About
Everyone quoting you a building profits from the answer.
Except us. Spanrate prices steel and post-frame buildings and sells nothing. That's the whole arrangement.
What this site is
Ask ten people what a pole barn costs and you'll get ten different numbers, most of them either a manufacturer's best-case kit price or a horror story from somebody's cousin's contractor. Both are true. That's the problem. A kit on a truck and a building you can park in are separated by tens of thousands of dollars, and almost nobody says which one they're quoting.
So we price both, separately, for every building type, at every size we can find real data for. 66 sources across 13 guides, each one linked, each one dated. When a number moves, we move it and say when.
We don't sell buildings. We don't broker leads. No manufacturer pays to appear here, and none of them can. When we name a builder, it's because they publish real pricing you can check.
Where the money actually goes
The shell is the part everyone advertises, and it's the part that varies least. Posts, trusses, purlins and steel are commodities, and commodity prices are public. Two quotes for the same 40×60 shell will land within a few thousand dollars of each other.
Everything after that is where budgets die. A slab is often the largest single line on the invoice after the frame. Grading and a driveway happen before a post goes in the ground and appear on nobody's kit price. Every door is a hole that has to be framed, headed and sealed. Insulation and wiring are the difference between a shed and a shop, and both sit outside almost every shell number you'll see advertised.
None of that is a secret. It's just not on the cover page.
What a number here means
A range on this site is a planning range, not a bid. Steel and lumber move through the year, labor varies more by region than most buyers expect, and a slab in frost country costs what a slab in Georgia doesn't. Use these numbers to know whether a quote is sane. Then get a real bid from a licensed builder, in writing, with an expiry date on it.
If a number here is stale or wrong, we'd rather hear it than leave it up. Corrections go to the contact page, and a current quote is the most useful thing you can send.