Between about thirty five pounds and five hundred pounds a month. That is the honest range. The more useful answer is that how quickly a facility can give you a number tells you more about them than the number itself does.
These are the going rates in the UK, before VAT, for one car. London and the Home Counties sit at the top of each band, because the property under the car costs more.
Plenty of facilities will quote you a monthly figure over the phone before they have asked what the car is. That feels like good service. It is worth pausing on what it means.
A single monthly rate is a claim. It says that every car in that building costs the same to look after. That is only true if the same thing is done to every car, which leaves two possibilities. Either the facility applies one protocol regardless of what is sitting in front of it, or it is renting out space and does not intend to touch the car at all.
Both of those are perfectly legitimate businesses. Neither of them is storage in the sense most owners mean when they go looking for it. And the easiest way to see the problem is to put two cars side by side.
A nineteen sixties classic. The received wisdom is to start it every month and let it run. It sounds conscientious. It is one of the more damaging things you can do. Combustion produces water, and that water forms acids in the oil which go to work on the bearings. Getting rid of it requires the oil, not the coolant, to reach around one hundred degrees. A few minutes idling on a cold morning gets the coolant warm and leaves the oil far short, so each start adds contamination and removes none of it. For a great many classics the correct answer is either a proper drive of fifteen or twenty miles, or leaving it alone entirely until spring.
A modern electric car. Start it monthly is not merely wrong here, it is meaningless. A lithium pack ages fastest when it is held at a high state of charge and kept warm, so a car being put away for months wants to sit at roughly forty to sixty percent, not full. Whether it should be left plugged in depends on whether that particular model has a genuine storage mode, which is a question about that car's software rather than a general rule. And the twelve volt battery underneath it all is a separate problem that needs its own maintainer.
One of those cars wants to be left alone. The other wants to be held at a specific charge and checked against its own manual. No single monthly protocol serves both, so no single monthly price honestly covers both.
If a facility quotes the same figure for both cars without asking which one you have, it has told you something useful. It has told you the price is based on the floor, not on the car.
This cuts the other way too, and it would be dishonest not to say so.
If what you need is secure space, a published price is the better model and you should prefer it. A self storage unit is the same box whatever you put in it, and an outdoor compound is the same square of tarmac. The operator's costs genuinely do not change with your car, so a fixed rate is the honest way to sell it, and any operator charging you bespoke rates for identical space is doing something odd.
A modern car with modern paint and galvanised panels, going away for six weeks in summer, does not need specialist care. Paying three hundred pounds a month for it is money you could spend on the car instead. Buying attention your car does not need is as wasteful as buying too little.
Three things, and only one of them is obvious.
Ask what relative humidity the building holds, and whether it is monitored or assumed. An operator who controls it will give you a figure without hesitating. An operator who says climate controlled and cannot produce a number is describing a heater.
Water condenses on any surface colder than the dew point of the air around it, and dew point is set by just two things, temperature and relative humidity. It is arithmetic rather than opinion, and you can check it in half a minute.
Read the fifteen degree row. In an uncontrolled building on a damp day at eighty percent, anything on the car colder than 11.6 degrees is wet. Hold that building at fifty percent and the threshold falls to 4.7 degrees, which is nearly seven degrees of headroom. At ten degrees and fifty percent the dew point is zero, so the car essentially cannot sweat unless the building is freezing.
This matters more than it sounds, because a car is a large mass of metal and metal lags air temperature. After a cold night, when milder damp air arrives in the morning, your car is the coldest object in the building and the first thing the moisture finds. It condenses on the discs, the underside, inside the exhaust, on the chrome and on every fastener. All the places you will not look until something has seized.
Storage is sold by the month but delivered by the square foot, so convert before you compare. Allow about a hundred and thirty square feet for a car with room to work around it.
Which makes the real question clear. You are not paying for space, because the space is much the same. You are paying for the air in it and the hands that go near the car.
We do not publish a rate, and having spent this article explaining why fast quotes are worth questioning, it would be poor form not to say why.
Our own process answers it. The fourth step is a pre storage inspection covering general condition, tyre tread and pressure, fluids and battery health. The fifth is coming back to you with what we found and a quote for anything that needs doing. A process that produces a quote after inspecting the car cannot produce a price before seeing it. That is a matter of sequence rather than policy.
What we can tell you is exactly what moves the figure, so you can place yourself on the scale above before you ring anybody.
Henry's Car Barn has stored cars and managed collections since 1984. Whatever the figure comes to, it covers a fully dehumidified building, a full inspection on arrival, a photographic record of how the car came in, a twenty four hour controlled air dry, brakes cycled before storage rather than after, a soft breathable cover, a battery conditioner throughout, and the car stored with the handbrake off and the window slightly ajar so nothing seizes or goes stale. The site sits behind a mile long private drive and electronic gates with number plate recognition, monitored around the clock, with CCTV across the barns and motion sensors inside them.
Tell us what the car is, roughly how long, and where it is now. If it does not need any of this, we will tell you that instead.
