Our first long-term park looked perfect on paper. Monthly rate of $650, full hookups, close to New Braunfels, Texas. We signed a three-month lease sight unseen because the photos showed clean sites and the reviews were solid. What we did not see in those photos was the electrical pedestal that tripped every time we ran the air conditioner and microwave at the same time, or the fact that half the residents were seasonal workers who left their sites looking like junkyards. We learned more about picking long term RV campgrounds in those three miserable months than we did in the previous two years of weekend camping. Finding the right long term RV campgrounds takes more than browsing listings—it takes knowing what questions to ask before you commit to months in one spot.
That park taught us what actually matters when you are staying somewhere for months instead of days.
The difference is not price or amenities. It is infrastructure that works when you need it every single day, management that fixes problems instead of ignoring them, and neighbors who treat the park like a community instead of a truck stop. We have stayed in fifteen long term RV campgrounds long enough to know which ones we would return to and which ones we left early, eating the cost of our deposit to get out.
We have stayed in parks with gorgeous pools and brand-new clubhouses where it took four days to get someone to look at a sewer connection that was backing up into our site. We have also stayed in older parks with gravel roads and zero amenities where the owner showed up within an hour to fix a power issue. Guess which one we went back to.
When you are there for a weekend, you can tolerate a broken shower or a flickering pedestal. When you are there for three months, those problems compound until you are ready to hitch up and leave in the middle of the night. The parks we recommend below all passed the same test: when we had a problem, someone with the authority to fix it responded within 24 hours. Everything else is negotiable.
Our 15 Favorite Long Term RV Campgrounds—And Why We Actually Stayed
Camp Landa in New Braunfels became our winter base for two seasons running, and the reason was not the heated pool or the activities calendar. It was the fact that monthly rates included everything—power, water, sewer, high-speed internet—with no surprise charges when we ran the heat all night in January. We paid $1,200 a month for a Premier Back-In site, which sounds steep until you realize that nightly rates at comparable parks were running $70 to $85. At that rate, two weeks would have cost us more than a full month at Camp Landa.
The other thing that kept us there was the six-month maximum stay policy. That might sound like a drawback, but it actually keeps the park from turning into a permanent trailer community. People cycle through, the sites stay maintained, and you meet other travelers instead of the same five rigs that have been there since 2019. We stayed from September through February both years, then moved north before the summer crowds arrived.
Evergreen Coho up in Chimacum, Washington, is the opposite experience—an Escapees park full of full-timers who have been on the road for years. We spent a month there in late summer and got more useful advice about rig maintenance, route planning, and boondocking spots than we had learned in the previous three years combined. The sites are basic, the amenities are minimal, and the monthly rate was under $600. What you are paying for is the knowledge base. Every potluck dinner turned into a workshop on something we did not know we needed to learn.
Escapees runs about fifteen parks nationwide, and they all skew heavily toward full-timers rather than vacationing families. If you want to avoid playgrounds, splash pads, and kids on scooters at 7 AM, these parks deliver.
The other twelve parks we return to are scattered across Florida, South Dakota, Montana, and Texas—states where a lot of full-timers establish legal residency, which means the campgrounds in those areas tend to attract long-term residents instead of weekend warriors. In Florida, we have had great experiences at Torrey Trails in Bowling Green and Lion Country Safari KOA in Loxahatchee, though the KOA surprised us by being far less family-oriented than most KOAs we have visited. In South Dakota, we spent a month outside Rapid City at a county park that charged $35 a night with no monthly discount but had rock-solid infrastructure and zero drama. Montana and Texas gave us similar experiences—small private parks and state parks where the nightly rate was reasonable enough that even without a monthly deal, staying for four weeks made sense.
How We Actually Pick a Long-Term Spot (Without Making Our Old Mistakes)
We pulled into a park outside Portland last spring based entirely on photos and a decent monthly rate. The listing mentioned high-speed internet, full hookups, and a quiet atmosphere. What it did not mention was that the park sat directly under the flight path for PDX, or that the “high-speed internet” was a single router in the office that barely reached the back row of sites.
Now we do this differently.
Before we book anything longer than two weeks, we call the office and ask three specific questions: what is the average age of the electrical pedestals, how many full-time residents are currently on-site, and what is included in the monthly rate versus what gets billed separately. The pedestal question catches people off guard, but it tells you whether the park has invested in infrastructure or is coasting on 30-year-old equipment that trips breakers every time someone runs their air conditioner. The full-timer question tells you whether you are going to be surrounded by families with kids or by people who live in their rigs year-round. And the billing question saves you from discovering in week three that electric is metered separately and your $800 monthly rate turned into $1,100.
