A camper van layout is the one decision a conversion cannot take back. Cabinets come out, batteries get replaced, a fridge is a weekend job. Where the bed sits decides everything else in the van, and it is settled in week one. Here are the five layouts American shops actually build, what each one costs you in floor space, and the one that rarely works.
The short answer
- Five layouts cover almost every professional build: a fixed bed over a garage, a convertible dinette, a lift bed, a pop-top, and a modular interior that comes out again.
- The bed is decided first and everything else is fitted around it. No shop redraws that cheaply once the walls are in.
- Wheelbase sets the menu. Mercedes lists the 144 inch high roof Sprinter at $52,540 and the 170 at $57,540, and the longer van gives back roughly 320 pounds of payload.
- A fixed bed, a garage, an indoor wet bath and a seated dining area do not all fit on a 144 inch floor. Pick three.
- By layout, published prices run from $15,984 for a pop-top roof alone to $30,000 to $65,000 for a fixed-bed ProMaster build and $292,000 for an electric lift bed.
How to choose a camper van layout
Start with the bed. It is the largest fixed object in the van, it claims the most floor, and every other zone is arranged around whatever is left. Buyers who start with a mood board and work inward spend three weeks arguing about cabinet finishes before discovering that the bed they wanted leaves no room to stand up and cook.
Four questions settle the bed, and they are worth answering in writing before you speak to a shop. How many people sleep aboard, and how often. Whether gear goes inside the van or on a rack. Whether you need to sit upright at a surface and work, or whether a camp chair outside covers it. And how many nights in a row you spend without hookups, because that number sizes the batteries and the water, and both of those want space a layout has to find.
The volume under a raised bed is the most contested space in the whole vehicle, and it is where most layout arguments actually happen. Bikes want it. Water tanks want it. So does a lithium bank and its charging equipment, which has to live somewhere temperature-stable and reachable. A shop that puts all three under the bed has raised the bed until you cannot sit up in it.
| Layout | Suits | What it gives up |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed bed over a garage | Two people carrying bikes, skis or a dog | The most floor space of any layout, and usually a wheelbase upgrade |
| Convertible dinette bed | Short wheelbases, families, daytime living | Ten minutes at each end of every day, forever |
| Lift bed | Buyers who want both and will pay for it | Budget, and standing height under the raised platform |
| Pop-top | Weekend use, a second berth, low parking clearance | Roof area a rack or panels wanted, and weather sealing on canvas |
| Modular removable interior | One van doing two jobs, and resale flexibility | Some storage density, and a little rattle over washboard |
The five layouts that work
Fixed bed over a garage
The bed sits permanently across or along the back of the van, raised high enough that the space beneath it swallows bikes, skis, a generator or crates. It is the default at most American shops, because a bed that is always made removes the single most tedious part of living in a vehicle and turns the volume below it into the only serious storage the van has.
It only pays for itself if the garage underneath is a designed space with tie-downs, a slide tray and a floor that survives a wet bike, rather than the gap that happened to be left over. Glampervan builds this layout on one chassis only, the ProMaster 136 inch high roof, for $30,000 to $65,000, and the resulting van still parks in a standard space. Vertical Vans in Salt Lake City runs $35,000 to $95,000 on an eight to ten week turnaround.
Convertible dinette bed
The seating becomes the bed each night and the bed becomes seating each morning. It is the oldest layout in the category and the most efficient use of a short floor, which is why it dominates minivan and shorter wheelbase builds. The cost is not money. It is roughly ten minutes at each end of every day, and the novelty of that wears off somewhere around week three.
Where it earns its place is a van that also has to be a car. Oasis Campervans converts a Sienna, Odyssey or Pacifica for $12,000 to $30,000 in three to four weeks, and the result returns around 25 miles per gallon instead of 16. Cardiff Campervan builds modular conversions in Encinitas from $6,000 to $40,000, where the low end is a genuine weekend sleeping setup rather than a theoretical starting price.
Lift bed
The bed rises electrically toward the ceiling during the day and lowers at night, so the rear of the van is a lounge, a workshop or a garage between sleeps. It resolves the fixed versus convertible argument structurally instead of picking a side, and it is the most expensive way to solve any layout problem in this category. Brooklyn Campervans starts conversions at $92,000 and delivers the Elevate v4, built around an electrically raised bed with a 15kWh EcoFlow bank under a walkable solar deck, at $292,000. The honest catch sits in that sentence: this answer begins well into six figures and there is no budget version of it.
Pop-top with the floor left clear
Move the sleeping upstairs and the entire floor stays available for everything else. This is the only layout that adds a berth without taking floor, and it is the cheapest entry point in the category: Colorado Camper Van sells a pop-top from $15,984 and its Base Camp interior from $26,760 as two separate purchases, so the roof can be this year's project and the interior next year's.
Canvas is the compromise. It is cold, it is noisy in wind, and it wants drying before it is folded away. Rossmönster in Longmont builds hard-sided pop-tops at $130,000 to $250,000, which give standing height and a second berth without fabric, so the top stays usable in weather that shuts a soft one down. Same layout, two very different prices, and the gap between them is entirely about what the roof is made of.
