Campgrounds Near L.A., Ranked. The Beach RV Park Comes Last.

Ranked by nightly rate, the drive, and whether you can actually book a site.

The best campground near Los Angeles costs $45 a night and sits four miles off the 101, and it isn't the one on the sand. Malibu Creek State Park comes first. Dockweiler RV Park, the county's beachfront lot at the end of the 105, comes last. That's my hot take, and I'll defend it below.

California State Parks' own pages for Malibu Creek, Leo Carrillo and Point Mugu list open dates and day-use fees but no nightly camping rate. The state-park prices below come from the National Park Service's camping table for the Santa Monica Mountains, which was last updated in January 2022.

1. Malibu Creek State Park, Calabasas. It's $45 a night or $315 a week, according to the Park Service table, for one of 62 tent or RV sites with showers and fire rings. The park's directions are about as simple as camping gets: exit the 101 at Las Virgenes, head toward the ocean, and turn in just past Mulholland.

The land used to be 20th Century Fox's Century Ranch, where Planet of the Apes and M*A*S*H were filmed, and it opened as a state park in 1976. That's an old Fox backlot, a state park for 50 years now, for the price of a cheap dinner for two. The catch is that some high-demand sites have moved into State Parks' monthly lottery, so check ReserveCalifornia before you plan a weekend around it.

2. Leo Carrillo State Park, Malibu. Same $45, or $60 for a site with electricity, across 135 tent and RV spaces in the Canyon campground. Its own page measures the trip from Santa Monica, 28 miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, so the drive starts after the drive. In exchange, you get 1.5 miles of beach, tide pools and sea caves.

3. Crystal Lake, Angeles National Forest. This is the one I'm least sure about. At $20 a night, the Forest Service's rate (up from $12 in May 2025) is less than half of anything else here. If price were the whole test, it would win.

It isn't, because nobody can book it. The 120 sites are first come, first served, and you pay by dropping cash or a check into a fee tube. The campground sits at the top of Highway 39, at 5,539 feet, with no cell signal and no gas anywhere in the forest. That's a long way to drive on a maybe.

4. Point Mugu State Park, Big Sycamore Canyon. It's $45 a night for one of 58 sites. The cheaper option, the $35 Thornhill Broome beach campground, has been closed since Oct. 8 because of high tide. The park warns it floods often from high tides, tidal surges and rising seas. Its directions start from Oxnard, 15 miles north on Highway 1, which says plenty about the drive from downtown.

All three state parks are covered by a red flag closure plan that State Parks, the Park Service, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority announced Oct. 14. Under it, campgrounds may stay open depending on conditions, but closures are decided day by day, and the agencies say they'll announce them the day before whenever they can.

5. Dockweiler RV Park, Playa del Rey. Here's the fight. L.A. County Beaches & Harbors calls it "freeway-close": take the 105 west until Imperial Highway runs out at the beach. No other campground on this list has an easier drive, and none charges more or allows less.

Tents are banned. Full hookups run $65 in the back row, $70 in the middle and $75 in the front, plus a $10 reservation fee that's never refunded. The $45 dry sites are only for campervans 19 feet or shorter that have a bed, a dinette, a sink and water, so an SUV with a mattress in the back gets turned away.

Then there's the sand. From late October to late March, the county builds berms against the winter tides that can block the ocean view from the front row, and the posted front-row rate is still $75. Thanksgiving week adds $10 a night.

One campground didn't make the list. Chilao, another $20 site in the San Gabriels, stays closed through March 31, 2027, while the Forest Service fixes its water system.

Source: nps.gov, retrieved October 21, 2026. Other sources: State of California, State of California (2), fs.usda.gov, State of California (3), State of California (4), Los Angeles County, fs.usda.gov (2).