How To Start A Campground Business

Before you buy a single shovel, figure out what kind of campground you are actually building

The people who lose money on this usually skip the thinking part and go straight to dirt work. I watched a guy in upstate New York pour $400,000 into clearing land and grading tent sites before he realized his zoning only allowed seasonal recreational use, not permanent occupancy. The county would not issue a single camping permit. He ended up selling the land at a loss six months later. This happens more often than you would expect. There are three main types here, and they require completely different regulatory paths and capital models. A dispersed backcountry site requires almost no infrastructure and lives on a thin margin. A full hookup RV park with water, sewer, and electric at every pad needs commercial-grade utilities, fire lanes, ADA compliance, and probably a septic system that costs more than the roads. Then there is the middle ground, the family campground with some pull-through sites and a central bathhouse. That is where most people think they want to be, but it is also the most operationally brutal. How To Start A Campground Business starts with knowing which of these three buckets your property actually fits into, because the rest of the process branches entirely from that answer. The zoning conversation should happen before you even think about buying anything. Call your county planning department and ask specifically about conditional use permits for transient lodging. Get it in writing. Verbal assurances from a friendly planner mean nothing when a formal application gets reviewed by the full board.

How To Start A Campground Business: the site evaluation most people get wrong

Water access is the first hard filter. If you do not have municipal water or a permitted well that can handle simultaneous flow to every site plus the bathhouse, you need to budget for a storage tank and a booster pump system. One well I worked with in Vermont could only deliver four gallons per minute under load. That sounds fine until you realize eight sites running shower and toilet flush at the same time need roughly twelve gallons per minute minimum. The client ended up drilling a second well and installing a sixty-thousand-gallon cistern. It set the project back fourteen weeks. Soil percolation is the second filter that bites people. You need a perc test or at minimum a soils report from a licensed engineer if the county requires it. Clay-heavy soil that fails a standard perc test cannot support a conventional septic system for a bathhouse. I had a property in central Pennsylvania where the engineer recommended an aerobic treatment unit instead of a traditional leach field. The ATU cost eighty-five thousand dollars installed and required quarterly maintenance contracts. Without it, the county would not approve the occupancy permit. That one decision turned a marginal project into a losing one. Access road width matters more than people expect. Fire departments will not issue a certificate of occupancy if their engine cannot turn around on your entrance road. That usually means a turnaround pad at least sixty feet in diameter at the end of any dead-end spur. Road grade should not exceed ten percent for the length of any site access. A lot of steep hillside properties look cheap until you add in retaining walls and cut-and-fill earthwork.

Financial structure and the numbers that actually matter

Break out your costs into three buckets: land, infrastructure, and operations. Land varies wildly. I have seen rural acreage go for eighteen thousand dollars an acre in depressed markets and two hundred thousand in places within an hour of a popular state park. Infrastructure is where the real numbers live. A single full-hookup RV pad with underground utilities typically runs between twelve and twenty-five thousand dollars to install depending on terrain and distance to the main line. Tents sites with just a level pad and a fire ring might cost two to four thousand each if you are doing it yourself or with seasonal crew. Revenue modeling is where most beginners overestimate. Do not price off what Airbnb or Hipcamp charges. Those platforms take fourteen percent of every booking plus payment processing fees. If you are doing direct bookings you avoid that, but you also need to build a marketing funnel that does not exist on day one. A realistic occupancy target for year one in a non-tourist-corridor location is forty to fifty percent during peak season, with November through March nearly dead unless you have heated facilities or a specific draw like hot springs access. My rule of thumb is that you need at least six months of operating reserves after the last dollar is spent on construction. That covers payroll, insurance, utility deposits, and the inevitable unexpected repair. I had a client in Ohio who opened with zero reserve because he financed everything. His first winter heater failed on site four, and he had to take a personal loan at twenty-two percent interest to fix it while revenue was flat. He sold the park eighteen months later.

Permitting and the hidden timeline

The permitting timeline is the thing nobody tells you about until they are stuck. In my experience, a straightforward conditional use permit in a rural county takes between sixty and one hundred twenty days from application to approval. If the site is near wetlands, a historic district, or a protected watershed, add six to twelve months for environmental review. I have a folder full of correspondence from a project in northern Maine where the state DEP required a wetland delineation study before they would even accept the zoning application. That study alone took four months and cost eleven thousand dollars. Building permits come after zoning is cleared. You will need site plan approval showing road layout, utility routing, setbacks from property lines and water bodies, and a stormwater management plan. If your county uses a model code, expectplan review comments that require redesign. I once spent three weeks revising a site plan because the reviewer wanted fire hydrants every three hundred feet along the access road, which would have required a pressurized water system I did not have budgeted for. We ended up negotiating a reduced hydrant spacing with an approved alternative suppression strategy using onboard tanks on the fire department truck. Health department approval is a separate track from building. They care about potable water quality, wastewater discharge, food service if you run a store or laundry, and pest control. Some counties require a health inspector walkthrough before the first guest checks in. Budget time for that.

