A small barndominium is one under 1,600 heated square feet. That is the square footage line we have decided on after working with buyers for the past decade- more about that hard line below. Every plan below is measured against it — from a 612 square foot one-bedroom up to 1,572 square feet with a three-car-wide garage.
The number that matters is heated square footage, not the size of the building.
Barndominiums confuse this more than any other kind of house, because the same structure can hold 612 square feet of living space and 1,140 square feet of shop. Two plans with almost identical heated areas can sit inside buildings that differ by 1,300 square feet. The plans below list both figures, and the share of each building that is actually conditioned space.
What Counts As A Small Barndominium?
There is no building code definition, so the honest answer is a range with reasons attached. Small barndominiums generally run from about 600 to 1,600 heated square feet. Below 600 you are in tiny home, cabin and ADU territory. Above 1,600 the layout stops making the compromises that define a small plan — you get a formal dining room back, a third bathroom, a proper hallway.
1,600 is where the trade-offs change. Under it, a barndominium is normally single-level open plan, two or three bedrooms, two baths, and everything earns its place. Over it, the plan can afford rooms that exist for occasional use.
Common small footprints and what they hold: a 30×40 building gives 1,200 square feet and comfortably carries two bedrooms. A 40×40 gives 1,600 and reaches three. A 30×50 gives 1,500. But a footprint is not a heated area — carve a shop out of any of these and the living space drops by exactly that much, which is why the plans below list the two numbers separately.
Small does not mean cheap per square foot. It means cheap in total. That distinction has its own section further down, and it is the single most misunderstood thing about building small.
Our Favorite Small Barndominium Floor Plans
JRW-10002 Amerie
612 sq ft heated · 1,752 sq ft under roof · 1 bed · 1 bath · 48′ x 38′ · 1 story
Amerie is the smallest plan on this page and the clearest illustration of why heated square footage is the number to read. The house is 612 square feet — one bedroom, one bath, an open living and kitchen space — sitting inside a 1,752 square foot building. Only 35% of what is under that roof is living space. The rest is shop.
That makes it a specific answer to a specific problem: a place to live on land you are working, a guest house, or a first build you intend to add to later. It is not a family home and it does not pretend to be. What it does have is the most generous shop-to-house ratio of anything here, and it is the only plan on this page with photographs of a finished build rather than renderings.
PL-71003 Jericho
1,350 sq ft heated · 1,596 sq ft under roof · 3 bed · 2 bath · 42′ x 32′ · 1 story · ICF construction
Jericho is the opposite case and the most efficient plan on this page. 1,350 of its 1,596 square feet under roof is heated — 85%. There is almost no unconditioned space, which means almost nothing you are paying to roof that you cannot live in.
Three bedrooms and two baths inside a 42 by 32 foot footprint is tight, and it works because the plan does not waste area on circulation. The trade-off is that there is no garage and no shop at all — covered parking would be a separate structure. One thing to know before you price it: Jericho is ICF, not stick frame or a metal kit shell. Insulated concrete forms cost more up front and perform better afterward, and none of the kit pricing you will see quoted for barndominiums applies to it.
RP-10007 Beaumont
1,482 sq ft heated · 1,809 sq ft under roof · 2 bed · 2 bath · 27′ x 37′ · 2 stories
Beaumont is 27 feet wide. That is the plan to look at if your problem is not budget but frontage — a narrow lot, a deep lot, a setback that rules out everything else, or an infill site where a 60-foot building simply will not fit.
It gets 1,482 heated square feet out of a 999 square foot footprint by going up: two full stories, two bedrooms, two baths. That is the trade every narrow plan makes. You get stairs, you get a stairwell taking floor area out of both levels, and single-level living is off the table. In exchange you get a house that fits where nothing else does, and 82% of the building is conditioned space.
GJ-4405 Dover
1,572 sq ft heated · 2,949 sq ft under roof · 3 bed · 2 bath · 982 sq ft garage · 65′ x 40′ · 1 story
Dover sits right at the top of the small range and is the most conventional plan here — three bedrooms, two baths, single story, everything on one level, and a 982 square foot attached garage that genuinely holds two vehicles plus storage.
It is the plan for someone who wants a small house rather than a small building. 53% of what is under the roof is heated, so nearly half the structure is garage and porch. If you have the frontage for a 65-foot building and you want covered parking without a separate shop, this is the one that fits that description without compromise.
