A three-week gap between completions and a two-year hold are different products at different prices. Here is where the cost breakpoints fall.
Storage between house moves is priced by the week. Storage that lasts is priced by the month, on a contract, with a notice period attached. That single difference is why people who ask “how much is storage per month” get such wildly different answers, and why a three-week gap between completions and a two-year hold are not the same product at different lengths — they are different products. This page is about duration and where the money actually steps.
Everything below is costed from our own Lower Dicker storage rates and the market rates around Sussex. If you want the wider question — security, formats, unit sizes, what to ask before signing, and how the national chains price it — our guide to choosing the right self storage covers that side. Here we are only interested in how long you need it for and what that does to the bill.
The most common storage request we take is not really a storage request at all. It is a timing request: the sale completes on the Friday, the purchase completes a fortnight later, and the contents of a house have to exist somewhere in between. The same shape comes up when a renovation overruns, when a rental starts before the purchase closes, or when a downsizer completes before the new apartment is finished.
For a gap measured in weeks, what you need is strong-room storage at a remover’s depot — a secure warehouse room where the load sits untouched. It is billed per week, it goes on the removal quote as a line item rather than as a separate contract you sign, and it includes exactly two movements: we load out on completion day and deliver in on the new completion day. There is no setup fee, no notice period, no minimum term to negotiate out of. The one thing you give up is walking in and helping yourself to the load, and for a fortnight that costs you nothing.
The practical work is in what you keep out rather than what goes in. Everything except an overnight bag can go into store, but the list people forget is consistent: passports and completion paperwork, medication, phone and laptop chargers, school uniform, the kettle, one set of tools, and anything the estate agent or solicitor might ask you to produce. Once the load is in the strong room it is not casually retrievable — a retrieval means a crew, a vehicle and a slot in the diary, and on a two-week hold that is a cost you booked specifically to avoid.
Our survey costs the whole thing as one job: pack, load, store for the number of weeks you actually need, deliver. If the chain slips by a week, the storage line moves by a week and nothing else changes. That flexibility is the real product being sold here, more than the square footage.
Once you are past about three months, the comparison people actually want is container storage vs self storage, and the honest answer is that the headline rates overlap. Containerised or strong-room storage is sold by the volume you actually occupy — we price it as a private steel room, and our 50 sq ft room takes 350 cubic feet, which is a studio or a one-bedroom flat. The national self-storage chains sell floor area instead, in drive-up steps of roughly 25 sq ft. Two units priced within a few pounds of each other can hold very different amounts depending on how well the contents stack.
What does not overlap is the cost of the movements. On strong-room storage the load in and the load out are done by our crew and sit inside the removal quote. Most self-storage sites leave both movements to you, which means a hire van and a weekend at each end, or a paid crew booked twice. Across a fortnight, those two movements are most of the total bill, which is why containerised storage wins outright for a short gap. Across eighteen months they barely register, and the monthly rate becomes the only number that matters.
The second thing duration changes is stacking. A container is loaded once, tightly, by people who do it daily, and it stays loaded. A walk-in unit at a self-storage site gets unstacked and restacked every time you visit, which in practice means you buy more space than you strictly need so you can walk into it. That is a real cost of access, and it is the reason a rented walk-in unit big enough to be usable often costs more per cubic foot than the same contents sat in a container. Our guide to preparing furniture for storage covers the packing side, and our steel storage rooms page describes the units themselves.
So the rule of thumb by duration: under three months, containerised or strong-room, with the movements built into the removal quote. Three to six months, either format, decided by whether you will genuinely go in and handle the load yourself. Beyond six months, rent a walk-in unit from a self-storage operator only if you are actually visiting it — otherwise you are paying an access premium on furniture that nobody is going to touch until the next house is ready. We hold containerised crate storage and individual steel storage rooms at our Lower Dicker depot, and moving a customer’s load from one room type to the other is an internal job that does not involve them at all.
