Garage size
2 car garage dimensions
Twenty by twenty is what gets built and twenty-four by twenty-four is what people wish they had built. The difference is whether you can open both car doors at once.
The verdict
2 × small suv (rav4) fits a 20 × 20, but only just.
- Spare width
- 3.3 ft
- Room in front
- 1.9 ft
- Vehicle
- 7.1 ft × 15.1 ft
Under 2.5 ft beside a car you turn sideways to get out. It works, and you will notice it every day.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 20 × 20 | 400 sq ft | The legal minimum in most places, and the one builders quote. Two sedans fit. Two pickups do not — not with the doors opening. |
| 24 × 24 | 576 sq ft | The size to build if you have the lot. Two full-size trucks, doors open on both sides, and a workbench along the back wall. |
| 22 × 22 | 484 sq ft | The honest middle. Two SUVs with room to walk between them, and about six feet of storage in front. |
| 28 × 24 | 672 sq ft | Two vehicles and a real workshop down one side, or two trucks plus a motorbike. |
The part that catches people
The number that catches people is not the width, it is the gap. Two full-size pickups are sixteen feet of metal. In a twenty-foot garage that leaves four feet split three ways — a foot and a half at each wall and about one foot between them. You get in through the passenger side, or you park one outside.
In full
Twenty by twenty is the number most people have heard and it is the number most people regret. It parks two cars and it does almost nothing else: once both cars are in, the gap between them is the gap you walk through sideways, and the wall in front of the bumpers is where the bins were supposed to go.
Twenty-four by twenty-four is what a two-car garage wants to be. The extra four feet of width is the difference between opening a car door and squeezing out of one, and the extra four feet of depth is where the freezer, the bikes, the mower and the water heater actually live. Builders know this, which is why twenty-four by twenty-four is the size that appears the moment a plot is wide enough to allow it.
Depth is underrated because nobody parks by it. A full-size pickup is close to twenty feet long on its own, and a twenty-foot-deep garage with a twenty-foot truck in it has no room behind the tailgate and no room in front of the bumper. Whether you can shut the door is not the test — whether you can walk round the back of the vehicle is.
The garage door is a separate decision from the garage. A twenty-four-foot-wide garage does not need a twenty-four-foot door, and could not have one: you need roughly a foot of wall at each side for the vertical track and the framing. Sixteen feet of door in a twenty-foot garage, or eighteen in a twenty-four, is the normal 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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