Modular interior that comes out again
Nothing is permanently attached. The units drop in, lock down and lift out, so the van hauls plywood on Monday and sleeps four on Friday. VanDOit builds Ford Transits this way at $58,000 to $108,000, with components on a rail system and marine grade materials throughout. Z2Overland sells removable cabinet kits from $18,000 that fit a Sprinter, Transit or ProMaster with no permanent modification, and Contravans in Arvada turns modular builds around in four to six days against $45,000 to $130,000 for its full work. Reversibility is worth real money at resale, and it is the least discussed layout of the five.
Layout lines on a mid-range quote
Total$23,700 to $41,700
The total assumes all six, which no van has. A lift bed and a fixed bed are alternatives, not additions. The line that breaks budgets is the wet bath, because it arrives with plumbing, a fan, a drain and a floor penetration attached, and it is the only one of the six that also demands water weight.
The layout that rarely works
The build that fails most reliably is the short van asked to do everything: a fixed bed over a garage, an indoor wet bath, a full galley and a seated dining area, all on a 144 inch wheelbase. It looks reasonable on a drawing because a drawing has no thickness, and it is the layout buyers most often arrive with after a winter of screenshots.
The floor is the problem, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. A fixed bed claims the rear. A wet bath claims a full-height column against one wall. A galley claims a counter run. A dinette claims a seated footprint plus the room to get past it. On a 144 inch floor three of those fit and the fourth comes out of the aisle, which is why so many of these vans end up with a bath you cannot turn around in and a bed you enter feet first through a gap.
Weight is the second wall, and it is the one nobody draws. Mercedes publishes the 144 inch high roof Sprinter 2500 at 3,781 to 4,134 pounds of payload depending on drivetrain. A four-season build with a bath asks that number to carry the conversion, the tanks, two adults, the batteries and everything in the garage at the same time.
Costs money to get wrong
Water is the heaviest thing you will add to a layout
Water weighs 8.34 pounds a gallon. A 30 gallon fresh tank and a 20 gallon grey tank, both full at once, is 417 pounds before the pan, the walls, the fan and the pump. Put that on a 144 inch high roof 2500 published at 3,781 to 4,134 pounds of payload, alongside a conversion that already runs 1,800 to 2,600 pounds, two adults, 400 amp hours of lithium and a garage of gear, and the van is at or over its rating before you have packed food and clothes. Ask any shop quoting a bath for the finished weight in writing and the payload it leaves.
There are three honest fixes and they are all boring. Move to the 170 inch wheelbase and buy the floor. Drop the indoor bath and take a portable toilet with a shower at the rear doors, which is what plenty of long-term owners run anyway. Or keep the bath and give up the garage, storing bikes on a rack where their weight sits behind the rear axle instead of on it. What does not work is asking a shop to make all four fit, because the shop will say yes and you will find out afterwards.
Wheelbase decides which layouts are open to you
Layout is downstream of wheelbase, and wheelbase is downstream of platform, so the choice between the three common chassis arrives before any floor plan does. Mercedes publishes the 144 inch high roof Sprinter Cargo Van from $52,540 and the 170 inch high roof from $57,540, which puts the extra floor at roughly $5,000 on the sticker.
| Sprinter configuration | Published from | 2500 payload | Layouts it opens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 144 in, standard roof | $48,990 | 3,858 to 4,211 lbs | Convertible dinette, pop-top, weekend builds |
| 144 in, high roof | $52,540 | 3,781 to 4,134 lbs | Fixed bed and a galley, or a bath, not both |
| 170 in, high roof | $57,540 | 3,450 to 3,814 lbs | Fixed bed, garage, galley and one more zone |
| 170 in extended, high roof | $59,980 | 3,351 to 3,704 lbs | Lengthways fixed bed, garage and a wet bath |
Read the payload column next to the price column, because they move in opposite directions. Every foot of floor you buy is weight the van has already spent on itself, and the 170 gives back roughly 320 pounds against the 144. The way out of that trade is the chassis rating rather than the layout: Mercedes publishes the 170 inch high roof 4500 at 6,382 pounds of payload, which is why heavy four-season fixed-bed rigs go on it. Off Highway Van attacks the same problem from the other end, building in aerospace aluminium rather than timber at $165,000 to $245,000 to take several hundred pounds out of the conversion itself.
The names change on other platforms and the arithmetic does not. Ford offers the Transit in several roof heights and body lengths, and the ProMaster's near-vertical walls make cabinetry faster to build and crosswise beds easier to fit, which is why several shops build on nothing else. Whatever badge is on the front, the question is the same: how much floor am I buying, and what does the van weigh before I load it.
From the desk
The question we would ask that no floor plan answers is where two people stand at the same time. A van that works solo and fails as a couple usually fails at one spot, the galley, where one person cooking blocks the only route to the bed and the door. We watch for it in every layout drawing we are sent, and on a 144 inch floor it shows up in month two rather than week one.
