How much shed space do you actually need in Dubbo?
Most people build about 30 per cent too small. Start from the gear: a car needs 15m², a double garage that actually works is 36m², a tractor with a front-end loader wants a 4m x 9m bay and 5m of clearance to lift, a 21ft caravan needs 9m of depth behind a 3.4m high door, and 5ft round bales stacked three high need a 5.5m to 6m eave. Add your gear up, add 20 per cent, then round up to the next standard bay. The estimator below turns that area into a price.
Shed size estimator for Dubbo and the Orana
Set the floor area you have worked out from your own gear, then tell it what kind of building and how tall. The area you choose is the answer to "how big"; the dollar range underneath is a 2026 indicative figure for this region, not a quote.
What this estimator assumes
- Supplied and erected, engineered to AS/NZS 1170 for the exposure you selected, with the frame, cladding, flashings and tie-downs included.
- The concrete slab is only included if you tick it, because plenty of machinery and hay sheds around Dubbo are built on compacted gravel instead.
- Footings are assumed to be sized from a site classification. On highly reactive clay the footing allowance sits at the top of the range.
- Doors: one standard roller door and one access door on an enclosed building. Tick the door extra for anything taller or wider.
- Excludes power, water, internal fit-out, mezzanines and any earthworks beyond a normal pad, unless ticked.
- Indicative 2026 figures for the Dubbo and Orana region only. Steel prices move, and so does the number.
How much room each thing actually needs
These are working allowances, which means they already include enough room to get in and out without scraping a mirror. Measure your own gear where you can: the numbers below are what we use when someone cannot.
| What you are housing | Floor area to allow | Clear height needed | The catch nobody counts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car or ute | 15 m² per vehicle, 3m x 5m | 2.4m door | A 3m bay means the car door opens into the wall. 3.3m is far better |
| Two cars, working double garage | 36 m² minimum, 45 m² to be comfortable | 2.4m door | Add 1m of depth if a bench or a fridge is going down one end |
| Caravan, 21ft | 27 m², 3m x 9m | 3.2m to 3.4m door | Measure to the top of the air conditioner, and add the drawbar and tow ball to the length |
| Boat on a trailer | 21 m², 3m x 7m | 3.0m door | The winch post and a trimmed-up outboard add close to a metre of length and height |
| Tractor with front-end loader | 36 m², 4m x 9m bay | 5m to raise the bucket inside | Measure at full lift with a bale on the forks, not parked with the loader down |
| Header with the front off | 60 m², 5m x 12m | 5.5m to 6m | The comb front on its trailer is another 12m to 14m of width, and it needs cover too |
| Round bales, 5ft | 1.5m dia x 1.2m wide each, about 120 per layer on an 18m x 12m floor | 5.5m to 6m eave for three high | Allow the telehandler boom swing above the top bale, not just the stack height |
| Workshop bench and tool storage | 24 m², 4m x 6m | 3m | A bench you can walk right around is worth two you cannot |
| Horse stable, per box | 12 m², 3.5m x 3.5m | 3m | Plus a 3m breezeway and somewhere to wash down. See American barns |
Standard modules make a shed cheaper per square metre: bays at 6m, 7.5m or 9m and lengths in 3m increments use full sheet lengths and standard portal spacings.
How to measure it properly with a tape and a phone
Twenty minutes with a tape saves you from the one mistake you cannot undo. Do this before you ask anyone for a price, and bring the numbers with you.
- Measure the machine, not the memory. Length, width and height of every vehicle and implement that has to fit. Write them down. The spec sheet on the manufacturer website is often for a different tyre or cab option than the one you actually own.
- Measure at working height. Raise the loader, put a bale on the forks, tip the tipper, stand the auger up. The number that matters is the tallest position the machine reaches inside the building, not the parked height.
- Add the accessories. Air conditioners, aerials, spotlight bars, roof racks, the outboard, the winch post. Then add 200mm of clearance on top of the total.
- Photograph everything with the tape in shot. A photo with a tape stretched across the widest point settles arguments later, and it lets us check your figures without another site visit.
- Pace out the pad, then tape it. Pacing gets you close, but a shed pegged from a pace count is a shed 400mm from the boundary you thought you had a metre from.
- Check the approach, not just the pad. Measure your gate opening, the turning circle in the yard, and the width between the house and the fence. A 15m shed is no use if the header cannot swing into it.
- Use the compass on your phone. Note which way the open front will face and where the afternoon sun and the westerly come from. Orientation is free at design stage and impossible later.
- Mark the corners with pegs and look at it. Peg the footprint and leave it for a day. It is astonishing how often a shed that looked huge on paper looks small once it is pegged out in the paddock.
