How Much Does It Cost To Build a Tiny House?

There’s no doubt, tiny houses are hugely popular not only because they’re cute (sleeping lofts!) and environmentally friendly (composting toilets!), but also because they’re less expensive to maintain. In fact, the desire for a more cost-effective, simple homestead might be driving you to consider building your own tiny home.

But how much does it really cost to build a tiny home, compared with a traditional home?

Recently, Home Depot decided to help people fulfill their tiny house dreams by selling home kits for $50,000. Don’t be too mindblown by the price point, though. Other amenities and features must be added (and purchased additionally) for the house to be complete, like doors, windows, electrical and plumbing systems, and finishes.

If your heart is set on joining the tiny-house movement, here’s how much it’ll cost you.

How much does it cost to build a tiny house?

Teri Page, aka Homestead Honey, who built a 348-square-foot house in Missouri and blogs about tiny-house construction costs, estimates that the average payout for a 200-square-foot home runs from $25,000 to $35,000. For comparison, the medium price of building a new home is $292,000, and a brand-new RV starts at around $10,000.

That said, how much it costs to build a tiny home can vary widely beyond that ballpark figure, and it’s not always about square footage. Teri Page’s tiny home cost only $8,270 to build. But in her tiny house community, the neighbor’s even tinier 120-square-foot house cost more than double that amount, at a total cost of $21,200. Page breaks down the tiny house cost line items to consider, which account for the price fluctuation:

• Permits: The fee for local building permits can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands to build a tiny home. Check out what permits are required to build a tiny house under the building codes where you live, to get a sense of how much they’ll set you back—and even whether it’s legal to keep a tiny house on your property.
• Materials: Decide if you’re going to use new or recycled materials as a tiny home builder. “The quality of your components—a granite countertop vs. a used counter from the Habitat ReStore—can be the difference of several hundred dollars,” says Page. She spent $7,800 on a combination of new and secondhand items, like lumber, siding, windows, and doors. Whether your tiny home will also be a mobile home with wheels will impact its price as well.
• Labor: Determining whether you’re building a do-it-yourself tiny home (Godspeed!) or hiring laborers, as many people do, can greatly influence a tiny home’s overall price tag. Page’s husband did the bulk of the work on their house, eliminating builder labor costs. Her neighbor’s dwelling took 1,565 hours to build, 465 of which was hired out at $15 an hour, for a tiny house cost total of $7,000.
• Insulation: This is often a huge, expensive line item in tiny-home building; one tiny-house owner spent $1,500 to insulate 200 square feet. But the initial outlay on full-size insulation becomes cost-effective when it comes to slashed heating and cooling costs.
• Electricity and plumbing: Based on estimates, owners of tiny homes may spend around $1,000 on plumbing and $300 on wiring, but this cost depends on whether you’ll be living on or off the grid. Many tiny houses are off-grid, with eco-friendly composting toilets—popular in RVs—or are solar-powered with no connection to main sewer or water lines for the appliances. If you’re going off-grid, you’ll pay around $3,500 for energy-efficient roofing solar panels.

How to lower the cost of a tiny house

“If someone is willing to beg and borrow, and use the internet to do the work themselves, the cost could be quite minimal,” says Eclipse Tiny Cottages founder Justin Draplin. “If you were to find someone that does remodeling, they might be getting rid of cabinet or windows or other items that can be repurposed for your tiny home.”

Draplin adds that if saving money is your ultimate priority, a tiny house on wheels will cost less than one with a foundation, since “moving dirt” will involve not only owning the land it’s on, but pulling permits and getting inspections. By contrast, a tiny house on a trailer does not need to adhere to such strict building requirements, and only need to adhere to the safety standards required for a recreational vehicle or RV.

Not so handy? Try tiny-house kits

If you’re worried you don’t have the DIY chops to construct a tiny home from scratch, you can also buy a tiny-house kit from a builder, which comes with instructions and pre-built materials, or some variation thereof, to keep your floundering to a minimum. Just keep in mind tiny houses don’t always come with tiny costs.

Tiny-house kits with sleeping lofts and built-ins are also sold to suit varying levels of ability. At place like Tumbleweed Tiny Houses or Tiny Living by 84 Lumber, for instance, you can buy a bare-bones DIY kit for $6,884, which comes with tiny-house plans, blueprints, a customized trailer on which to build, and a list of materials to buy. Or for $19,884, you can get the semi-DIY version, which comes with the shell of the house on top of a trailer like an RV, complete with doors, windows, sheathing, and a shower, leaving to you just the exterior and interior finishing touches—for instance, what type of appliances to install.

Both DIY tiny home kits definitely beat buying the same model move-in ready for $49,884 from a tiny-house builder, but you should weigh carefully whether you’re biting off more than you can chew with time-consuming work—because a tiny home is, after all, still a new home.