Budgeting for the Big Lap: what a year on the road actually costs a family

Someone in a camp kitchen at Streaky Bay asked me straight out last winter: "What's this actually costing you a week?" I gave her a number and she went quiet, then admitted the figure she'd seen on a Facebook group was about half what we were spending. That's the problem with Big Lap budgets floating around online — they're usually written by couples with no kids, no dog, and a lot more free camping tolerance than the average family van.

We've been doing the east coast in stretches for three years now, plus one longer run out west, and I keep a spreadsheet because my husband won't let me not keep a spreadsheet. So here's what a family of four (two primary-schoolers, one dog, one 21ft van) genuinely spends on a year away, broken down by the categories that actually move the needle.

The big lap budget most families actually need

For a full twelve months on the road, touring the east coast plus a chunk of the centre or north, we budget roughly $55,000 to $70,000 for a family of four. That's not a number I pulled from a forum — it's what we've tracked, receipt by receipt, across two long trips. Solo travellers and childless couples routinely quote $35,000 to $45,000 for the same period, and I believe them, because they're not paying for four powered sites' worth of school holiday surcharge or buying a second icy pole every single afternoon.

The honest breakdown for us runs something like: 35% caravan parks and camping fees, 25% fuel, 15% food (over and above what we'd spend at home), 10% vehicle and van servicing/repairs, 10% activities and entry fees, and the remaining 5% swallowed by things nobody plans for — medical, school resources, replacing gear that dies.

Fuel: the number that actually varies with your route

Towing a van at 90-100km/h, our Landcruiser sits around 18-20L/100km, sometimes worse into a headwind or through the Victorian High Country. If you're covering 25,000-30,000km over a year — which is a realistic full lap plus detours — you're looking at roughly $6,000 to $9,000 in fuel depending on where diesel prices sit when you're travelling and how much remote/outback driving you do. Remote fuel is always dearer; budget an extra 20-40% per litre once you're past Alice Springs or out on the Birdsville Track compared with capital city prices. If your route includes something like the Red Centre Way or the run out to Oodnadatta Track, factor those premiums in properly rather than averaging against city bowser prices — it skews the whole fuel line low if you don't.

Caravan parks versus free camping — and why the mix matters more than either extreme

This is where families spend differently to everyone else, and it's worth being blunt about it. We don't free camp every night. With two kids who need reliable showers, decent internet for school catch-up work, and a jumping pillow to burn off energy before dinner, we're paying for a powered site more often than the free-camping purists would recommend.

Realistically we run about 60% paid parks, 40% free or low-cost camps (national park campgrounds, showground stops, the odd council reserve). Paid sites average $45-$65 a night in peak season on the east coast, less in shoulder months and well less again out west and through the centre. A big part of managing this cost is simply timing — we've written before about school holidays versus shoulder season pricing, and the gap is real, sometimes $20-30 a night between peak and shoulder for the same site.

If you're weighing up whether a night should be a paid park or a free camp at all, that's a whole decision tree in itself — we've gone through it properly in caravan park or free camp: how to actually decide with kids in the van. Short version: paid parks earn their keep on school days and rest days, free camps earn theirs on the driving days in between.

Where families actually overspend without noticing

Food is the sneaky one. You're not just cooking three meals a day for four people, you're doing it with a smaller fridge, less pantry storage, and a lot more temptation to just grab a burger because everyone's tired and it's been a nine-hour tow day. We budget about 20% more for groceries and takeaway on the road than we would at home, and that's being disciplined about it.

The other quiet cost is activities. Reef trips, national park entry fees, the odd horseriding lesson because your daughter won't stop asking — it adds up fast, and it's the first thing people forget to budget for because it feels optional in the planning stage and completely non-negotiable once you're standing there with a nine-year-old.

Vehicle and van costs are the one area where I'd rather over-budget than under. Corrugated roads, long distances and constant loading will find every weak point in your rig eventually — tyres, wheel bearings, suspension bushes. If you're heading anywhere near Gibb River Road or the Savannah Way, budget for at least one unplanned repair. It's not pessimism, it's just what corrugations do to a van over a few thousand kilometres.

Registration, permits and the paperwork line item everyone forgets

Vehicle rego renewal doesn't stop because you're travelling, and neither do park permits for places like Mungo or Karijini, which need to be booked and paid for ahead of time. National park camping fees, Kakadu passes, some outback track permits — none of these are huge individually, but tally them across a year and it's a few hundred dollars you need to have set aside, separate from your nightly accommodation budget. We keep this as its own line rather than folding it into "parks", because it behaves differently — it's paid in lumps, often months ahead, not nightly.

What we'd change if we did it again

Honestly, I'd build in a bigger buffer than we did the first time. We budgeted tight and it made the last six weeks stressful in a way that took the shine off what should have been the best part of the trip. My contrarian take, and I'll cop pushback for it: I don't think the "do it dirt cheap by free camping everywhere" version of the Big Lap is actually realistic for most families with school-age kids, and I'd rather see families budget realistically for parks with camp kitchens and jumping pillows than stretch themselves to prove a point about free camping.

We also underestimated how much direction changes cost. Backtracking to revisit somewhere, or detouring because the weather turned, ate into fuel more than we expected — worth reading which direction to lap Australia: clockwise, anticlockwise, and why it matters with kids before you lock in a route, because getting the seasonal direction right the first time saves you fuel and stress later.

The ABS household expenditure data and RBA inflation figures are worth checking before you finalise a year-long budget too, since fuel and grocery costs shift meaningfully year to year and a budget built on last year's numbers can be out by a fair margin by the time you're actually on the road.

Building your own number

Don't take our figure as gospel. Your kids' ages, your appetite for free camping, whether you're towing an off-road van into places like the Dampier Peninsula or sticking to sealed roads and coastal parks, all of it moves the number substantially. What I'd say is this: track your first six weeks properly, receipt by receipt, then extrapolate. That's more accurate than any forum average, including mine.

— Kellie Nguyen, Family Touring & Parks Editor