Access frequency is the variable that decides this, and it is the one people estimate worst. Almost every customer who books storage for a gap of a few weeks expects to need nothing from it, and almost every customer who books for a year expects to visit monthly. In practice the first group is right and the second group visits two or three times.
The reason it matters is that the two formats price access completely differently. A unit at a self-storage site charges you nothing per visit but charges a premium every month whether you visit or not. A container or strong-room charges you nothing extra month to month, but a retrieval is a booked job: a couple of days’ notice, a crew to break down the stack, find the piece and rebuild the stack, and a vehicle if it needs delivering to you. One retrieval a year is trivial. One a month is not, and at that frequency the walk-in premium a self-storage site charges has already paid for itself.
So do the arithmetic honestly before you book, not after. Write down what you genuinely expect to need out of store and when. Winter coats in October, the Christmas boxes in December, a filing box for the accountant in January — that is three retrievals, and it is cheaper to schedule those three as jobs than to rent walk-in access for twelve months. Business stock you are drawing from weekly is the opposite case and always belongs at a self-storage site where you can open the unit yourself.
The split option is underused. Furniture, beds, wardrobes and anything for the next house go into containerised storage where they sit still and cost the least; the handful of things you know you will want are boxed separately and stacked at the front of the room, so retrieving them is a short booked job rather than a full unstack. Both halves sit at the same Lower Dicker site on one inventory, so there is one supplier and one invoice. If you want to walk in and help yourself week by week, that is the part of the load to rent a small unit for at a self-storage site — and in most households it turns out to be a couple of boxes, not a houseful. If you are unsure which side of the line you fall on, the questions in our questions-to-ask guide apply to storage quotes as much as to removal quotes.
Two rate structures, two different units of measurement. Our strong-room and containerised storage is priced by the room you occupy, by the week, VAT included: £18 a week for a 30 sq ft room of boxes, £27 a week for the 50 sq ft room that holds a studio or a one-bedroom flat, £45 a week for the 100 sq ft room a two-bedroom house needs, and £63 a week for the 150 sq ft room a three-bedroom house needs. Billed in four-week blocks that is £72, £108, £180 and £252, and £5,000 of cover is included in every one of those figures. The national self-storage chains price on a different basis — drive-up floor area, typically £20–£60 per month per 25 sq ft, so a 100 sq ft unit elsewhere lands at £80–£240 a month. Rates vary considerably by region; Sussex generally sits in the middle of the national range.
| Room | Typically holds | Per week | Per 4 weeks | Collection or delivery, each way |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 sq ft | One room, boxes | £18 | £72 | £240 |
| 50 sq ft | Studio or 1-bed flat | £27 | £108 | £390 |
| 75 sq ft | 2-bed flat | £36 | £144 | £550 |
| 100 sq ft | 2-bed house | £45 | £180 | £720 |
| 150 sq ft | 3-bed house | £63 | £252 | £990 |
| 200 sq ft | 4-bed house | £80 | £320 | £1,290 |
| 250 sq ft | 5-bed house or business stock | from £95 | from £380 | Quoted on survey |
All prices include VAT. £5,000 of cover is included in every price. First 4 weeks half price when we collect for you.
Put real durations through those numbers and the steps become obvious. A one-bedroom flat stored for the classic three-week completion gap is three weeks in the 50 sq ft room: £81 in total, plus the removal itself. A three-bedroom house for the same three weeks takes the 150 sq ft room, so £189. Those are list figures before the first-four-weeks-half-price offer, and nobody agonises over them, which is why the between-moves case is rarely a decision at all.
Now run the same contents for a year. Our 100 sq ft room at £45 a week is £2,340 across fifty-two weeks; the 150 sq ft room a three-bedroom house needs is £63 a week, or £3,276 a year. A 100 sq ft drive-up storage unit at one of the national chains, at £80–£240 a month, works out at £960–£2,880 over the same twelve months, and the van hire at each end is on top of that. This is the point at which storage stops being a line on a removal quote and starts being a standing cost with the same weight as a utility bill, and it is where people should stop and reconsider what is actually in the boxes.
