METHODOLOGY

What this site is built on.

Change of 6 September 2026. This site previously published a 20-metro table of monthly rates. That table was built by fetching one operator's own city listing pages, which their terms do not permit, and republishing a derived price set. We withdrew it. We did not replace it with an estimate, a model, or a figure bought from an industry research product. Where there is no source we can stand behind, there is now no number.

Fit judgements are geometry

A 5×10 is 50 square feet of floor and, at the 8 ft ceiling that is standard across the industry, 400 cubic feet. Every entry on /what-fits/ compares a published item dimension against that envelope, with an allowance for the aisle you need to reach the back of the unit. A king mattress is 76 by 80 inches. A road motorcycle is around 7 ft long. The shortest car on sale is 8 ft 10 in and wider than the door. None of that requires a vendor to tell us, and none of it changes when a price changes.

The one price series we use

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index for miniwarehouse and self-storage unit operators, series PCU531130531130, NAICS 531130. Free, public, monthly, and running since December 2003. We retrieve it through the St. Louis Fed API and report it as an index, because that is what it is. We do not convert it into a dollar rate for a 5×10, because doing so would need a per-square-foot assumption we would be making up. Full read-out on /national/.

What we do not do

We do not scrape operator booking or listing pages, and we do not republish rates taken from them.
We do not republish figures from subscription industry research products.
We do not publish a per-metro or per-state rate table. There is no free primary source for one, and an estimate dressed as a measurement is worse than silence.
We do not claim a 5×10 fits a small car. It does not, and the door is the reason.
We take no affiliate revenue and run no lead form, so there is nothing pulling the copy toward a booking.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we would rather know. The index figures are checkable against the series page linked on /national/, and the fit arithmetic is checkable with a tape measure.