Almost All House, Or A Small House With A Shop
Those four plans are two completely different buildings wearing the same label, and knowing which one you want narrows the search faster than any other filter.
Almost all house. Jericho at 85% heated and Beaumont at 82% put nearly everything under the roof to work as living space. These are the plans to look at when land is expensive, the lot is tight, or you want the lowest possible cost for a given number of bedrooms. You are not paying to roof a shop you do not need.
A small house with real workspace. Dover at 53% and Amerie at 35% put a compact home inside a building that also does a job. The house is small on purpose so the shop can be big. These cost more to build in total than their heated square footage suggests, because a roof over a shop still costs money — but far less per square foot than the living space does.
The practical test: if you already own tools, equipment or a vehicle you need indoors, the second shape is what you are looking for and the heated figure alone will mislead you. If you do not, the first shape gets you more house for the same money.
Mini And Tiny Barndominium Plans Under 1,000 Sq Ft
Reese JRW-10004
612 sq ft heated · 1,776 sq ft under roof · 1 bed · 1 bath · 1,064 sq ft shop · 46′ x 38′ · 1 story
Reese is the same 612 square feet in a different shell, and putting it next to Amerie is the fastest way to understand what you are actually choosing at this size. One bedroom, one bath, an open living room and kitchen, a full bath with the laundry built into it — the living half is close to identical. The building around it is 46 by 38 feet instead of 48 by 38, with 1,064 square feet of that given over to shop.
What changes is the detail. The shop has a large overhead door at the front, an exit door at the back, and an interior door straight into the living room — so the workspace is part of the house rather than a separate building that happens to share a roof. There is a 100 square foot covered patio off the living area. The roof runs a 7:12 pitch to a height of 17 feet 8 inches, ceilings are 9 feet, and it is drawn for stick frame on a concrete slab.
That is the honest summary of shopping below 1,000 square feet: the floor plans converge and the shell is where the decisions are. Width, pitch, where the shop door goes, whether you can walk from the truck bay to the kitchen without going outside. Read those before you read the square footage, because the square footage will be the same on every plan you compare.
Mini barndominium plans and tiny barndominium plans are the same thing under two names, and the line sits at about 1,000 heated square feet. Below it, a plan stops being a compact house and becomes a single well-organized space.
Amerie is the mini barndominium on this page. At 612 heated square feet it is one bedroom, one bathroom, and an open kitchen and living area, inside a 1,752 square foot building that is mostly shop. That is the shape most mini barndominium floor plans take — the house is small because the building is doing a second job.
What These Plans Get Called
The naming is genuinely confusing and it is worth untangling before you search further. A mini barn house, a tiny pole barn home, a barn style tiny home and a tiny barndominium are all describing the same building. Which name gets used depends mostly on where the designer started: “pole barn home” and “mini barn house” come from people who started with a barn and put a house in it; “tiny barndominium” comes from people who started with a house and gave it a barn’s shell. The plans that result are close to identical.
What actually differs is construction. A pole barn home is post-frame — posts set in the ground or on brackets, no continuous foundation wall. A barndominium may be post-frame, a metal building kit, stick frame or, like Jericho above, insulated concrete forms. That difference changes your cost and your financing far more than the name does, so ask which one a plan is drawn for before you buy.
What Changes Below 1,000 Square Feet
A second bedroom stops fitting without making both of them small. Storage has to be designed in rather than found later, because there is no spare corner. The kitchen and living space become one room whether you planned it that way or not. And a full-size laundry usually gives way to a stacked unit in a closet.
What does not change is the cost per square foot. A 612 square foot plan still needs a kitchen, a bathroom, a service panel, a water heater and a septic connection, and none of those get cheaper because there are fewer square feet to spread them over. Expect roughly $40,000 to $98,000 finished — genuinely affordable in total, and toward the top of the $65 to $160 range per foot.
Where A Mini Barndominium Makes Sense
A guest house or in-law suite. A rental on land you already own. A place to live while a larger build goes up. Or a first structure you intend to extend later — which is a legitimate strategy and much easier when the original plan anticipated it. Ask the designer about adding on before you buy rather than after.
What Does It Cost To Build A Small Barndominium?
Building small is cheaper in total and more expensive per square foot, and almost everything written about small barndominium costs gets this backwards.
