Garage size
1 car garage dimensions
Twelve by twenty is the number you will be given. It fits a car and nothing else, which is a problem, because nobody has ever owned a garage that held only a car.
The verdict
1 × sedan (camry) fits a 12 × 20 comfortably.
- Spare width
- 3.5 ft
- Room in front
- 0.9 ft
- Vehicle
- 7 ft × 16.1 ft
Both doors open, and there is room to walk round the back.
Widths are across the mirrors, because mirrors are what people hit. Measure your own vehicle before you pour a slab.
The sizes
| Size | Floor area | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 12 × 20 | 240 sq ft | The standard single. A sedan fits with room to open one door properly. A pickup fits lengthways and you shuffle. |
| 14 × 22 | 308 sq ft | The one to build. Both car doors open, and there is a bay at the front for bins, bikes and the mower. |
| 16 × 24 | 384 sq ft | A single garage with a workshop in it. Full-size truck, tool bench down one wall, still shuts. |
The part that catches people
Depth catches people more often than width on a single. A long-bed pickup is twenty-one feet before you count the tailgate down, so a twenty-foot garage will not close behind it. Measure your own vehicle, not the class it belongs to.
In full
A single garage is the size where every foot is visible. There is no second car to blame — if it feels tight, it is tight, and the two dimensions that make it tight are almost never the ones people check.
Twelve by twenty is the common minimum and it is genuinely minimal. Twelve feet of width gives an ordinary car about three feet of total spare across the whole room, which is a door swing on one side and nothing on the other. Park central and you can get out; park off-centre once and you learn where the wall is.
Fourteen by twenty-two is the size that makes a single garage useful rather than merely possible. Two extra feet of width is a workbench or a row of shelves down one wall AND the ability to open the car door. Two extra feet of depth is the difference between a garage and a car-shaped cupboard.
The trap specific to single garages is the door width, because the room is narrow enough that the framing matters. A twelve-foot-wide garage cannot take a ten-foot door comfortably — the track needs its space at each side, and what looks like two feet of spare wall is one foot per side and already spoken for. Nine feet of door in a twelve-foot garage is the honest pairing.
The room that is not the car
Where the space actually goes
The door on it
Door widths that suit this garage
The opening is narrower than the building. You need a foot of wall at each side for the track and the framing, so a 20-foot garage takes an 18-foot door at most, and most builders hang a 16.
More
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