What Is a Typical Management Fee for RV Park Operators?

August 23, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Most third-party RV park management agreements charge a base fee of 4% to 8% of gross collected revenue, often paired with an incentive fee of 5% to 15% of net operating income above a set threshold. Smaller parks sometimes use a flat monthly fee instead, usually $1,500 to $4,000 depending on site count and complexity. If a proposed fee falls well outside these ranges, that is a reason to ask more questions, not necessarily a reason to walk away, but it changes what you should be checking.

What you need

• The proposed management agreement, in full, not just a summary sheet
• A clear definition of "gross revenue" as used in the fee calculation (does it include utility reimbursements, transient vs long-term rent, store or laundry income?)
• A breakdown of what is bundled into the fee versus billed separately (payroll, marketing spend, accounting, software, reserves)
• Two or three comparable management agreements from other parks of similar size and type, if you can get them
• The park's trailing 12-month financials, so you can model the fee in dollars, not just percentages

Step by step

1. Identify the fee structure type. Fees generally come in three flavors: flat monthly, percentage of gross revenue, or a hybrid with a base percentage plus an incentive fee tied to NOI or EBITDA. Flat fees are more common on parks under 75 to 100 sites where revenue is too small for a percentage fee to cover the manager's overhead. Percentage and hybrid structures dominate mid-size and larger parks.
2. Check what's included and what's billed on top. A 6% base fee sounds reasonable until you learn the manager also marks up onsite payroll by 10%, charges separately for accounting software, and bills a "mobilization" fee at takeover. Ask for the full list of pass-through costs and any markups on labor or vendors. Onsite staff wages, payroll taxes, and benefits are almost always billed to the owner directly, which is normal. Markups on top of that labor are where fees quietly grow.
3. Compare against benchmark ranges. Base fees of 4% to 8% of gross revenue are typical for full-service RV park and outdoor hospitality management. Fees under 4% usually mean a very hands-off scope (bookkeeping and remote oversight only) or a manager buying market share. Fees above 8% to 10% need a specific justification, such as heavy involvement in a ground-up development, a turnaround situation, or a very small revenue base where the manager still needs a minimum dollar amount to make the account worth taking.
4. Test the incentive fee for alignment, not just size. An incentive fee of 10% to 15% of NOI above a preferred threshold can align the manager's interests with the owner's, since it rewards profit growth rather than just revenue growth. But check whether the threshold resets each year, whether capital expenditures are excluded from the NOI calculation in a way that inflates the number, and whether there's a cap. A manager who benefits from higher gross revenue but not from controlling expenses will chase occupancy and rate increases even when it hurts long-term guest quality or increases churn.

Where this goes wrong

The most common problem is fee stacking in syndicated deals. A sponsor charges an asset management fee (often 1% to 2% of revenue or equity) at the fund or GP level, and then a separate, unaffiliated third-party operator charges a property management fee (4% to 8% of gross revenue) at the property level. Neither fee is unreasonable on its own, but investors sometimes don't realize both exist, or don't see how they interact. Read every fee line in the offering documents separately, then add them up as if you were the one paying all of them, because in effect you are.

Another failure mode is a percentage-of-gross-revenue fee with no incentive component and no expense discipline built into the agreement. This structure pays the manager more as revenue rises regardless of what happens to expenses or NOI. A manager can hit their fee targets by raising rates aggressively or overbooking sites, while margins compress from higher payroll, higher turnover, and higher maintenance costs. The owner sees the fee go up while net income stalls or falls.

A third issue is vague scope language. Agreements that don't specify what's included (reservations system, marketing, revenue management, capital project oversight, vendor sourcing) leave room for the manager to bill extra for services an owner assumed were part of the base fee. This shows up months later as unexpected invoices, and by then the owner has limited leverage because switching managers mid-season is disruptive and costly.

Termination terms cause trouble too. Some agreements lock owners in for multi-year terms with steep early termination penalties, sometimes six months of fees or more. If the fee itself is reasonable but the exit terms are punitive, the owner has effectively signed away control of the asset for the contract term. This matters more in RV parks than in some other real estate because operational quality (site turnover speed, guest screening, maintenance response) has an outsized effect on both revenue and reputation, and a bad manager can do real damage before an owner can act.

When to stop and call someone

Reading and benchmarking a fee structure is something any owner or investor can do with the checklist above. But two things call for outside help. First, if you're evaluating a management agreement as part of a syndication or fund investment, have a securities attorney or an experienced third-party advisor review the full fee stack, not just the property management fee, before you commit capital. Fee structures in private placement documents are legal language, and small wording differences (how NOI is defined, what triggers the incentive fee, whether fees are prorated) have real financial consequences that are easy to miss on a first read.

Second, if you're an owner negotiating a management agreement directly with an operator, get a CPA or an operator with RV park experience to sanity-check the numbers against your actual trailing financials before you sign. A fee that looks fine at 6% of current gross revenue can become a much bigger dollar number if the manager also drives revenue growth, which is the point, but you want to model that scenario before you're in it, not after.

Invest With Zac covers these fee structures and benchmarks in more depth for readers evaluating RV park operators and outdoor hospitality investments, since getting the fee right at the start avoids most of the disputes that come up later.