The allowances to add on top
Add 1m of walk-around space on any side you need to get past a machine. Add 20 per cent to the total floor area for circulation, because a shed packed wall to wall is a shed you cannot use. Add 600mm of clearance above the tallest thing at full lift. Then round up to the next standard bay, which is usually 3m of extra length. If your budget will not carry the extra bay, take the height first and the bay second: height is the thing you can never add.
Not sure your numbers add up? We will check them on site for free
Bring your measurements and we will peg it out with you, check the access and the fall, and tell you honestly if you are building too small.
The sizing mistake that costs the most around here
Eave height, every time. A shed 500mm too low is the most expensive mistake on this page, because it cannot be fixed. You cannot raise a shed: you take it down and build another one. Every season we get asked whether a roof can be lifted so a telehandler can stack the third row of bales, and the answer is always the same. Buying an extra metre of eave at design stage typically adds 7 to 12 per cent to the frame. Discovering you needed it costs the whole building.
Door width is second. A door 300mm too narrow means a lifetime of folding mirrors in and holding your breath. Widening an opening later means an engineer checking the portal, a new lintel and patched cladding: $2,500 to $6,500, and it never looks original. Measure your widest machine, add 600mm, and make the door that wide.
Depth is third and the easiest to get wrong on paper. A 21ft caravan is not 21 feet long. With the drawbar and a bike rack it is closer to 8.5m, so it does not fit in an 8m deep shed, and a person who measured the van body rather than the whole rig finds that out on delivery day.
Do not accidentally size yourself into a development application
There is one direction where bigger genuinely costs more than the steel. Floor area, height and setback limits in the NSW planning codes decide whether your shed is exempt development, a complying development certificate or a full development application through Dubbo Regional Council, and those limits scale with the lot size and the zone. Going up one bay can flip the pathway and add weeks and $1,200 to $6,000 of process. Check the thresholds on the rural NSW shed permits page before you settle on a footprint, and if you are near a limit we will tell you at the measure.
Worked example: a 10 acre block at Wongarbon
A common Orana job. The owner has a tractor with a front-end loader, a 21ft caravan, a dual cab ute, and wants a proper workbench. Everything currently lives under a tarp or out in the weather. Here is the arithmetic, exactly the way we would do it at the kitchen table.
- Tractor with loader, 4m x 9m bay: 36 m²
- Caravan, 3m x 9m: 27 m²
- Dual cab ute, 3.3m x 6.5m: 21 m²
- Workbench and tool storage, 4m x 6m: 24 m²
- Subtotal: 108 m²
- Plus the 20 per cent circulation allowance: 130 m²
- Rounded up to a standard module, 15m x 9m: 135 m²
Height is set by the caravan, not the tractor: a 3.4m door needs about a 4.2m to 4.5m eave once you allow for the door drum. The block is treed acreage rather than open paddock, so it sits in the middle exposure band. Put those into the estimator with an enclosed farm shed or workshop, a farm-sized slab, gutters to a tank and council certification ticked, and it returns roughly $44,200 to $98,700.
That is a wide band on purpose, because the top of it assumes the dearest version of every line: the deepest footings, the biggest slab allowance and a full development application. For a job like this we would expect the real fixed quote to land in the middle, around $60,000 to $70,000 including the slab. The point of the exercise is not the dollar figure, it is that the owner now knows they need 135 square metres and a 4.5m eave, and can compare quotes that are all for the same building.
The bonus nobody plans for
That 135 square metre roof is also a water catchment. One millimetre of rain on one square metre is one litre, and Dubbo averages roughly 580mm a year, so after losses this shed collects in the order of 66,000 litres in an average year. The gutters, downpipes and tank connection cost $900 to $3,500 at build time and are a nuisance to retrofit, so decide at design stage.
When a smaller building is the right answer
We do talk people down as well as up. If the only real problem is the caravan and the boat sitting in the sun, a carport at $8,000 to $22,000 solves exactly that and a 135 square metre shed does not solve it four times better. If the gear is hay and nothing else, a tall open-front hay shed on gravel beats an enclosed building on a slab for both cost and hay quality. And if you are only ever storing implements, an open-front machinery shed is a third cheaper per square metre than the enclosed version. Size the building to the job, not to the biggest number the budget will carry.
Get your size checked and priced for your block
Send us your measurements or just a list of what has to fit, and we will come out for a free measure and send a fixed written quote, usually within a few days of the visit.
Sizing questions we get asked
How big should a double garage be in Dubbo?
How much shed do I need for a tractor and a caravan?
How high does a shed door need to be for a caravan?
How many round bales fit in a hay shed?
How much bigger than I think should I build the shed?
How much rainwater will a shed roof collect around Dubbo?
Get the size right the first time
Free on-site measure across Dubbo and the Orana, and a fixed written quote for the building you actually need.