Shops quote build time. Buyers hear delivery date. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is where most of the frustration in this industry lives. Book a build in March expecting a summer of use, discover in August that your slot has not started, and you have lost a season you cannot get back. Here is the whole timeline, including the part nobody quotes.
How long it actually takes
Build time runs from four weeks for a budget conversion to fourteen months for full custom. Total wait from deposit to keys is commonly six to twenty months. The difference is the queue, and the queue is usually the larger half.
| Tier | Design | Queue | Build | Deposit to keys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget catalogue | None to 1 week | 1 to 3 months | 4 to 8 weeks | 2 to 5 months |
| Mid-range | 1 to 3 weeks | 3 to 8 months | 3 to 6 months | 6 to 14 months |
| Premium custom | 3 to 8 weeks | 6 to 12 months | 6 to 14 months | 12 to 26 months |
Tier predicts wait more reliably than anything else, and it does so for a boring reason: a shop building its own layout for the fortieth time has the drawings, the cut list and the parts already sorted. Shops at the accessible end of the market can turn work around in weeks because there is nothing to design. Shops drawing each van from scratch cannot, and should not pretend otherwise.
Why every guide gives you a different number
Search this question and you will be told four to six months, three to twelve months, and twelve to eighteen months, all by shops that build vans for a living. They are not contradicting each other. They are measuring from different starting lines and none of them says which.
| When the clock starts | Typical figure quoted | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|
| Bench time on your van | 6 to 16 weeks | Design, queue, parts, handover. Most of the wait |
| Slot start to collection | 3 to 6 months | The queue, which is often longer than this figure |
| Deposit to collection | 6 to 20 months | Nothing. This is the number you plan around |
| First enquiry to collection | 12 to 26 months | Nothing, and it includes your own decision time |
This single ambiguity causes more disappointment than any genuine delay does. When you collect quotes, write the start point next to every figure, because a shop quoting eight weeks and a shop quoting nine months may be offering you the same delivery date. Asking which clock a number refers to belongs on the same list as everything else worth settling before you choose a shop.
Why the queue exists at all
The queue is not a sales tactic and it is not disorganisation. It is arithmetic.
A conversion shop with four bays and a four month build cycle completes roughly twelve vans a year. Take twenty deposits and you have created an eight month queue on the day you accept the last one, without anybody doing anything wrong. Every shop in this industry is small in a way buyers consistently underestimate.
For scale, the entire US factory van camper category is tiny. RVIA's monthly shipment survey recorded 909 van campers shipped across the whole country in May 2026, and 4,075 in the first five months of the year, against 138,160 RVs of all types. Custom conversion shops sit well below even that, and there are only so many of them: we hold published pricing for 46 US builders, and Colorado, the deepest state market in the country, has fifteen.
Two practical consequences follow. Booking in autumn rather than spring routinely halves the queue, because every buyer wants the van finished by June and shops fill summer slots first. And a shop with no queue at all is worth a question rather than a celebration, because in a market this small, availability usually means something.
It also explains why growth does not fix this. A shop cannot hire its way out of a queue quickly, because the constraint is rarely floor space. It is the one person who does the electrical properly, and that person takes a year to replace and longer to train. Shops that expand fastest are usually the ones that standardised their layouts first, which is the same reason their lead times are shorter.
What the build time is spent on
A mid-range conversion is not four months of continuous work on your van. It is roughly six to ten weeks of actual labour spread across a longer window, because materials arrive when they arrive, specialists are shared between projects, and your van sits in a bay next to three others.
- Design and drawings, 2 to 6 weeks. Happens before your slot, and it is your speed rather than theirs. Slow decisions here push everything downstream by the same amount.
- Strip, sound deadening, insulation, subfloor, 1 to 2 weeks. Fast, cheap in labour terms, and the part you never see again. Also the part that decides whether the van works in February.
- Roof penetrations and electrical rough-in, 2 to 3 weeks. The specialist stage. Fan and solar cuts, window apertures, the wiring loom before anything covers it. Delays commonly start here because it is where the scarce skills are.
- Cabinetry, 2 to 5 weeks. The longest single stage on a custom build, because it is manufactured rather than fitted. A shop with in-house CNC compresses this substantially.
- Plumbing, appliances and finish, 2 to 3 weeks. Tanks, pumps, heater, fridge, upholstery, trim.
- Commissioning, snagging and handover, 1 week. Everything run under load, faults found and fixed before you leave. Weak shops skip this and you find out in your first month.
Six weeks of work inside a four month build
Add those stages up and you get eight to twenty weeks of labour, against a build window that a shop will describe as three to six months. That gap is normal and it is worth understanding, because month two of a build is when most customers quietly start to panic.
Your van is not being ignored. It is waiting for a batch of parts, or for the one person who does electrical to finish the van in the next bay, or for a cabinet run to come off a machine that is currently cutting somebody else's. Shops interleave projects because the alternative is idle specialists, and idle specialists are what makes builds expensive.
What you should expect in return is visibility. A shop confident in its process sends photographs at named stages without being chased. A shop that goes quiet for six weeks and then asks for a progress payment has told you something about how the rest of it will go.
