What this site is built on.
Fit judgements are geometry
A 5×5 is 25 square feet of floor and, at the 8 ft ceiling standard across the industry, 200 cubic feet. Every entry on /what-fits/ and every item in the floorplan compares a published item dimension against that envelope. A queen mattress is 60 by 80 inches. A banker box is 15 by 12 by 10. A road motorcycle is 7 ft to 7 ft 6 in long, and the diagonal of the floor is 7 ft 1 in, which is why a bike does not go in at any angle. None of that needs a vendor to tell us and none of it changes when a price changes.
The one price series we use
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index for miniwarehouse and self-storage unit operators, series PCU531130531130, NAICS 531130. Free, public, monthly, and running since December 2003. We retrieve it through the St. Louis Fed API and report it as an index, because that is what it is. We do not convert it into a dollar rate for a 5×5, because that would need a per-square-foot assumption we would be making up. Full read-out on /national/.
What we do not do
- We do not fetch operator booking or listing pages, and we do not republish rates taken from them.
- We do not republish figures from subscription industry research products.
- We do not publish a per-metro or per-state rate table. There is no free primary source for one.
- We do not run a lead form, a quote request or a “find a unit” redirect, and we take no affiliate revenue.
Conflicts of interest
5x5storage.com carries no affiliate links, no referral codes, no vendor sponsorship and no paid placement. Digital Signet owns and funds the site.
Corrections
The index figures are checkable against the series page linked on /national/, and the fit arithmetic is checkable with a tape measure. If something here is wrong: [email protected].