Construction phase: what goes right and what goes wrong

Grading and utilities first. Roads, then water mains, then sewer or septic, then electrical conduit. Do not backfill until every inspection is signed off. I learned that the hard way on a project where we backfilled a sewer line before the pressure test passed. The inspector caught it during a routine visit, and we spent three days breaking open concrete that had already cured to expose the faulty joint. That single mistake cost about eighteen thousand dollars in rework and delayed the project by nine days. Site preparation varies by terrain. Clear-cutting everything looks clean on paper but creates massive erosion problems in the first rain event. Keep existing tree cover where possible, especially along drainage swales. The cost of replacing a mature oak is not just the tree, it is the root ball, the transport, and the two-year establishment period during which the site loses value. Pad construction for RV sites should include a compacted gravel base at least four inches thick with a geotextile fabric underneath if the native soil is sandy or loamy. Without the fabric, your gravel bed turns to mud within two seasons. I replaced a client's gravel pads in New Hampshire after year two and found the fabric had completely degraded into the sand below. We switched to a heavier weight nonwoven fabric and the problem stopped.

Operations and the details that determine whether you stay open

Insurance is not something you shop for once. Your premium will depend on location, number of sites, amenities, and claims history. A basic general liability policy for a small campground in a low-risk area runs between four and eight thousand dollars annually. Add workers compensation if you have any employees beyond yourself, and that goes up quickly. One employee in most states pushes annual premiums past fifteen thousand combined. I worked with a park in Idaho that dropped their coverage to save money after year one. A guest slipped on an unmarked step during a rain event and filed a lawsuit. The settlement exceeded their entire annual revenue for that year. Staffing depends on your model. A bare-bones ten-site campground with no staff on site can sometimes run on a remote check-in system and a contracted monthly maintenance visit. That works if your guests are experienced campers who do not need hand-holding. As soon as you add families with young children, a bathhouse, or dump station demand, you need someone physically present during peak hours. A single on-site manager working seventy-hour weeks will burn out in the first summer unless you rotate weekend coverage with a seasonal hire. Booking software matters more than people realize. I have used CampgroundBnB, Campsites.com, and a few proprietary systems. The ones that charge per-booking fees eat directly into your margin. A system that charges a flat monthly fee becomes cheaper once you hit roughly fifteen to twenty reservations per month, depending on the pricing tier. Factor this into your revenue model from the start. A twenty percent fee on every booking is the difference between profitability and barely staying afloat at lower occupancy.

Utility billing is another area where mistakes compound. If you offer submetered utilities, you need a system that reads individual meters and allocates charges accurately. Meter reading errors are inevitable, so build in a reconciliation process. I once worked with a park that forgot to read five water meters for an entire quarter. When they finally caught it, they had to back-bill guests for roughly double their normal usage. Three guests disputed the charges, two filed complaints with the state attorney general's consumer division, and the owner ended up absorbing the entire balance to make it go away.

Marketing and occupancy realities

You cannot rely on walk-ins anymore. Even in remote areas, most campers research and book online before they leave home. Your listing on Campspot or similar platforms needs professional-quality photos, accurate amenity descriptions, and a response time under two hours during business hours. Listings that sit unanswered for a day lose bookings to the next available option. Seasonality is a structural problem, not a temporary one. If your market is purely summer-dependent, you need to either diversify your activity offerings into fall and spring or accept lower annual revenue. I consulted with a park in the Catskills that added a dedicated leaf-peeping package with heated cabins and late-checkout flexibility. Occupancy in October jumped from fifteen percent to sixty percent within the first year. That kind of pivot requires capital for cabin upgrades, but it transforms the financial model. Review management is unavoidable. You will get bad reviews regardless of how well you run the place. A missed reservation confirmation, a noisy neighbor, a bear getting into a trash can. Respond professionally to every negative review. Do not argue, do not blame the guest publicly, and offer to take the conversation offline. A single thoughtful response to a negative review can actually improve your rating more than ten five-star reviews because prospective guests can see you take feedback seriously.

When the numbers do not work

Sometimes the land is wrong for this business regardless of how well you plan it. Steep slopes above thirty percent grade are extremely expensive to build on and create accessibility issues that alienate a large portion of your market. Properties without legal road frontage require easement negotiations that can take years. Sites in flood plains require flood insurance premiums that can exceed twenty thousand dollars annually and may face future regulatory restrictions on expansion. I passed on a deal in western North Carolina last year because the property sat in a fifty-year flood plain and the insurance quote alone destroyed the pro forma. The seller was convinced a new development would change the flood risk. It did not. The biggest mistake I see is underestimating the operational workload. This is not a passive investment. Even a well-staffed campground requires active management during every occupied season. If you are doing this as a side business while working another job, you need a reliable on-site manager before you open, not after. The guests who call at 11 PM on a Saturday night when the pump station fails do not care that you have a day job. I have seen successful campgrounds run on remarkably simple models: twelve sites, a vault toilet or small bathhouse, no electricity at some sites, and a owner who lives on-site. The complexity creep is real. Once you add a pool, a store, and a community fire pit, your insurance, staffing, and maintenance obligations multiply in ways that are hard to predict during the planning phase. Keep the initial scope smaller than you think you need. You can always add sites later. You cannot un-dig a septic trench.