How Much Does It Really Cost to Travel Australia by Caravan?

Everybody wants the one magical number: how much does it cost to travel Australia per day or per week. Anything you find on the internet isn’t going to be your number. Here’s how we actually worked out ours.

The three daily levers

There are three things that eat the majority of your travel budget: fuel, accommodation, and food.

Fuel doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. If your fuel bill is looking horrendous, you don’t have to cut the trip short, just work out a few less kilometres and find good accommodation nearby instead.

Accommodation comes down to a choice: caravan parks, or free and low-cost off-grid campsites. Our happy spot is about a week off-grid, then a caravan park mid-week. Going mid-week saves a lot of money, and it’s worth watching for buy-two-nights-get-the-third-free deals.

Food gets more expensive the more remote you get, and the range shrinks too. If you’ve got picky eaters who need particular brands, that adds up fast.

Our real number: $100 a day

We spent about $100 a day on average over 11 months on the road. Some weeks were up around $2000. Other weeks were $100 or $200.

We actually overestimated our budget for that trip, because we ended up slowing our travel right down to suit our kids, more free camps, staying in one spot longer, and the budget reflected that.

The sneaky costs nobody budgets for

• Laundry — caravan parks charge for washing machines and dryers, and the dryers can cost $15-20 a cycle for a load that comes out still damp
• Coffee stops — one family coffee run a day adds up to more than $2000 a year
• Back home costs — health insurance, ambulance cover (often state-only, worth upgrading to Australia-wide), mortgage, council rates and insurance keep going whether you’re travelling or not
• Connectivity — Starlink lets us work and homeschool on the road, but it’s genuinely expensive

Working out your own number

Set your daily number first, based on your actual travel style, not someone else’s trip. Multiply it up to weekly, monthly, annual. Add your fixed back-home costs, plus about a 10% buffer.

We’ve found from talking to other travelling families that most people underestimate their budget by 20-30%. Have an emergency fund on top of all of it too, for when the van breaks down or something unexpected happens.