How much does it cost to store the contents of a 2-bed home?

For the ~14 m³ of storable overflow a typical 2-bed home generates, commercial self-storage ranges from about €138/month (Cork) to €235/month (Amsterdam) across the cities modelled. Peer-to-peer space on Packhood’s reference rates is roughly half that. Figures are estimates from public rate cards; the marketplace is pre-launch.

Which city is most expensive for home storage?

Of the six cities modelled, Amsterdam has the highest commercial self-storage cost for the reference volume, followed by London. The widest peer-to-peer saving in absolute terms is therefore also in those cities.

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Packhood Research · Open data · CC-BY 4.0 · Q2 2026

The Cost of Storing the Average Home: IE / UK / NL edition

If you had to store everything a typical two-bed home can’t fit, what would it cost? Packhood Research prices a constant ~14 m³ of storable overflow — the most-quoted self-storage unit size — at commercial self-storage rates versus peer-to-peer rates across six cities in Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. Holding the volume fixed isolates the price gap between the two ways of storing the same stuff.

The finding: Storing a typical home’s ~14 m³ of overflow costs up to €235/month at commercial self-storage — peer-to-peer space cuts that by roughly half.

Published 2026-06-01 · Free to reuse with attribution

£268/momost expensive commercial rate for ~14 m³ (London)

£1,776/yrsaved with peer-to-peer in London — the widest gap

14 m³storable overflow modelled for a typical 2-bed home

About these numbers: Packhood is a new marketplace, so this study contains estimates composited from real public sources — not realised booking data. Peer-to-peer figures are Packhood’s published reference rate card; commercial, rent and dwelling figures are drawn from the public sources named below. See the shared methodology and the limitations on this page before citing.

Press angle Storing the overflow of an average 2-bed home costs the most in Amsterdam and London at commercial self-storage rates — and peer-to-peer space is the single biggest lever a household has to cut that hidden cost, by around half.

Monthly cost to store ~14 m³ of home overflow: commercial self-storage vs Packhood peer-to-peer

City	Overflow	Commercial /mo	Packhood /mo	Saving /mo	Saving %	Saving /yr
Dublin (IE)	14 m³	€220	€95	€125	57%	€1,500
Cork (IE)	14 m³	€175	€78	€97	55%	€1,164
London (UK)	14 m³	£268	£120	£148	55%	£1,776
Manchester (UK)	14 m³	£178	£85	£93	52%	£1,116
Amsterdam (NL)	14 m³	€235	€105	€130	55%	€1,560
Rotterdam (NL)	14 m³	€185	€86	€99	54%	€1,188

Commercial self-storage Packhood peer-to-peer

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This dataset is open under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). Reuse it in articles, charts or research — just credit Packhood Research and link back.

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A permanent DOI for this dataset is being registered with Zenodo — until then, cite the URL below.

Methodology

We model a typical two-bed home as generating ~14 m³ of storable overflow — the most-quoted commercial self-storage unit size (a 50 sq ft unit) — and hold that volume constant across all six cities so the comparison isolates price rather than dwelling size. For each city we take the commercial self-storage monthly price for that reference unit (midpoint of the public operator rate-card range) and the Packhood peer-to-peer monthly reference price for the equivalent volume, both from the State of Storage benchmark dataset. The saving is the simple difference. Dwelling-size context is drawn from CSO Census 2022 (IE), ONS Census 2021 (UK) and CBS (NL); because those offices do not publish a single agreed "overflow volume", the 14 m³ figure is an explicit modelling assumption, not an official statistic.

Full shared method (sampling, normalisation, audit): packhood.com/state-of-storage/methodology.

Limitations

Pre-launch: the Packhood figure is a reference list price, not realised booking data.
Overflow volume (14 m³) is a fixed modelling assumption applied to every city. Real overflow varies by household, dwelling size and how much is decluttered; CSO/ONS/CBS publish floor areas but not a storable-overflow figure.
Holding volume constant means city differences reflect price only, not the genuinely larger/smaller dwellings in each market.
Commercial prices are rate-card midpoints sampled Q2 2026; promotional "first 4 weeks" pricing and branch-level variation are not reflected.

Sources

State of Storage price index (commercial vs P2P per-city rates) & methodology
CSO Census 2022 — dwelling type & floor area (Ireland) ↗
ONS Census 2021 — dwellings & floor space (UK) ↗
CBS — housing stock & dwelling characteristics (Netherlands) ↗
Commercial rate cards: Big Yellow, Safestore, Shurgard, Lok’nStore (UK); Shurgard, City Box (NL); leading IE operators

Questions journalists ask

How much does it cost to store the contents of a 2-bed home?: For the ~14 m³ of storable overflow a typical 2-bed home generates, commercial self-storage ranges from about €138/month (Cork) to €235/month (Amsterdam) across the cities modelled. Peer-to-peer space on Packhood’s reference rates is roughly half that. Figures are estimates from public rate cards; the marketplace is pre-launch.
Which city is most expensive for home storage?: Of the six cities modelled, Amsterdam has the highest commercial self-storage cost for the reference volume, followed by London. The widest peer-to-peer saving in absolute terms is therefore also in those cities.

Cite this study

For journalists, researchers and bloggers. Licensed CC-BY 4.0 — reuse freely with credit.

Packhood Research, "The Cost of Storing the Average Home" (Q2 2026), packhood.com/research/cost-of-storing-average-home. Released under CC-BY 4.0.

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Questions, a custom cut of the data, or an interview? Email press@packhood.com — we reply within 4 hours on weekdays.