DIY Chicken Coop vs Buying One: The Cost Math

Building is usually cheaper in materials and almost never cheaper in total, because the expensive input is your weekend. A bought coop in our catalogue works out between $11 and $36 per square foot of ground footprint as of 26 July 2026, with the whole 20-coop range running $130.93 to $903.06. A self-build beats the low end on materials if you already own the tools — and loses badly if you have to buy a saw, or if the half-finished frame is still in the garage in October. Here is both sides, priced where we can price them honestly, next to the coops we actually sell.

Prices below are our own, read from our catalogue on 26 July 2026. We don't publish a lumber total, and the section on why is the most useful one on this page.

Is it cheaper to build or buy a chicken coop?

On materials, usually yes — a small coop's worth of framing lumber, cladding, roofing and wire generally comes in under what a comparable finished coop costs, because you're not paying for a shipping carton or a retailer's margin. On total cost, usually no, once the tools and the hours are counted honestly.

The gap narrows fast as the coop gets smaller. A very small bought coop carries almost as much hardware, as many hinges and as many corners as a big one, spread over a fraction of the area — which is why our smallest wheeled coop is the most expensive per square foot in the catalogue and our second-cheapest coop is the least.

So the real question isn't which is cheaper. It's which cost you'd rather pay: money, or Saturday.

What a DIY coop actually costs

Seven line items, every time. The quantities come off the plan's cut list; the prices come off the shelf at your local yard on the day you buy. We publish the first column and deliberately leave the second empty.

Now the part most articles handle badly. We are not going to print a total. Framing lumber is a commodity: it moves week to week and it varies by region and by yard. The NAHB publishes the framing lumber composite for precisely that reason — in the week to 17 July 2026 it moved 0.2%, according to Madison's Lumber Price Index. A single dollar figure typed into an article eighteen months ago and never revisited is worse than an empty column, because the empty column at least tells you to go and look.

What we can tell you is where the money hides. It isn't the lumber. It's roofing, wire and hardware — the three lines people leave off the back-of-the-envelope sum and then buy in a second trip. And it's tools, if you don't own a circular saw, a drill and a square, at which point the "cheap" build stops being cheap on the first purchase.

Take the cut list from our free plans, price the pile at your yard, and you'll have a real number for your zip code — which is the only kind worth having.

What the easy chicken coop costs: the bought option, priced

Here is the side we can price to the cent, because it's ours. Our range, read on 26 July 2026, runs from $130.93 to $903.06, averaging $501.33. The useful figure isn't the sticker, though — it's the price per square foot of ground the coop actually occupies.

Footprints are computed from the manufacturers' own stated length and width; ten of the 20 state both. The other ten state a length in the title and nothing else, which is a fair reason to be suspicious of them.

Read the spread rather than the winner. The cheapest coop per square foot is a mid-size unit with a big run; the most expensive is the smallest wheeled one. Small costs more per square foot in every category of manufactured goods and coops are no exception — the corner count doesn't shrink with the floor.

Six free coop plans, three of them moveable. SEND ME THE PLANS

One more honest note on the bought side, because it's the number nobody prints. A flat-pack coop is not finished when it arrives. Of our 20 listings, exactly one states an assembly time — about 40 minutes for two adults — and exactly one states how many cartons it ships in. Eighteen of 20 say nothing at all. Treat "some assembly required" as a warning that the seller doesn't know either, and plan for a couple of hours and a second pair of hands.

The hours nobody counts

A first coop build runs across five distinct jobs, and only one of them is the fun part. Marking and cutting. Assembling the frame square. Roofing. Wiring the run. Painting or staining, then waiting for it to dry.

The order doesn't matter here — what matters is that four of the five are slow, and two of them (roofing and wiring) are the ones beginners consistently underestimate, because both involve working around a shape that's already built.

Then there's the invisible time: reading the plan properly, two trips to the store, and the half-hour you spend at the start of day two working out what you were doing at the end of day one. Nobody puts that on a materials list, but it's real, and it's the reason so many builds stall.