A finished barndominium runs $65 to $160 per square foot depending on where you build, what you finish it in, and how much work you do yourself. On the plans above that works out as:
- 612 sq ft (Amerie) — roughly $40,000 to $98,000
- 1,350 sq ft (Jericho) — roughly $88,000 to $216,000
- 1,482 sq ft (Beaumont) — roughly $96,000 to $237,000
- 1,572 sq ft (Dover) — roughly $102,000 to $252,000
Small plans land in the lower half of the total-cost range because there is less of everything. But expect to sit toward the upper end of the per-square-foot range, and here is why.
Why Small Costs More Per Square Foot
A kitchen costs what a kitchen costs. So does a bathroom, a service panel, a water heater, an HVAC system, a permit, a septic connection and a driveway. None of those get cheaper because the house is smaller — they just become a larger share of a smaller budget. A 1,200 square foot house and a 2,400 square foot house can have the same kitchen, the same two bathrooms and the same mechanical package. Spread across half the floor area, that lands as a higher number per foot.
The corollary is the useful part: the cheapest square footage in any build is the square footage you add to a plan you are already building. If a 1,200 square foot plan is at the edge of your budget, stretching to 1,400 usually costs less per added foot than anything else you could buy.
What Your Budget Actually Buys
- $100,000 — roughly 625 to 1,540 finished square feet. A small barndominium is squarely what this budget buys, and at the top of that range only with owner labor and basic finishes.
- $150,000 — roughly 940 to 2,300 square feet. Every plan on this page is comfortably inside this budget at mid-range finishes.
- $200,000 — roughly 1,250 to 3,100 square feet. At this budget a small plan can carry high-end finishes, or you can add a shop wing and stay inside it.
Those are arithmetic on the range above, not quotes.
The Kit Shell Is A Different Number
A metal building kit runs $20 to $35 per square foot for the shell, plus $10 to $15 per square foot to erect it. On a 1,200 square foot building that is roughly $36,000 to $60,000 for a weathertight shell on a slab — no interior, no mechanicals, no finishes. It is the figure that makes barndominiums look cheap and it is not a house yet. It also does not apply to every plan: Jericho above is ICF and Dover and Beaumont are conventional construction.
Every figure here moves with your market. Get three local bids before you commit to a number.
Small Barndominium Plans With A Garage
A garage on a small plan is a bigger decision than on a large one, because on a small building it is competing directly with your living space.
Inside a single small footprint, every square foot the garage takes comes out of the house. Carve a two-car garage — call it 500 square feet — out of a 30×40 building and you are left with 700 square feet of living space, which is one bedroom, not two. That is the arithmetic behind most disappointing small barndominium builds.
Attaching the garage alongside instead keeps the house whole, and it is what Dover and Amerie both do. Dover’s 982 square foot garage sits outside its 1,572 square feet of living space; Amerie’s shop is more than twice the size of its house. Both need more lot width than the heated figure implies — Dover wants 65 feet before setbacks.
If covered parking matters more than a workshop, look at the plans without garages too, and price a carport as a modification. A carport is covered but open-sided, and it does not lock.
Inside A Small Barndominium
The inside of a small barndominium does not feel like the inside of a small house, and that is the whole appeal.
Clear-span construction is why. A barndominium’s roof load is carried on the exterior walls, so there is no interior load-bearing wall anywhere in the plan. In a conventional 1,200 square foot house the structure dictates where walls go and you get a series of small rooms. In the same footprint as a barndominium, the kitchen, dining and living space can be one uninterrupted room with nothing standing in the middle of it.
Ceiling height does more than floor area. Nine or ten foot ceilings, or a vaulted great room, changes how a small plan reads far more than another 100 square feet would. It is also cheap volume — you are already building the walls.
What you give up: sound and smell travel in an open plan, and there is nowhere to close a door on a mess. Small plans with a separate laundry or mudroom are worth more than the square footage suggests, because they are the only rooms that contain anything.
Windows on the long walls. With no load-bearing interior walls, glazing can go almost anywhere on the two long elevations — which is what stops a compact plan feeling like a corridor.
Browse Small Barndominium Plans By Size And Bedrooms
Four plans is a starting point, not the whole catalog. Narrow it by the constraint that actually decides your build.
By footprint. Our 30×40 barndominium house plans give 1,200 square feet and are the most popular small footprint there is. 40×40 barndominium house plans give 1,600 and reach three bedrooms. 30×60 barndominium house plans give 1,800 in a long narrow building, which suits a deep lot.
