How Much Does a Common Garter Snake Really Cost?

Common garter snakes are some of the most affordable snakes you can keep, cheap to acquire, cheap to feed, and in a lot of the country, not even something you have to buy at all. The one place the budget gets less predictable is the diet, which looks nothing like a standard mouse-eating snake's.

The Snake Itself: $20 to $50 Typical, More for Morphs

A real current listing from Backwater Reptiles prices a medium to large normal garter snake at $49.99, and other online retailers list smaller juveniles starting around $30. That puts a normal garter snake below a normal corn snake ($25-70) and well below a normal hognose ($50-100). Color and pattern morphs (albino, checkered albino, anerythristic, and combinations like erythristic-het-anery or flame het albino) are a smaller, newer market than corn snake or hognose morphs, but they do exist and command real premiums on the exotic pet marketplace.

The Free Option: Catching One in Your Backyard

This is unique among the beginner pet snakes. The common garter snake is the most widely distributed snake in North America, found in gardens, vacant lots, and wetlands from Florida to coastal Quebec and west to British Columbia, and plenty of keepers end up with one simply because it turned up in the yard rather than because they went shopping for it.

Two real caveats keep this from being a free lunch. First, regulations vary by state, and a few subspecies, including the federally endangered San Francisco garter snake, carry specific legal protections, so it's worth a quick check of local wildlife rules before you keep a wild one. Second, a wild-caught animal skips the purchase price but not the setup cost or the vet visit, a fecal exam for parasites is a genuinely good idea for any wild-caught snake.

Upfront Setup: Roughly $200 to $400

Item	Cost Range
36x18x18 in or 40-gallon breeder enclosure	$120 - $220
Under-tank heater + thermostat	$35 - $70
Warm, cool, and humid hides	$15 - $30
Water container sized for full submersion	$15 - $30
Digital thermometer and hygrometer	$15 - $25
Substrate (coconut fiber, cypress mulch, or leaf litter)	$15 - $25

A 36x18x18 inch enclosure or an equivalent 40-gallon breeder glass tank is the standard adult size cited across every care sheet we checked. Pair it with an under-tank heater and thermostat, since a heat mat running without one can climb well past a safe temperature.

The line item that makes a garter snake's setup different from a corn snake's or hognose's is the water container. This is a semi-aquatic species that actually swims, not just drinks, so the bowl needs to be deep and wide enough for full submersion. A large soak-able water dish works for a smaller individual, though many keepers size up further to a plastic storage bin, which can cost less than a dedicated reptile-branded soaking dish.

Ongoing Costs: Roughly $195 to $360 a Year

Item	Annual Cost
Frozen fish, earthworms, and mice	$70 - $140
Thiamine (B1) and calcium supplements	$10 - $20
Substrate replacement	$25 - $40
Electricity (heat)	$40 - $70
Annual vet wellness check	$50 - $90

Prices last checked September 2026 at Josh's Frogs and PetSmart. Retail prices move; treat the table as a snapshot, not a quote.

This is where the diet stops being a simple one-line cost. Frozen mice are the cheap, easy default for a corn snake or hognose, one supplier, one product, done. A garter snake's diet spans frozen and thawed fish (tilapia and silversides are common, thiaminase-free choices), earthworms, and sometimes mice, and the total dollar cost lands in a similar range to a standard rodent-only snake. What changes is the sourcing: you're keeping two or three food types on hand instead of one, and if fish make up a large share of the diet, a vitamin B1 supplement becomes a real recurring line item, not an optional extra.

Vet Costs

A routine reptile wellness exam runs roughly $50 to $100, with a fecal test around $25 to $50, worth prioritizing for this species given how much of its natural diet (fish, earthworms, amphibians) can carry parasites. Thiamine deficiency from an unsupplemented, fish-heavy diet is treatable with injectable thiamine plus a diet correction, but it's a condition specific enough to piscivorous snakes that the standard veterinary reference for exotic animal medicine calls out garter and water snakes by name as the group most likely to develop it. Catching it early keeps the vet bill to a single visit; catching it late, once neurological symptoms appear, costs more in both money and risk to the snake.

Lifespan and the Long Game

Wild garter snakes rarely live long, most don't survive their first year or two, with 2 to 4 years being a commonly cited range for the ones that do. Captivity changes that picture substantially: 6 to 10 years is typical with good care, and individuals have been documented living past 20. That's a real span to budget for, even on a snake this inexpensive to run month to month.

The Value Proposition

Among the beginner snakes, a normal garter snake is one of the cheapest to acquire and among the cheapest to set up. The catch isn't cost so much as convenience: a keeper who wants to buy one food type and never think about it again will have an easier time with a corn snake, while someone willing to keep fish and earthworms on hand gets a genuinely inexpensive, active, semi-aquatic pet in return.

The garter snake also shows up alongside the red-footed tortoise and rosy boa in our roundup of Three Reptiles Worth Starting With, Each for a Different Reason.

Sources & Further Reading