Two things commonly missing from the headline rate. The first is the movements in and out, which are inside our removal quote for strong-room storage but are yours to arrange at most self-storage sites. The second is cover for the goods, which most operators quote separately from the storage rate — see the next section. Ours does not work that way: £5,000 of cover sits inside the weekly figure. Ask anyone you compare us against for the monthly figure, the movement costs and the cover as three separate numbers, because a quote that bundles them is very hard to compare against one that does not. We will set ours out at survey stage.
Insurance is where duration bites hardest, because the exposure is the same on day one and on day four hundred but the paperwork is only checked once. Most home contents policies do not cover goods in off-site storage at all, and the ones that do usually allow only a short grace period around a move. For a fortnight between completions that gap is easy to miss and easy to regret. Cover comes instead from the remover or the storage provider, priced against a declared value for the goods, and it is quoted separately from the storage rate. Our terms and insurance details set out how we handle it.
Over a long stay the declared value is the thing that goes stale. People declare a figure when the load goes in and never revisit it, so a household that has been in store for two years is often covered for what it was worth when it went in, before anything was added, revalued or inherited. If the contents include anything genuinely valuable — the sort of pieces described on our antiques moving service page — the declared value is worth reviewing annually rather than at exit, when it is far too late.
Contract terms move the same way. Weekly strong-room storage carries no notice obligation, so if your completion slips or lands early you pay for the weeks you use. Most self-storage contracts want a calendar month’s notice and often carry an annual price review, which means the rate you compared against on day one is not necessarily the rate you are paying in month fourteen. Get the review mechanism, the notice period and the exit costs in writing before signing — some facilities charge a final clean fee, some do not, and it is not a question anyone thinks to ask when they are focused on a move.
One last duration point that costs nothing to get right: over months rather than weeks, the building matters. Climate-stable storage — insulated and ventilated rather than an uninsulated steel box — is the difference between contents that come out as they went in and contents that come out damp. It is a non-issue for a fortnight and a serious one at a year.
If you have decided which side of that line you fall on, the service pages go into the practicalities: storage while moving house for the short gap, and long-term storage for anything past six months.
Free in-home or video survey, written fixed-price quote, BAR-protected deposit. Sussex’s family-run independent remover.
Scenario one, three weeks. A three-bedroom Eastbourne family sells in late June and completes on the Brighton purchase three weeks later. Everything but an overnight bag goes into strong-room storage at our Lower Dicker depot. We collect on completion day, hold for three weeks, and deliver to the new Brighton address on the new completion day. A three-bedroom load takes the 150 sq ft room, so three weeks at £63 a week is £189 of storage, billed by the week inside the removal quote, with both movements already included. Nobody needs a spreadsheet for that decision.
Scenario two, eighteen months. A two-bedroom couple downsizing in Lewes want to keep extensive contents for a future second home. They take a 100 sq ft steel room at our Lower Dicker depot — the size a two-bedroom house needs — with our crew collecting, wrapping and stacking the load on move day rather than leaving them to load it themselves. At £45 a week including VAT, eighteen months is seventy-eight weeks and £3,510 of storage, with collection quoted separately at £720 each way. The drive-up alternative at one of the national chains runs £80–£240 a month, or £1,440–£4,320 across the same term, with an annual price review and the van hire at each end on top. Either is a perfectly sound decision — but it is a four-figure one, and it deserves to be made deliberately.
Which brings up the question nobody in the storage industry volunteers: at what point does storing cost more than replacing? The method is simple and takes twenty minutes. List the ten largest items you are about to store. Write down honestly what each would cost you to replace in similar second-hand condition, not what it cost new. Total it, and set that total against the twelve-month storage figure for the space they occupy. If the storage number is the bigger one, you are renting a room to keep things you could rebuy for less, and the sensible move is to store the irreplaceable half and sell or donate the rest.
