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Self storage rate increase calculator
Estimate what an existing customer rate increase actually nets after the tenants it pushes out and the weeks their units sit empty.
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Gate code and lockout workload calculator
Add up the hours your office spends issuing codes, clearing codes, and locking out past due units, then see what that quiet work costs across a year.
Manual gate work never shows up as a line item. Nobody writes down the four minutes spent typing a new code into a panel after a move in, or the phone call from a keypad on a Sunday, or the walk down C row with an overlock and a clipboard. It arrives instead as a vague sense that the office is busy without much to show for it, and it is one of the main reasons a small facility feels like it needs more coverage than its unit count justifies.
This calculator turns that into a number. Enter your monthly move ins and move outs, how long a code change actually takes you including the walk to the panel, how many units go past due in a normal month, and how long each lockout takes to perform and record. The result is monthly hours and an annual cost at whatever you actually pay the person doing the work.
Your result
Hours per month on gate codes
3.0
Issuing codes at move in and clearing them at move out, every month.
Hours per month on lockouts
3.6
Disabling access, hanging overlocks, and recording each past due unit.
Total office hours per month
6.6
The combined gate related workload your office absorbs in a typical month.
Yearly cost of that work
$1,910
Twelve months of that workload at your loaded hourly cost.
This counts only the gate work itself, so it leaves out the reinstatement calls, the missed lockouts that let a past due tenant clear a unit, and the Saturday rentals that never happened because nobody was there to hand out a code.
The hours you cannot see are the expensive ones
Gate work is interrupt work. It rarely takes long on its own, but it arrives at the worst moments: mid conversation with a prospect, halfway through the monthly walk, or on a Sunday when the office is closed and the phone rings anyway. The cost is not really the minutes. It is that those minutes decide when you can leave the property and how many days a week the office has to be covered.
That is why the annual figure matters more than the monthly one. Six or seven hours a month sounds trivial. Priced across a year at a loaded rate, it usually lands in the same range as a meaningful software or maintenance line, and unlike those it delivers nothing except keeping two systems in agreement.
What changes when the code follows the ledger
When gate codes are issued at lease signing and revoked on a schedule the ledger drives, the code hours and the lockout hours both approach zero. What remains is the physical part: hanging an overlock on the door, which still requires a person and still should be done, and the monthly walk that catches cut locks and failing door springs.
The other change is consistency. A ladder that runs automatically runs the same way every month, including the month you are traveling and the month a manager quits. That consistency is what makes a lien file defensible later, because the dates in the record are the dates the system produced rather than the dates somebody got around to.
Questions about this calculator
My office already has staff, so is this cost real?
It is real in the sense that the hours are being spent on work that produces nothing. Whether that shows up as a payroll saving or as freed capacity depends on your situation. At a site with one part time person, the usual outcome is that the same person finally gets to the leads, the walk, and the auction prep.
Why does the calculator include move outs?
Because a code left active after a move out is both a security problem and a labor item. Somebody has to remove it, and if nobody does, a former tenant retains gate access to your property. Counting move outs is the honest way to size the work.
What is a realistic minutes per code figure?
It depends on where your panel is and how your controller accepts changes. Owners who walk to a panel in a gatehouse commonly report high single digits per change once you count the interruption. If you are batching changes once a week, divide the batch time by the number of codes in it.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The self storage delinquency ladder worksheet
A fill in worksheet that turns your rental agreement and your state statute into a dated ladder your property can actually run every single month.
Take that result to your own rent roll
The figure above came out of your inputs, not out of a claim of ours, so the next step is checking it against real paid through dates. In a demo we load a slice of your units and show what one billing cycle does to that number when the notices, the code issuance and the overlock rung all run on schedule. Twenty minutes, starting from whatever is on your screen right now.