.Your insurance agent’s declared value, your contractor’s estimate, and your market’s street rates all tell a story. Make sure the story adds up. Run the numbers. Then run them again.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures in these posts are historical results for those specific deals or the cited industry data, not projections, and nothing here constitutes investment advice. The math that decides a deal is the math you do before you sign — underwrite it yourself, or have someone you trust walk it with you.