Where the bathroom goes
A bathroom is three separate decisions, not one, and treating it as a single yes or no is how buyers end up with a wet box they use twice a year. There is the wet area, there is the shower, and there is the toilet that sets the footprint before anything else about the space is settled. A composting unit, a cassette and a portable cassette all need different clearances and different service routines.
At the tier where an indoor bathroom stops being a compromise, the shops are named and the prices are published. DM Vans builds RVIA certified ProMasters at $97,000 to $105,000, which means the electrical, propane and egress work is inspected against the industry's standards rather than self-attested. Storyteller Overland is certified too, at $160,000 to $220,000. Brooklyn Campervans' Infinity Shower recirculates and UV sterilises a single gallon rather than draining a tank, which is a different product from a wet box with a drain in it.
Below that, the answer is often no, and saying so is not pessimism. A wet area is a condensation problem before it is a plumbing one, so the wall build-up behind the pan matters more than the fixture bolted to it, and a bath fitted into a poorly detailed wall grows mould in its second winter. A portable toilet, a rear-door shower and a gym membership cost a few hundred dollars, weigh almost nothing, and take no floor away from the zones that earn their keep.
The galley, the seating and the work surface
The galley goes along one wall or across the rear, and the choice is about traffic rather than cooking. A wall galley keeps the aisle clear and puts the counter within reach of the sliding door, which matters if you cook with the door open, which everybody does. A rear galley gives a longer run and a view, and it competes directly with a fixed bed for the same end of the van, so the two rarely coexist outside an extended wheelbase.
Seating is where cheap layouts get expensive later. A pair of swivel seat bases turns the cab into the lounge for around $900 to $1,600 fitted, which is the highest return on floor space available in a van. A dedicated dinette costs floor and a fixed bench costs comfort, and neither is worth building until the swivels have been tried for a season.
Climate hardware is the constraint people leave out of the drawing entirely. A diesel heater takes a cabinet, its ducting takes a route, and where the warm air enters the van decides whether the bed or the floor is the warm place to be. Air conditioning takes roof area that a fan or a solar panel also wants. Draw those three before the cabinetry, not after.
What each layout costs, and who builds it
| Layout | Shops that build it | Published conversion price |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed bed over a garage | Glampervan, Vertical Vans, Ready.Set.Van | $30,000 to $65,000, $35,000 to $95,000, $65,000 to $95,000 |
| Convertible dinette | Oasis Campervans, Cardiff Campervan | $12,000 to $30,000, and $6,000 to $40,000 |
| Lift bed | Brooklyn Campervans | From $92,000, Elevate v4 at $292,000 |
| Pop-top | Colorado Camper Van, Rossmönster | Pop-top from $15,984, hard-sided $130,000 to $250,000 |
| Modular removable interior | VanDOit, Z2Overland, Contravans | $58,000 to $108,000, kits from $18,000, $45,000 to $130,000 |
Every figure in that table is conversion work with the van bought separately, which is how this industry quotes and where most of the confusion in a price comparison begins. Add a chassis and a mid-range fixed-bed Sprinter goes past $100,000 before tax and registration, which is a different conversation from the $45,000 the shop quoted.
The shops that fit an electric lift bed and the shops that build a modular Transit interior are not the same shops, and very few do both well. Comparing American van builders side by side on layout tells you more than comparing them on headline price, because price mostly tracks chassis and geography while layout tracks what a shop has built a hundred times before.
A 170 inch fixed-bed build, all in
Total$110,440 to $136,140
Sales tax, title and registration sit outside this and add $8,000 to $11,000 in most states. The bath row is the one to interrogate: it is roughly 6 to 8 percent of the total and it removes the zone buyers miss most, which is somewhere to sit with a laptop and the door shut.
How to test a layout before you commit
Layouts fail in the body, not on paper, and the test costs an afternoon and a roll of tape. Mark the van's floor outline on a garage or a driveway, tape the zones inside it, and then live the sequence: get in, take your boots off, reach the fridge, sit down, stand up, get past the person cooking, go to bed. The failures announce themselves within twenty minutes.
Test the layout before the deposit
- Tape the floor outline full size and mark every zone inside it, including the aisle
- Stack boxes to the height of the bed platform and try to sit up under the roof line
- Put two people in it and cook a real meal, with one of them needing to get past
- Lie down where the bed goes, in the direction it runs, with shoes on for length
- Load the garage with the actual bikes or skis, not a guess at their size
- Sit at the work surface for an hour with a laptop, in the seat the build will have
- Weigh everything you intend to carry and write the total next to the van's payload
Do it before the deposit, because a layout change once the walls and wiring are in is a rebuild rather than an edit, and weeks come out of the schedule along with several thousand dollars. Shops will make the change. They price it honestly and it still hurts.
Then ask the shop to name the last three vans it delivered in the layout you want, and to say what it would change about them. A shop that has built your layout a hundred times has already solved the problems you have not thought of yet, and what a builder should answer before a deposit is mostly a question about repetition. Layout is the one place where a shop's experience is worth more than its taste.
