How Many RV Sites Do You Need to Break Even?

August 22, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For most conventionally financed RV parks, breakeven starts showing up somewhere between 25 and 40 developed sites, and comfortable cash flow usually needs 50 or more. Below that, the fixed costs of running a park (a manager, insurance, property tax, basic maintenance) eat too much of the revenue no matter how good your rates are. This post is for passive investors sizing up a deal and operators trying to figure out if a piece of land is even worth developing.

What you need

• Total site count, split by type: RV sites, cabins, tent sites, storage
• Realistic ADR (average daily rate) by season, not just peak season
• Realistic occupancy by month, not an annual average pulled from a pro forma
• Full fixed cost stack: debt service, property tax, insurance, base payroll, utilities baseline, software/booking fees
• Variable cost per occupied site-night: utilities overage, cleaning, consumables, credit card processing

Step by step

1. Build the fixed cost stack first. Add up everything that gets paid whether you have one guest or a full park: debt service, property tax, insurance, a base level of payroll (even a small park usually needs someone on call), and any software or reservation platform fees. For a modest 30 to 60 site park, this stack commonly lands somewhere between $150,000 and $400,000 a year, depending heavily on debt load and whether the owner lives onsite or pays a manager.
2. Estimate your true variable cost per occupied night. This is smaller than fixed costs but real: utilities that scale with usage, cleaning between stays, credit card fees (usually 2.5 to 3.5 percent), and consumables. A common range is $8 to $20 per occupied site-night, depending on amenities and whether you offer full hookups.
3. Set ADR and occupancy honestly, by season. Don't use one blended number. A park that averages $55 a night at 70 percent occupancy in July can easily be $35 a night at 25 percent occupancy in January. Breakeven math done on annual averages hides the months that actually sink a deal.
4. Solve for the occupied nights needed to cover fixed costs, then check it against your site count. Divide your fixed cost stack by (ADR minus variable cost per night) to get the number of occupied nights you need per year. Compare that to what your site count can realistically deliver given seasonality. If the math requires occupancy levels above what comparable parks in your market actually achieve, the site count is too small for the fixed cost structure you've built.

Worked rough example: fixed costs of $220,000 a year, blended ADR of $45, variable cost of $12 per night. That's $33 of contribution margin per occupied night, meaning you need about 6,667 occupied nights a year to break even. Spread across a 200-day peak-ish season plus a slower shoulder and winter, a park with 35 to 45 sites can plausibly hit that. A park with 15 sites almost certainly cannot, unless ADR is much higher or fixed costs are much lower.

Where this goes wrong

The most common mistake is sizing the fixed cost stack for a bigger operation than the site count supports. A park doesn't need twice the payroll at 50 sites versus 25 sites, but it does need enough to keep the bathhouse clean, answer the phone, and handle check-ins. Small parks often get stuck paying near-fixed labor costs across too few revenue-generating sites, which is exactly why sub-30-site parks are hard to make work unless the owner is doing the labor themselves.

Another common error is using peak season numbers for the whole year. A park that looks great in a July snapshot can lose money from November through March if the fixed costs don't shrink much in the off season. Debt service and property tax don't take the winter off. If a market has a real shoulder season, the breakeven analysis has to include it, not just the best months.

A third failure mode is underestimating debt service relative to site count. Two parks with identical site counts and rates can have very different breakevens depending on leverage. A park bought with 50 percent leverage at a reasonable rate has a much lower breakeven occupancy than one bought with 75 percent leverage, even if every other number is the same. Site count alone doesn't tell you if a deal breaks even. Debt structure matters just as much.

Finally, people sometimes count sites that aren't actually rentable. A site without proper electrical, a site that floods twice a year, or a site too close to a septic field to legally use, still shows up on the site map but doesn't generate revenue. Breakeven math needs the real number of sellable sites, not the platted number.

When to stop and call someone

This kind of breakeven modeling is something any investor should be able to build in a spreadsheet with market comps and a pro forma. But there are limits to doing it alone. If you're evaluating a specific deal with real debt terms, get a lender or broker to walk through the actual loan structure rather than assuming a generic rate and term. Amortization schedules and rate resets can shift breakeven occupancy more than people expect.

If the deal involves a syndication structure, a JV, or a waterfall with preferred returns, the breakeven for the property and the breakeven for a specific investor's return are two different calculations. A CPA or an experienced sponsor should walk through how property-level breakeven translates into investor-level cash flow, because those numbers are not the same thing and conflating them leads to bad expectations.

And if you're trying to underwrite a market you don't know well, local occupancy and ADR data matters more than any generic benchmark, including the ranges in this post. A park operator or broker active in that specific region can tell you whether 30 sites is comfortable or a stretch, and that kind of local knowledge doesn't show up in a spreadsheet. If you want a second set of eyes on how a specific deal's numbers hold up, that's the kind of thing we look at regularly at Invest With Zac.