Standard garage door sizes: widths, heights and what they cost

Every standard garage door size in one place: single, double, tall and RV openings, the headroom and side room each one needs, and the installed Las Vegas price beside every size.

The standard single garage door is 8 ft or 9 ft wide by 7 ft high, and the standard double is 16 ft wide by 7 ft high. Widths run 8, 9, 10, 12, 16 and 18 ft, heights are usually 7 ft or 8 ft, and RV openings go taller again. In the Las Vegas Valley a replacement single steel door starts at $1,150 installed and a double 16x7 starts at $1,450, with insulated versions from $1,550 and $2,050.

Standard single garage door sizes

A single car door is 8 ft or 9 ft wide in almost every case, and 7 ft high. The 8 ft width belongs to older and more compact garages, 9 ft is what most newer construction uses, and 10 ft shows up where somebody wanted room for a wide vehicle or a workbench along one wall.

Height is the measurement people forget. A 7 ft opening clears an ordinary sedan or crossover without a thought, and it is the one that catches out a lifted truck or anything with a rack or a cargo box on the roof. If that is your vehicle, measure it before you order a door rather than after.

Standard double garage door sizes

The standard double is 16 ft wide by 7 ft high, which is the width that lets two ordinary cars sit side by side with room to open the doors. An 18 ft opening is the next step up and buys real elbow room rather than just looking bigger.

Clopay, whose published buying guide is one of the sources Google leans on for this question, puts it the same way: the two most common singles are 8 ft and 9 ft wide by 7 ft high, doubles run to 18 ft wide, and 8 ft tall doors are becoming more common. Our own Clopay door page covers the styles we fit most here.

What size garage door for a 24x24 garage?

A 24 ft by 24 ft garage is a genuine two car garage, and a 16x7 door is the size that normally goes in it. An 18 ft door fits too if the framing allows, and it is the better choice if you park two full size vehicles and want to open both front doors without a careful shuffle.

The other common answer for a 24 ft wide garage is two separate single doors, usually 9x7 each with a post between them. Two singles look tidier on some homes and mean one failure does not lock both cars in. The trade is two openers, two sets of springs and a post you have to steer around.

RV and oversized garage door sizes

RV openings are their own category. Widths of 10, 12, 14 and 16 ft are all normal, and heights run 10, 12 and 14 ft depending on what is going inside. Clopay publishes custom widths up to 20 ft. A motorhome with roof air conditioning needs the height measured at the highest point on the unit, not at the roofline.

Two things change once a door passes the standard sizes. The weight goes up sharply, so spring sizing stops being a catalogue lookup and becomes a calculation against the real door. And the opener has to be matched to it, which is often where a wall mount jackshaft unit earns its place instead of an overhead motor. Both are covered on our new garage door installation page.

How to measure your garage door opening

Measure the opening itself, not the door that is hanging in it. Five numbers describe any garage door opening, and a supplier will ask for all five.

• Width: across the finished opening at its widest point, in inches.
• Height: from the floor to the top of the finished opening, at the highest point.
• Headroom: from the top of the opening up to the ceiling or the lowest obstruction.
• Side room: from each side of the opening out to the nearest wall or obstruction, measured on both sides because they are often different.
• Backroom: from the opening straight back to the rear wall or the first thing in the way.

Measure in inches and write down what you get rather than rounding to the nearest foot. A 16 ft door is a 192 in opening, and an opening that measures 190 in or 194 in is telling you something about the framing that matters before anybody orders a panel.

The clearances a standard door needs

A size only fits if the space around the opening allows the hardware. Clopay publishes the standard minimums, and they are the same ones a supplier will quote you: about 12 in of headroom for a torsion spring system, about 10 in for extension springs, roughly 3.75 in of side room on each side, and backroom equal to the door height plus 18 in.

Short on headroom is the common one, especially in a garage with ductwork or a low ceiling. It is not a dead end. Low headroom track kits exist and a wall mount opener removes the overhead motor entirely, which between them solve most tight garages. It does need to be known before the door is ordered, because it changes the hardware package.

What each size costs installed in the Las Vegas Valley

These are our published Las Vegas prices, the same list that is on the price list page, with the door and the labor shown separately there and haul-away of the old door included in every line.

Oversized, tall and RV doors are quoted in writing against the actual opening, because the panel, the track and the springs all change. You get a flat written price before any work starts, and the diagnosis costs you nothing if you decide not to go ahead.

If the door itself is sound and it is the hardware that has failed, a replacement is not the question you are answering. A torsion spring pair is $295 to $425 installed, lift cables are $140 to $220 a pair, and a set of 10 nylon rollers is $135 to $195, all on the same published list. What that work involves is on the garage door repair page.

What we see in Las Vegas garages

Across the valley the 16x7 double is far and away the most common door on our trucks, which is what you would expect from a metro built largely in tract neighborhoods. The sizes that break the pattern cluster in particular places, and it is worth knowing if you live in one of them. Oversized and full-view glass doors are common in The Ridges and Red Rock Country Club, which is why the Summerlin page spends so much time on heavy doors, and the same is true of Seven Hills and MacDonald Highlands over in Henderson.

A door on springs that were sized to the catalogue rather than to the door is the failure we get called out to most often on premium doors, and it shows up early. That is the whole reason the size question matters beyond fitting a car in the garage.

Size is not only a fitting question here, it is a paperwork question. The first condition in Clark County's own permit exemption for replacing a door is that the replacement is of the same size and type, so a door ordered to the size already in the opening stays exempt and a wider opening does not. Garage door permit requirements in Clark County quotes the three conditions and the city's plain language version of the same rule.