The items that survive that test are consistent: solid wood furniture, anything antique or inherited, tools and instruments, and anything with genuine sentimental weight. The items that usually fail it are equally consistent: flat-pack wardrobes, tired mattresses, ageing white goods and the third sofa. If your situation does not map cleanly onto either scenario, the survey will work it through with you, and the what-you-can-store guide covers what is not allowed in the building at any price.
We are a family-run Sussex remover that owns and runs its own storage rather than sub-letting space and adding a margin, which is why we can quote a gap of three weeks and a hold of three years off the same survey. Our crews are directly employed and trained at our own staff training centre, so the people who stack your container are the people who packed the house.
What you get in writing is the part that matters when the dates move. The fixed-price quote shows the storage as its own line, priced per week for short holds and per month for long ones, with the collection and the delivery listed separately rather than rolled into a single number, and the £5,000 of cover shown as already included in the storage line. Deposits are protected by the British Association of Removers’ Advance Payment Guarantee, and the storage rate does not change because your chain slipped a fortnight. The result across storage and removals together is a 4.9/5 average from 120+ independent reviews.
Booking a survey takes ten minutes, and for storage it is worth doing even if you are only pricing options, because the volume figure is what everything else hangs off. We hold goods for customers moving locally across Eastbourne and for customers whose contents are waiting on an international removal at the other end — the second group are often in store far longer than they first expected, which is exactly why the monthly arithmetic above is worth doing before you commit.
A three-bedroom house needs our 150 sq ft room, which is £63 a week including VAT, or £252 per 4 weeks. A drive-up storage unit at one of the national chains is priced by floor area instead, typically £80–£240 a month for 100 sq ft, and you also arrange and pay for the load in and the load out yourself.
For a one-bedroom flat, three weeks in our 50 sq ft room at £27 a week is £81. For a three-bedroom house it is the 150 sq ft room at £63 a week, so £189. Both figures sit inside the removal quote as a weekly line and include the collection and the delivery.
Per cubic foot, usually yes, because a container is stacked once and tightly and is sold by volume rather than floor area. The published monthly ranges do overlap, so the honest comparison has to include the two movements in and out and the fact that the walk-in unit most self-storage sites rent you has to be bigger than the contents strictly require.
Weekly storage is billed for the weeks you use, so a chain that slips a fortnight adds two weeks and changes nothing else — no re-quote, no amendment fee. That flexibility is the main reason between-moves storage is priced weekly rather than monthly in the first place.
List the ten largest items going into store, write down what each would cost to replace second-hand, and compare the total with twelve months of storage for that volume. If the storage figure is larger, store the irreplaceable items and sell or donate the rest. Solid wood, antiques, tools and instruments usually pass the test; flat-pack wardrobes, tired mattresses and old white goods usually fail it.
For as long as you keep the cover in force and the declared value realistic. It is quoted separately from the storage rate, and on a long stay the declared value should be reviewed annually — a figure set when the load went in two years ago is the figure you will be paid against, not what the contents are worth today.
Yes, with a couple of days’ notice. From a container it is a booked job: a crew breaks down the stack, retrieves the piece and rebuilds it, with a vehicle if it needs delivering to you. One or two retrievals a year is cheap; if you expect one a month, most self-storage sites will suit you better, because you walk in and get things out yourself.
Most facilities reduce the rate for committed contracts of twelve months or more, and so do we. Tell us the expected duration at survey and we will quote the committed rate alongside the flexible one, so you can see what the commitment is actually buying before you sign for it.
Yes. Plenty of customers begin with a few weeks for a chain delay and then find the need has become months. The billing switches from weekly to a monthly contract on the same goods, and if the load needs consolidating into a different steel storage room at Lower Dicker our own crew handles it in-house — you do not have to attend, hire anything or move anything yourself.