Our position is straightforward: if you enjoy the work, none of this is a cost. Making things is a good way to spend a weekend and a coop is an excellent first carpentry project — forgiving tolerances, no plumbing, and the client doesn't complain. If you don't enjoy the work, all of it is a cost, and you should read the price-per-square-foot table again.

Pallet chicken coops: what a pallet actually gives you

Less floor than you think. The standard North American pallet is the GMA footprint at 48 × 40 inches, which is 13.3 square feet of deck. Butt four of them into a square and the outside is about 4 × 4 feet, but once you allow for the frame thickness the interior comes out nearer 40 × 40 inches — roughly 11 square feet. At the 3–4 sq ft per standard hen that Virginia Cooperative Extension publishes, that's three hens. Not the eight the photographs imply.

The bigger issue is that a pallet is a frame, not a wall. GMA deck boards are 3½ inches wide with gaps between them, so every pallet you stand up as a wall needs cladding on one side before it's weatherproof or secure. Free pallets plus the plywood to sheet them is a different budget from free pallets.

Three practical checks before you use any pallet for a coop:

• Look for the heat-treatment mark. Pallets treated with methyl bromide exist; you don't want one holding your birds.
• Check what it carried. A pallet that spent its life under something spilled is not a bargain.
• Measure it. Pallet sizes vary widely outside the GMA standard, and a build designed around 48 × 40 falls apart if half your stack is a different footprint.

Pallets are genuinely good for one thing: the base and the frame of a run, where the gaps don't matter and the strength does. As coop walls, they're a saving on framing lumber only, and framing lumber was never the expensive part.

Turning a shed into a chicken coop

A shed conversion starts with more space than most purpose-built coops and one significant handicap: sheds are designed to keep weather out, which means they're designed to stop air moving. Ventilation is the whole project.

The arithmetic is friendly. A 6 × 4 ft shed gives 24 square feet of floor — six to eight standard hens at published space figures. An 8 × 6 gives 48 square feet, which is 12 to 16 hens, more than most backyard flocks will ever need.

Five things change on the way from shed to coop, and none is a step in a build sequence — they're decisions to make before you start:

Ventilation. Add vents high, above roost height, on more than one wall. Penn State Extension puts the requirement as ample air movement without a draft, and a sealed shed delivers neither air movement nor, once it's damp, anything pleasant.

The pop-hole. A shed has a people door, not a bird door. You need a low opening the hens can use without the big door being open, and it wants to be generous and roughly square.

Roosts and nests. Penn State's figures: roosts 18 to 24 inches above the floor, spaced a foot apart, about six inches of perch per standard bird, and never so high that birds are jumping down more than four feet. Nests at least 12 × 12 inches, two feet off the ground and four feet away from the roosts.

The floor. A wooden shed floor is fine with bedding on it, and considerably easier on your back than a concrete one. Whatever it is, keep it dry — every other problem in a coop follows moisture.

The run. A shed without a run is a box. Virginia Cooperative Extension's guidance for the pen border is to bury the wire at least 12 inches deep, which is the kind of specific, checkable detail worth having before you dig once.

If you already own the shed, this is nearly always the cheapest good coop available to you.

Homemade chicken coop mistakes that cost money later

Five, in rough order of how much they cost to fix afterwards.

Too small. The most common and the most expensive, because the fix is a second coop. Size on the flock you'll have in two years, not the four chicks in the box. Our coop size guide has the arithmetic.

Not enough ventilation. Costs you damp litter, ammonia and a coop that smells from the kitchen window. Cheap to add early, awkward to retrofit once the cladding is on.

The wrong wire. Aperture and gauge are two different numbers and both matter. Worth noting that this isn't only a homemade problem: of the 20 commercial coops we sell, not one states a wire gauge or a mesh aperture. If you're buying the wire yourself, you at least get to know what you bought.

A floor you can't reach across. Design for the scraper, not just for the hens. If you can't reach the far corner from an opening, you'll be crawling in every week for years.