By bedroom count. 1-bedroom barndominium house plans for a guest house, a rental or a build for one. 2-bedroom barndominium floor plans is where most small builds land. 3-bedroom barndominium floor plans is the practical ceiling under 1,600 square feet.
By what the building also has to do. If a workshop is the point, our barndominium with shop plans cover the range from a single bay to a full commercial space. For extra sleeping or storage volume without extra footprint, barndominium plans with a loft use the height a small plan already has. And if a compact house inside a very large building is what you want, our RV garage house plans take that idea to its limit.
If nothing fits, a custom plan starts from your lot and your list rather than from a catalog.
Which Small Plan Fits Your Build?
Start with the thing that cannot change.
If the lot is narrow, Beaumont at 27 feet wide is the only plan here that fits, and the two stories are the price of that.
If the budget is the constraint, Amerie at 612 heated square feet is the smallest thing that is still a house, and it is the only plan on this page with photographs of a finished build.
If you need three bedrooms and nothing else, Jericho gets there in 1,350 square feet with 85% of the building conditioned — the most efficient plan here. Price it as ICF, not as a kit.
If you want a normal small house with a garage, Dover is it: single level, three bedrooms, 982 square feet of garage, and enough frontage required that the lot needs to be 65 feet wide before setbacks.
If you need a shop more than you need bedrooms, Amerie’s shop is more than twice the size of its house, and our shop plans go considerably further.
Frequently Asked Questions About Small Barndos
What Is Considered A Small Barndominium?
Generally anything under 1,600 heated square feet. Below about 600 square feet you are into cabin and ADU territory; above 1,600 the layout stops making the compromises that define a small plan. Read heated square footage rather than the size of the building — the same structure can hold 612 square feet of living space and over 1,100 square feet of shop.
Is It Cheaper To Build A Small Barndominium?
Cheaper in total, more expensive per square foot. There is less of everything, so the total is lower. But a kitchen, a bathroom, a service panel, an HVAC system, a permit and a driveway cost roughly the same whatever the floor area, so they become a larger share of a smaller budget. Expect the total to be lower and the per-square-foot figure to sit toward the upper end of the $65 to $160 range.
How Much Does It Cost To Build A Small Barndominium?
Use a planning range of $65 to $160 per square foot finished. On the plans on this page that is roughly $40,000 to $98,000 for a 612 square foot one-bedroom, and roughly $102,000 to $252,000 for 1,572 square feet with a garage. A metal building kit shell is a separate and much lower number — $20 to $35 per square foot plus $10 to $15 to erect it — but a shell is not a finished house. Get three local bids.
How Big Of A Barndominium Can I Build For $100,000?
Roughly 625 to 1,540 finished square feet, depending on your market, your finishes and how much of the work you do yourself. A small barndominium is squarely what a $100,000 budget buys. Reaching the top of that range generally means owner labor and basic finishes rather than a turnkey build.
How Many Bedrooms Fit In A Small Barndominium?
Two comfortably, three if the plan is drawn efficiently. Jericho fits three bedrooms and two baths into 1,350 square feet by wasting nothing on circulation. Four bedrooms under 1,600 square feet means rooms small enough that most buyers regret it. If a shop is inside the same footprint, plan on one or two bedrooms rather than three.
Can A Small Barndominium Have A Garage Or Shop?
Yes, and the important question is whether it sits inside the footprint or alongside it. Inside a single small building, every square foot of garage comes directly out of your living space — a 500 square foot garage inside a 30×40 leaves 700 square feet of house. Attached alongside, the house stays whole but the building needs more lot width. Dover and Amerie both take the second approach.
What Is A Mini Barndominium?
The same thing as a tiny barndominium, and the bottom end of the small range — generally under 1,000 heated square feet. In practice that means one bedroom, one bathroom, and an open kitchen and living space, often inside a building whose remaining area is shop or garage. Amerie on this page is 612 heated square feet inside a 1,752 square foot building. You will also see the same plans called mini barn houses, tiny pole barn homes and barn style tiny homes.
How Much Does A Mini Barndominium Cost?
Roughly $40,000 to $98,000 finished for 612 square feet, using the same $65 to $160 per square foot range that applies to any barndominium. A metal shell for a building that size is far less — $20 to $35 per square foot plus $10 to $15 to erect it — but a shell has no kitchen, no bathroom and no mechanicals. Expect a mini barndominium to sit toward the upper end of the per-square-foot range, because a kitchen and a bathroom cost what they cost however small the house is.