Short version: there is no honest price per square foot for an Earthship. Every one is custom-made and built on its own site, so the cost is set by a handful of decisions: size, crew and schedule, the systems you include, the site, permits and drawings, and finishes. Here is how each one moves the number, and how to get a real estimate for your land.
Why we don’t quote a price per square foot
All Earthships are custom-made and constructed on site, and because they use recycled local materials, every build is different. A per-square-foot figure gets quoted back years later, long after materials, labor and codes have moved. A drawing set for your site is the first step toward a number you can actually rely on.
What sets the cost
1. Size and layout
A typical Earthship takes 700 to 1,500 tires, depending on its size and style. More rooms mean more wall, more roof, more glazing and more greenhouse. A compact plan is the biggest lever you have.
2. Crew and schedule
A typical two-bedroom, one-bathroom Earthship takes about four months with an experienced crew, materials organized and money flowing from a construction account. Building it yourself takes at least six months, and two or more years if you can’t work on it full time. Packing tires alone takes 15 to 20 minutes per tire, or about 400 hours for 1,000 tires. Time is money either way: crew hours, or your own months on site.
3. The systems you include
An Earthship can be fully or partly off-grid. Each system is its own line in the budget:
- Electricity: a packaged solar or wind system with battery storage, with biodiesel, micro hydro or a grid tie as other sources.
- Water: rain and snowmelt caught from the roof and used four times, with city water as an optional backup.
- Wastewater: indoor and outdoor treatment cells that reuse household sewage for food and landscaping.
- Heating and cooling: thermal mass and the sun, warm in winter and cool in summer.
Any system can have an automated conventional backup, and any of them can be added later as a renovation. Choosing which to build now and which to add later is a real way to manage the first budget.
4. The site
Excavation, grading and berming the north side all depend on the land. So does orientation: the ideal is 13.5° east of south, and thermal mass lets a building stay comfortable on a lot that can’t face it, but the design has to account for it. Access for materials and the crew matters too.
5. Permits and drawings
In New Mexico, the state building permit fee is calculated from the project’s valuation, and an on-site wastewater system needs its own septic permit. A construction and permit drawing set is the document everything else is priced from. See building permits in New Mexico.
6. Finishes
Packing tires is only the start. Plaster, the roof, the greenhouse, interior walls and floors all take skilled work, and the finish level you choose shows up directly in the budget.
The cost after it’s built
An Earthship is designed to stay warm in winter and cool in summer with little or no utility bill and no fossil fuel, and to use about half the fresh water of a conventional building. That running cost is part of the comparison with a conventional house.
How to get a real number
- Send us the site: where it is, what you want to build, and where you are in the process.
- We draw it: a construction and permit drawing set for that site, engineer-stamped in most cases.
- Price it from the drawings: with the set in hand, the cost is built from real quantities, not a rule of thumb. We can build it too, if you want us to.