How to Travel Australia by Caravan on a Budget
How do we afford to travel? It’s the question we probably get asked the most. Although I would love to answer some in some elaborate and exciting way, the truth is, well, rather boring!
We have a budget, we track what we spend, and we cut costs wherever possible. We also live a somewhat minimalistic lifestyle and prefer experiences over things. This is our personal choice, but I’ll let you know a bit more about what we do below.
From spending months on the road, there are two things that dominate a caravan trip budget: fuel and accommodation. Both are more controllable than most people realise. If you can get those two right, the rest of the budget is manageable. If you can’t, even reasonable spending everywhere else won’t save the trip.
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What a Caravan Trip Actually Costs — The Real Numbers
A realistic lower-end weekly budget for a family of four doing a moderate trip — some caravan parks, some free camps, cooking most meals, a few paid activities can come to roughly $900–$1,100 per week. Over three months, that’s $12,000–$14,000. Over six months, it doubles.
If you want to work out your own daily number instead of using ours, we break down exactly how in Australian Caravan Budget: How to Work Out Your Real Daily Travel Number.
Fuel and food together are consistently more than half the weekly spend. Accommodation is the most controllable category. Activities are the easiest to cut without impacting the experience.
Let’s go through each one and how we came to those figures.
Fuel 2026 Update!
When you’re towing at highway speed, most setups burn between 16 and 22 litres per 100km. At $3.00/L, that’s around $60 per 100km. A 300km driving day costs you $180 in fuel before you’ve bought anything else.
The single biggest thing you can do to reduce your fuel spend is drive less and drive slower and calmer. Both of those things are free to implement.
Speeding?
The aerodynamic drag on a van increases exponentially with speed. The difference between 90km/h and 110km/h isn’t only the 20km/h, it’s also a huge increase in fuel. Over a 300km per day that could be quite a bit of saving. If you’re not sure, test the theory! Fill your tank to full, then drive how you would normally drive, fill up again and see how much went in. Then repeat driving slighly slower, see what happens.
You’re on holidays anyway, no point in rushing! Of course, it goes without saying, drive safely – if you need to be on the speed limit, then do so, but try to drive calmly to reduce that fuel burn.
Want an easy way to work out your fuel consumption? There’s a section in our budget planner guide to help.
Drive fewer days.
Three driving days per week instead of five, 150km per day instead of 300, changes your fuel spend dramatically. The maths on this is in the Slow Travel Guide — but the short version is that slow travel can cut your fuel bill by 60–70% while making the trip better in every other way. Revise your itinerary to fit your budget. Do you need to travel as far? Plan to see more in the area you’re in.
If it comes to not going or driving less, I would choose to drive less anyday!
Check your tyre pressures every single driving day.
Under-inflated tyres increase rolling resistance. Takes 2 minutes, costs nothing. Use the manufacturer’s towing pressures, not the standard pressures.
Grab yourself a good quality tire pressure gauge like this one from Caravan RV Camping to get those pressures correct/
Watch your weight.
A full 200L water tank weighs 200kg. A van full of gear you haven’t touched in a month costs you fuel every kilometre. Weigh your van, cull what you don’t use, and fill water tanks to what you need. If you’re travelling to a caravan park, you don’t need them full.
Send home what you don’t need to use. On our big lap, we sent home BBQs, heavy tools and more to save on the weight.
Use Apps to find the cheap fuel
Prices vary enormously — sometimes $0.50+/L difference between neighbouring towns. In remote areas, fill to the brim at the last affordable servo. We use PetrolSpy and have found it useful. If you have other recommendations, jump onto our Facebook page to have a chat, let’s share the info to get the costs down!
Whenever you’re going to a critical point for fuel, such as long distances across the Nullabor, don’t be afraid to ring ahead to confirm if they have fuel. Take spare Jerrys if you need.
Accommodation — Free Camping Changes Everything
The difference between spending every night at a caravan park and mostly free camping is roughly $400 per week for a family of four. Over a 10-week trip, that’s $4,000. Over three months, it’s over $6,000.
Camps Australia Wide is the tool that makes this possible. It’s the most comprehensive and reliable resource for finding free and low-cost campsites in Australia. We use it every single day on the road. You can also use Wikicamps, although we have had more success with Camps Australia Wide.
The strategy: use caravan parks deliberately. We use them for battery recharge, water top-up, and washing and a good shower! One powered night every 5–7 days is usually enough if your solar setup is adequate. The rest of the time, free camp or visit low cost campsites.
The other trick with caravan parks is to check their websites for good deals. Usually mid week is cheaper, and sometimes they have pay for 2 stay 3 night options. Use the big name resorts as luxury stays. The smaller, out of the way parks are usually cheaper, quieter and still have good amenities.
When you do free camp, stay 3–5 nights rather than 1. The overhead of arriving and setting up is the same whether you stay one night or five. Multiple nights at a good free camp brings your cost-per-night down to zero and your quality-of-experience up significantly.
Food — Where Budgets Quietly Blow Out, Easily!
Food is where most families lose money they don’t notice losing. Not in dramatic moments but in the servo coffee every morning, the tourist town IGA where everything costs 30% more, the takeaway lunch because cooking felt like too much work.
A few things that make a real difference:
Stock up at big supermarkets before you hit tourist areas or remote stretches. Prices at regional Woolworths and Coles are comparable to metro. The small IGA in a tourist town is not. Yes, always support the locals, but you can choose when and where to do that.
If you can’t live without your coffee, then think about adding a coffee machine to your van. If this seems too extravagant, we use our little stove-top coffee maker. I’m not sure what it is called, but it’s like this one. I make a double batch in the morning and put one coffee in a travel mug, then it’s ready to go for morning tea.
Cook properly. A caravan has a full kitchen — use it. Slow cooker meals, one-pot dinners, BBQ nights. These cost a fraction of takeaway and are usually better. Save the eating-out for once a week somewhere actually good. This is also where caravan parks come in handy. Cook in batches and freeze for the nights you can’t be stuffed cooking.
The Free Stuff Is Often the Best
Activities are the easiest budget category to cut, partly because the best experiences in Australia are genuinely free.
Every beach. Most walking tracks. Wildflowers. Kangaroos. Stargazing in a good free camp. Community markets. Libraries in every regional town (free internet, air conditioning, local knowledge). Wildlife that simply appears.
Save the paid experiences for the ones that genuinely can’t be replicated independently an Aboriginal cultural tour, a reef snorkel with a guide, a cave system. Spend deliberately on a few excellent experiences rather than trickling money away on mediocre attractions.
Budget It Before You Leave
The travellers we’ve met who ran out of money mid-trip almost always had the same thing in common: they had a rough sense of costs but hadn’t actually put numbers to it before leaving. There are some sneaky ones that can creep in…
Build a real budget. Fuel first — it’s the biggest number. Then, accommodation based on your planned mix of parks and free camps. Then food. Then a maintenance buffer — tyres wear, things break, services come due. Then a back-home costs calculation if you still have a mortgage or rent to pay.
For the full worked numbers, the fuel saving calculators, and fill-in worksheets for your own trip — grab the deep-dive guide in our shop.
