Budget for Travelling Australia in a caravan

When we took off in 2021, our budget looked a little different! Believe it or not, we were living off $400 a week!! Now, things have changed in 2023 and the cost of fuel alone is just about half our budget. So we thought it was time to update our budget and take a look at what it costs in 2023 to travel Australia.

We want to base this off an ordinary week on the road. We tend to travel slow & not do many kilometres in a week, so this helps keeps our fuel costs down. We recently did a Cape York trip where we were doing big kilometres and this obviously meant we spent A LOT more on fuel. We will pop the budget for that trip below so you can see what it was like, you also have to take into consideration vehicle & caravan repairs when you are doing a hard trip like that.

Main costs on the road:

1. Fuel
2. Groceries
3. Accomodation
4. Eating out
5. Experiences
6. Repairs & Maintenance
7. Phone & Internet

Fuel

Fuel is currently sitting at $2-$2.30 a litre for Diesel. The rise in Diesel costs has definitely affected our budget & is something we have had to budget more for now. In all honesty, it has probably slowed us down a bit but it also helps that we are on the East Coast where distances to travel between each destination are nothing like it was in Western Australia. Here, we travel 30 minutes down the road whereas in WA it was 1.5 hours usually haha

We typically put around $200-$300 in every fortnight. So usually we are spending around $150 a week on fuel.

Groceries

We usually will do a big shop once a fortnight for around $100 and then during the week we will pop to the shop and spend at least $50-60. So we are probably spending $100 a week on groceries.

Check out our Camp Cooking eBook below for some of our favourite go-to recipes on the road:

Check out our TikTok where we share some cheap recipe ideas:

Accomodation

This is one that will vary every single week depending on what free camps are available. We have set ourselves up to be able to free camp as much as possible. The only time we will check in to a caravan park is when we need to do our laundry.

Costs of caravan parks: $50-60 Powered Site & $30-40 Unpowered Site

Low-cost camps: $10-20 a night

We can basically estimate that we only spend around $50 a week on accommodation as the majority of the time we are free camping, so this evens itself out.

Eating out

We don’t really treat ourselves to fancy dinners out, but we definitely have a soft spot for KFC Honestly, we’ll usually get takeaway once a week so we are looking at $20 a week on takeaway. Maybe once a month we will go out for a sit-down meal which is usually $60.

So let’s say $35 a week on eating out.

Experiences

This is another one that depends on your travels & what you want to do! For us, we don’t tend to spend much on experiences and try do a lot of free activities to save money. Of course, we have bucket list activities that we will splurge on such as swimming with whale sharks in Exmouth (we 100% recommend doing this!!) or snorkelling the Great Barrier Reef eventually! Usually, these are expensive experiences, the shark swim was $400 each!! So maybe if you budget around $50 a week, that will give you money on the side for whenever something comes up that you want to do. If you know you have lots of things like this that you want to do, then you might want to budget a little more.

Repairs and Maintenance

We service our car every 5000km which usually costs around $200-250. This is another one that depends on how many kms you are travelling or what kind of trips you are on. When we did Cape York we gave the car a little more love with servicing to make sure it was in good condition.

Repairs: This one is really tough to estimate! We are really fortunate to not have had much go wrong and really have only spent around $1000 a year on repairs. This could come down to servicing the car every 5000km and looking after our gear. A blown tyre is usually the most common repair you’ll get on the road. We always carry a Tyre Repair kit with us so that we can repair it and get more kms out of it before it needs replacing. We have the iCheck Tyre Pressure Monitoring System to monitor our tyres every day and then also their repair kit. Our discount code is SKT10 with iCheck for 10% off.

Phone and Internet

We are both with Telstra and pay $68 a month each. Thats $136 a month and $34 a week. We have gone nearly 2 years with no internet provider and we honestly think it is 100% doable without internet. We have run our small business all by using our phones hotspots. Now, there was times where we needed internet and there was none available or the service was too poor to work from it. We also make sure that we check the coverage in most campsites to make sure we will be able to work from there. We have recently made the investment to get Starlink to make running our business on the road easier. This costs $175 a month ($43.75 a week) and can be paused when you are not using it. This is great for us as if we are staying in the city and don’t need the upgraded internet and we can work from our phones hotspot.

Breakdown of costs per week:

1. Fuel: $150
2. Groceries: $100
3. Accomodation: $50
4. Eating out: $35
5. Experiences: $50
6. Phones: $34
7. Internet: $43.75
8. Maintenance: $30
9. Repairs: $20 (based off $1000 a year)

Average: $512.75

Remember this is an average week on the road where we are not doing many kilometres. If we are travelling long distances or have to make it somewhere for a certain date, the fuel cost is a lot higher than this. When you are planning your budget you need to take into consideration what kind of kilometres you will travel each week.