How to Price RV Park Sites Competitively in Your Market

October 8, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Pricing an RV park sounds simple until you try to do it. New operators often copy a rate sheet from a nearby park, hold it steady all year, and call it a strategy. The confusion comes from the fact that RV parks sit between two worlds. They look like real estate, with fixed monthly site rents, but they behave like hotels, with nightly demand that swings by season, weather, and local events. Most pricing mistakes happen because an owner treats the asset as only one of those things instead of both.

"Just price a few dollars below the campground down the road"

There is a kernel of truth here. You do need to know what nearby parks charge, and you should not be wildly out of line without a reason. But undercutting a competitor by five or ten dollars a night is not a pricing strategy, it is a guess. It assumes your site, your amenities, and your location are interchangeable with theirs. If your park has better pull-through sites, full hookups, or is closer to a lake or trailhead, you may be leaving money on the table by anchoring to someone else's rate. If your sites are older or your park backs up to a highway, matching their price might actually be too high. Comp shopping is a starting input, not the answer.

"Set rates once a year and leave them alone"

This is the most common thing that costs owners real money. RV demand is seasonal almost everywhere, and in a lot of markets it is also driven by specific events: a fishing tournament, a fall color weekend, a nearby festival, hunting season, a ski town's shoulder period. A single flat rate for the whole year means you are underpriced during your three or four peak weeks and overpriced during your slow stretches when you should be filling sites with longer-stay guests at a discount. Hotels and vacation rentals have used dynamic, date-based pricing for years. RV parks are catching up slowly, and parks that still price everything the same in July and February are giving away revenue during peak weeks and scaring off price-sensitive travelers during slow ones.

"The monthly rate is just the nightly rate times 30, with a small discount"

This sounds logical and it is almost always wrong in practice. Nightly, weekly, and monthly guests are different customers with different behavior and different costs to serve. A nightly guest uses more staff time for check-in, more turnover cleaning, and more wear on common areas per day of revenue. A monthly guest, especially a workforce or snowbird tenant, uses less daily labor, pays more predictably, and often stays through your slow season when you would otherwise have an empty site earning nothing. Because of that, monthly rates in most markets run somewhere in the range of 40 to 60 percent of what the site would earn at full nightly rate over the same period, sometimes lower in strong snowbird or workforce markets. That is a real discount, not a rounding error, and it reflects a genuinely different product, not just a longer stay.

What actually matters instead

Good RV park pricing starts with building an honest comp set, not just the one or two parks that come up first in a search. Pull nightly, weekly, and monthly rates from every park within a reasonable drive, note their amenities, their site types, and whether they are independently owned or part of a membership network like a Thousand Trails or KOA, because those guests behave differently and may not be true price competitors for your transient traffic.

From there, the real work is matching rate to demand across the calendar, not across the whole year. A few things that tend to matter most:

• Identify your true peak weeks (local events, holidays, weather windows) and price those separately, often well above your base rate.
• Track your occupancy by week or month over at least one full season before making big changes. You cannot price well without knowing when you actually fill up.
• Set weekly and monthly rates as deliberate tiers, not automatic math off the nightly rate, since they serve a different mix of guests and carry different operating costs.
• Watch your length-of-stay mix over time. If monthly guests are crowding out higher-margin nightly traffic during your peak season, your discount tiers may need boundaries, like capping monthly availability during the busiest months.
• Revisit rates at least twice a year, and more often if you are in a market with real seasonal swings.

None of this requires hotel-grade revenue management software, though some owners do eventually adopt simple tools built for campgrounds. What it requires is treating pricing as an ongoing decision tied to actual demand data, rather than a number you set once and defend. Parks that do this consistently tend to run higher occupancy and higher average rate than parks relying on a single flat rate copied from the competition.

If you are evaluating an RV park as an investment, how the current owner has handled pricing tells you a lot about upside. A flat, outdated rate sheet is often an easy value-add. That is the kind of detail we look at closely at Invest With Zac when underwriting a deal, because pricing discipline shows up directly in net operating income.