What makes it take longer
Four causes account for nearly every overrun, and you control two of them completely.
| Cause | Typical delay | In your control? |
|---|---|---|
| Slow decisions during design | 2 to 8 weeks | Yes, entirely |
| Change orders after build start | 1 to 6 weeks each | Yes |
| Chassis availability | 1 to 6 months | Partly, by buying used or supplying your own |
| Parts and appliance lead times | 2 to 10 weeks | No, but a good shop orders early |
Change orders deserve the attention. Deciding in month three that you want a shower is not a scheduling adjustment, it is a redesign: the plumbing run moves, the electrical load changes, the cabinet already built no longer fits, and the water tank needs somewhere else to live. The cheapest moment to change your mind is before the drawings are signed, and the price of changing it later is set by a policy you should have read at the start.
Parts have their own clock
The stage list above assumes materials are on the shelf. Several key components are not, and their lead times run concurrently with the build rather than after it, which is why a shop that orders late loses weeks it can never recover.
| Component | Typical lead time | What it blocks if late |
|---|---|---|
| Lithium batteries and inverters | 2 to 4 weeks | Electrical rough-in, so nearly everything after it |
| Windows and roof hatches | 3 to 6 weeks | Roof and wall penetrations, which come early |
| Fridges, heaters, cooktops | 1 to 3 weeks | Cabinetry fit-out and final plumbing |
| Custom upholstery and cushions | 3 to 8 weeks | Handover only, so it rarely blocks |
| The chassis itself | 1 to 6 months | Everything. Nothing starts without a van |
The chassis is the one worth planning around. A factory order on a Sprinter, a Transit or a ProMaster in a specific wheelbase, roof height and drivetrain can take months to arrive, and a shop cannot begin work on a van that does not exist. Turning up with your own van removes the single longest external delay from the schedule.
What a delay actually costs you
Nobody writing about this attaches a number to a slipped date, which is why buyers accept vague completion targets that they would refuse if the cost were visible. Here is a three month overrun on a mid-range build, priced honestly.
The housing line is the one that catches people. Somebody who gave notice on a lease for a June handover and gets the van in September has paid three months of rent they had planned not to pay, which on its own can exceed the difference between two shops' quotes. That is the argument for a written completion date with a stated consequence, and it is a reasonable thing to ask for.
There is a softer cost too, and it is the one people regret. A van finished in October has missed the season it was bought for, which means the first real use is eight months after handover, by which time the snagging window has quietly closed on faults nobody found because nobody was living in it. Build slips do not just move the date, they move the shakedown into a period when the shop no longer has to care.
How to shorten the wait
- Take a catalogue layout rather than a custom one. A shop building a layout it has built forty times moves faster, charges less and makes fewer mistakes. Custom is worth its premium when you have a real constraint, not by default.
- Supply the chassis yourself. This removes the longest external delay outright, and buying used removes it immediately rather than partially.
- Book in autumn. Summer slots fill first because everyone wants the van by June. The same shop can quote half the queue for a January start.
- Sign off the drawings quickly, then stop changing them. The single largest lever you personally hold over the schedule.
- Ask about cancellation slots. Queues shed customers constantly. A shop with a slot opening in six weeks will usually say so if asked directly, and almost never advertises it.
- Consider a finished van from stock. Several shops keep completed builds. It is available now, the price is known, and it finances far more easily than a build that does not exist yet.
- Split the work. Some shops do the electrical, plumbing and roof penetrations and hand the van back for you to finish. It shortens the shop stage substantially and takes the dangerous work off your hands.
Doing it yourself
A DIY build has no queue and no shop schedule, which makes it sound faster. It is almost never faster.
| Hours per week | Realistic completion | Who this is |
|---|---|---|
| 5 to 10 | 18 to 24 months | Weekends only, full-time job, no workshop |
| 8 to 12 | 12 to 18 months | Most first-time builders |
| 20 or more | 6 to 12 months | Between jobs, or a partner working alongside |
| Full time | 3 to 6 months | Rare, and usually somebody with a trade background |
The reason first attempts run long is not laziness, it is that three stages take far longer than anybody's estimate. Electrical typically runs two to four times the planned hours for somebody learning it, plumbing two to three times, and cabinetmaking three to five times, because square cuts in a vehicle with no square surfaces are genuinely difficult. Doubling your own estimate is not pessimism, it is the observed pattern, and the honest comparison between doing it yourself and paying a shop has to price those hours rather than ignore them.
What to agree before you pay
Three dates in writing, not one. The date your slot starts, the target completion date, and the date your deposit stops being refundable.
That third one is what shops are least likely to volunteer and most likely to matter. It frequently falls when the queue begins rather than when the build does, which can be six months before anybody touches your van and long before you have seen a single piece of evidence that the shop can deliver.
Ask for one more thing while you are at it: what happens if the target date slips by more than a month. A shop with an answer has thought about it. A shop without one will improvise, and the improvisation will not favour you. Both questions cost nothing to ask and they sort shops faster than any amount of reading about what different tiers of build cost.
Key takeaways
- Build time is 4 weeks to 14 months. Deposit to keys is commonly 6 to 20 months.
- Ask which clock a quoted figure refers to. Bench time, slot start and deposit date give wildly different answers to the same question.
- The queue is arithmetic, not a tactic. A four-bay shop finishes about twelve vans a year.
- A mid-range build contains only 6 to 10 weeks of labour spread across a longer window. That is normal.
- Long-lead parts run concurrently with the build. Ask when your shop orders them, not whether.
- Booking in autumn rather than spring routinely halves the queue.
- A three month overrun can cost $4,000 to $12,000 once housing and tied-up capital are counted.
- Get three dates in writing, including when your deposit stops being refundable.