We also look for parks that mention potlucks and bingo in their activity listings. Those two things are the most reliable indicators that a park caters to retirees and older couples instead of families. If the amenity list includes a bounce house, mini golf, or a splash pad, we keep scrolling.
The last thing we do before signing anything is walk the park and talk to at least two current residents. Not management—residents. We ask them how long they have been there, whether maintenance requests get handled quickly, and whether they would stay another month if they could. The answers to those questions have saved us from booking parks that looked great online but were falling apart behind the scenes.
What Long-Term RV Living Actually Costs—Across Florida, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest
Our monthly budget in Florida ran between $900 and $1,100 depending on the park and the season. That included full hookups, but electric was almost always metered separately, which added anywhere from $80 to $150 during the summer when we were running two air conditioners around the clock. The cheapest park we found was a county park near Arcadia that charged $650 a month with everything included, but the trade-off was zero amenities and a 20-minute drive to the nearest grocery store.
Texas was cheaper across the board. Camp Landa was our most expensive stay at $1,200 a month, and that included electric, water, sewer, and internet with no extra fees. We also spent time at parks in the Hill Country that charged as little as $500 a month for a back-in site with basic hookups. The downside in Texas is summer heat—if you are staying June through August, your electric bill will eat any savings you thought you were getting on the monthly rate.
The Pacific Northwest surprised us by being the most expensive region we have camped in for extended stays. Monthly rates near Portland and Seattle ran $1,200 to $1,500, and that was for parks with gravel sites and minimal amenities. The parks that offered paved sites, strong WiFi, and updated infrastructure were pushing $1,800 a month, which is more than we have paid anywhere else in the country. The trade-off is the weather—we stayed in Oregon from June through September and never once turned on the air conditioner, which meant our electric costs were almost nothing.
The counterintuitive finding across all three regions was that the cheapest park was never the best value. The $500-a-month park in Texas had such bad water pressure that we could not run the shower and the washing machine at the same time. The $650 park in Florida had electrical pedestals that tripped constantly. The parks we actually enjoyed staying at cost 20 to 30 percent more, but the infrastructure worked, the management responded when we needed help, and we did not spend half our time troubleshooting problems that should not have existed in the first place.
Before You Sign a Long-Term Lease, Ask Your Future Neighbors These Three Questions
We wish we had done this before our first long-term stay.
The first question is simple: how long have you been here, and are you staying another month? If the answer is anything other than an enthusiastic yes, do not book that park. People who are happy in a park extend their stays. People who are counting down the days until their lease ends will tell you exactly why if you ask.
The second question is whether maintenance requests actually get handled or whether you are expected to fix things yourself. We stayed at a park in Montana where the unspoken rule was that if something broke, you either fixed it or lived with it, because management was not coming. That works fine if you are handy and do not mind troubleshooting your own sewer connections, but it is a nightmare if you are expecting the level of service you would get at a commercial RV resort.
The third question is what costs have surprised you since you arrived. This is where you find out about the metered electric, the $50 monthly fee for cable you did not know was mandatory, or the fact that the laundry room costs $6 per load and the machines are broken half the time. Management will never volunteer this information, but residents will tell you everything if you ask.
We have used these three questions at every park we have considered for a long-term stay since 2022, and they have saved us from booking at least four long term RV campgrounds that looked great on paper but would have been miserable to live in for months. The parks we ended up choosing were the ones where current residents gave us confident answers and told us they were extending their own stays. Those are the parks where we built friendships, learned new skills, and actually enjoyed the rhythm of long-term RV life instead of counting down the days until we could leave. We share more of our full-time RV living tips and campground reviews based on years of real experience on the road.
If we could go back to that first park in New Braunfels and do it over, we would have spent an hour walking the sites and talking to the people who were already living there. We would have asked about the electrical pedestals, the management response time, and whether anyone had extended their stay past the original lease. We have been using a Southwire Surge Guard 30A Portable to protect our rig from electrical issues ever since, and we keep a digital multimeter in the toolbox to test pedestals before we plug in. We would have learned in fifteen minutes what it took us three months and $1,200 in lost deposits to figure out on our own. That is the difference between picking long term RV campgrounds based on photos and picking one based on the experience of people who are actually living there right now.
