What does it cost to travel around Australia in a caravan? This is probably the number one question asked, quickly followed by “will I still be married afterwards?”
Difficult questions to answer, when everybody has different expectations and budgets. We can only give our experience so far.
We started off on our travels in August 2024. Initially staying in Brisbane for 2 weeks while we got things tidied up, then heading north as far as Townsville, then all the way south to Millicent in South Australia.
5 months, and a few lessons have been learnt along the way.
Money
The number 1 question everybody seems to want to know is how much does it cost to travel around Australia. Well for us it has cost us this much, lets break it down.
This does not include insurance (car & caravan), or our storage fees. In 2025, this is looking to be about 10K combined.
Fuel
This is another favourite, how much fuel does it take to travel around?
| Total Klm | 11,539 Km |
| Total Cost | $4,604.58 |
| Average L/100km | 20.01 L/100 |
| Avg cost/tank | $124.45 |
Note: this is a combined towing/not towing fuel figure.
This is what I expected, I did a lot of research about this, since we are driving a 5.6L V8 petrol Nissan Patrol, so before purchasing the vehicle a lot of things were looked at, safety, reliability, off-roading, towing. The conclusion I came to, it doesn’t matter what you drive, if your GCM is about 6+ Tonnes, your fuel consumption will be about this figure.
Unusual expenses
- When back in Brisbane, we bought more accessories for the caravan and car, this was over $1000.
- We had a wedding to attend, which involved us staying at an expensive caravan park (Over $110/night), plus because we were part of a group, there was plenty of eating out and drinking.
- We bought a generator, it became obvious that you cannot always rely on the sun, and new portable solar panels, as the ones we had failed.
- We bought a smart TV, as the one that came with the caravan was not smart.
- Both of us had some medical issues, which involved CT scans, MRI’s and specialist doctors.
Summary
Now that we have been in the caravan for 5 months, I think it is safe to say we have most things that we need. Do we want more stuff, yes, but that will always be the case, every where you go you will always find new stuff to buy.
So unless stuff breaks, we should be able to travel a bit cheaper in 2025. Hopefully.
Average/month = $6,300 or 1,600/week
We hope 2025 can be a bit cheaper. At this rate we will run out of money in a few years time. ☹️
Plans going forward
We need to get our expenses below $5.000/month. So to achieve this we are going to try –
- More free camps – caravan parks can be expensive, and now that we have a generator, we should be able to stay off grid longer.
- Caravan park discounts– take advantage of the special deals that come around.
- Less eating out/takeaways – This is getting expensive, for us it starts at $50 and can get quite easily to over $100. That’s almost a weeks groceries!
There you have it, we are very lucky to be able to do this at this time in our lives, but it will be a shame if we have to stop due to lack of money.
As always thoughts and comments below.