Untreated timber in contact with soil. The cheapest lumber touching wet ground is a two-season coop. Either get the frame off the dirt or use material rated for it.

None of these is exotic. They're all decisions made on paper in about ten minutes, and all five are far cheaper to get right there than in the yard.

Who should build, and who shouldn't

Build if: you own a saw, a drill and a square; you want a specific size that nothing on the market matches; you have a free shed or a real supply of usable material; or you'd genuinely enjoy the weekend. Under those conditions a self-build wins on cost and on fit, and it isn't close.

Buy if: you need hens housed this month; you don't own the tools and would be buying them for one project; you're keeping four to six birds, where the standard sizes fit well; or you know from experience that your unfinished projects stay unfinished. Buying is also the right call if the coop has to move, because wheels, axle position and weight are the three things a first-time builder is least likely to get right.

The failure mode we see most is the middle path — an ambitious build started in spring, abandoned in July, with hens living in a dog crate and $200 of lumber warping under a tarp. That costs more than either honest option.

If you're leaning towards building, judge your plan before you cut: what a coop plan should include. If you're leaning towards buying, the coops with runs are where most four-to-six-hen buyers land.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to build a chicken coop?

It comes down to your lumber prices on the day, which is why no honest single figure exists — framing lumber is a commodity that moves weekly and varies by region. Price it properly: take the cut list and materials list from a plan, price the pile locally, then add roofing, wire, hinges and fixings, which are the lines people forget. Add the cost of any tool you don't already own.

How much is a chicken coop?

Our own catalogue runs from $130.93 to $903.06 as of 26 July 2026, averaging $501.33 across 20 coops. Measured against the ground they occupy, the ten coops that state both a length and a width work out between roughly $11 and $36 per square foot. Small coops cost the most per square foot, because hinges, latches and corners don't get cheaper as the floor gets smaller.

How to build a chicken coop out of pallets?

Use pallets for the base and the run frame, where their strength helps and their gaps don't matter, and clad them if you use them as walls — GMA deck boards are 3½ inches wide with spaces between. Four pallets butted into a square give about 11 square feet of interior floor, which suits about three standard hens. Check every pallet for a heat-treatment mark and for what it previously carried.

How to turn a shed into a chicken coop?

The floor area is usually already sufficient — a 6 × 4 ft shed holds six to eight standard hens at published space figures. The work is in ventilation, a low pop-hole for the birds, roosts 18 to 24 inches off the floor, nest boxes at least 12 × 12 inches set two feet up and four feet from the roosts, and an attached run. A shed is built to seal; a coop needs to breathe.

How to build a cheap chicken coop?

Reduce the footprint before you reduce the specification, because size is the only saving that doesn't come back later. Use free or reclaimed framing timber if you have it, but buy the wire and the hardware new — those are the parts that fail. Keep the roof to a single slope to cut both material waste and cutting time, and start from a plan with a nested cut list rather than improvising at the saw.

Written by the Moveable Chicken Coop Team We publish the price and the full specification for every coop we sell, which is what makes an honest build-versus-buy comparison possible at all. If you want a figure confirmed before you commit either way, email or call us. More about how we choose coops → /pages/about

Last reviewed: 26 July 2026

Sources

1. Virginia Cooperative Extension, "Small-scale Poultry Housing", publication 2902-1092, https://www.pubs.ext.vt.edu/2902/2902-1092/2902-1092.html — accessed 26 July 2026
2. Penn State Extension, "Small Scale Poultry Housing", https://extension.psu.edu/small-scale-poultry-housing — accessed 26 July 2026
3. NAHB, "Framing Lumber Prices" (Madison's Lumber Price Index, week to 17 July 2026), https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/housing-economics/national-statistics/framing-lumber-prices — accessed 26 July 2026
4. PalletOne, "What is the Standard Pallet Size? 48″x40″", https://www.palletone.com/what-is-the-standard-pallet-size/ — accessed 26 July 2026
5. Prices, dimensions and stated capacities: our own catalogue, read 26 July 2026.

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