Methodology and independence

Every price here is an online rate: what an operator charges when you reserve through its own website. That is usually lower than the walk-in price and is the number most renters actually pay. We read it from the operator's own public pages, not from aggregator feeds, broker rate cards, or figures supplied by a marketing team. We are not quoted these prices and we do not negotiate them.

If a facility publishes no price, it appears in the directory marked "Call for price" rather than with a number we would have to invent. We do not estimate.

We track storage facilities in 20 U.S. cities and 6 standard unit sizes, from a 5x5 up to a 10x30. That is 16453 individually priced units in total. Priced inventory comes from four large national operators: Public Storage, Extra Space (which now includes Life Storage locations), CubeSmart, and U-Haul. Independent, locally owned facilities are listed alongside them where we can confirm they exist, but most don't publish rates online.

It depends on the operator. We read each operator's own city results and follow its pagination where it has any, which for most operators means we hold every location they list in that city. One operator caps its city results at 120 locations, so in the largest metros we hold 120 of its facilities rather than all of them. Independent facilities are only the ones we could confirm separately, and most of those publish no price at all.

So a city page here is close to the full picture in most cities and short of it in the biggest ones. The number of facilities we hold for an operator says nothing about how many it actually runs there, and it should never be read as market share.

Rates are collected once a week, and every city page prints the date its prices were last checked. A price we can't confirm is recent gets labeled as approximate instead of being shown as current, and a facility that disappears from an operator's site across repeated collection runs is dropped rather than left sitting here with a stale number.

National medians are aggregates across every facility we track, so they carry no single collection date and we don't claim one for them; the per-city tables do carry a date, and it is printed above them. We would rather show you an old price marked old than a guess that looks fresh.

Right now, it doesn't. Storage by Price takes no affiliate commissions, no lead fees, and no payment from operators for placement or ranking. No operator can pay to appear here or to appear higher. If that ever changes, this page will say so, and the change will be disclosed on the pages it affects.

• No lead capture. There is no quote form on this site, no account to create, and no field that sends your number to an operator or a call centre.
• No paid placement. Ranking is by price or size, never by payment, and there is no tier an operator can buy.
• No bookings. Every listing links out to the operator; the reservation happens on their site, under their terms.
• No user reviews. A rating shown next to a facility comes from the operator's own listing, or for independent facilities from their Google Maps listing, and is passed through as-is.