Free Contractor Tool
Service Van Cost Per Mile Calculator
Find what your van actually costs to run — per mile, per year, and per job. Then see how much of your average ticket disappears before anyone picks up a tool.
Built by SubcontractorHub — the software contractors use to quote, finance, and run every job.
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Calculate Your Cost Per Mile
Enter one van's costs. Fixed costs are spread across the miles you actually drive, which is why annual mileage matters more than any single expense line.
1. Fixed costs — what the van costs whether it moves or not
Enter 0 if the van is paid off.
2. Mileage & running costs
The biggest driver of the result — measure it, don't guess.
Commonly $0.10–$0.18.
3. Translate it to a job
Cost per mile
$0.98
Total annual vehicle cost
$17,670
Vehicle cost per job
$27.49
Share of average ticket
6.5%
Fixed cost is $0.62 per mile and running cost is $0.37 per mile. Fixed cost is 63% of the total.
If this van drove 25% fewer miles for the same fixed costs, cost per mile would rise to $1.19. That is the trap in adding a van before the work exists to fill it: the fixed cost arrives immediately and the miles do not.
This models fixed annual costs spread over annual miles plus per-mile running costs. It does not include the technician's drive-time labour, parts inventory carried on the van, downtime while a vehicle is out of service, tolls, parking, or tax treatment such as Section 179 or mileage deductions, any of which may change the figure materially. All calculations are estimates based on historical information and should be verified by the user. This tool is provided as a free service for planning purposes only and is not a substitute for professional accounting, financial, or tax advice.
From Material Takeoffs to a Signed Proposal
SubcontractorHub is the platform contractors use to turn takeoffs like these into a branded proposal, financing the customer can accept on the spot, and a scheduled job — without re-entering the job anywhere. This tool is free to use; the platform is here if you want a closer look.
Cost per mile is a scheduling number as much as a vehicle number. The cheapest mile is the one nobody drives — jobs grouped by area, parts staged before the truck rolls, and second trips eliminated. That is a scheduling and dispatch problem, and it shows up on every trade: HVAC, roofing, and solar crews all lose the same margin to avoidable windshield time.
How Cost Per Mile Actually Works
The formula
(Annual fixed costs ÷ annual miles) + variable cost per mile
Fixed costs accrue whether the van moves or not: the payment or depreciation, insurance, registration, permits, and the wrap. Variable costs accrue per mile: fuel, maintenance, tires. Splitting them this way is what makes the number useful, because it shows you which half you can actually influence.
For most service businesses the fixed half dominates, and that has a counterintuitive consequence — the way to cut cost per mile is usually not to spend less on the van but to get more productive miles out of it, or to get the same revenue from fewer miles. A van that sits idle three days a week is expensive per mile no matter how carefully you shop for tires.
One caution on double counting: use the loan payment or depreciation, never both. The payment tells you the cash leaving the business. Depreciation tells you the economic cost of the value the van is consuming. For a keep-or-replace decision, depreciation is the honest number; for a can-I-make-payroll question, the payment is.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do you calculate cost per mile for a service van?
- Add every fixed cost the van incurs whether it moves or not — payment or depreciation, insurance, registration, permits, and wrap amortisation — then divide that annual total by the miles you actually drive. Add the variable costs that accrue per mile: fuel, maintenance, and tires. The formula is (annual fixed costs / annual miles) + variable cost per mile. A van costing $9,000 a year in fixed costs and driven 20,000 miles carries $0.45 per mile in fixed cost alone, before a drop of fuel.
- What is a typical cost per mile for a service van?
- Published 2026 benchmarks for cargo vans generally fall between roughly $0.70 and $1.05 per mile all-in, with fuel around $0.18–$0.25 and maintenance around $0.10–$0.18 per mile. Service vans often sit at the higher end of the range because they cover fewer annual miles than delivery fleets, so the fixed costs spread across a smaller denominator. Your own number matters far more than any benchmark, because annual mileage is the single biggest driver of the result.
- Why does a low-mileage van cost more per mile?
- Because fixed costs do not shrink when the van sits. A $9,000-a-year van driven 30,000 miles carries $0.30 per mile of fixed cost; the same van driven 12,000 miles carries $0.75. This is why adding a van before you have the work to fill it hurts twice — you take on the full fixed cost and spread it across fewer miles, raising the cost per mile on the vehicle you already had.
- Should I include the technician's drive time in vehicle cost per mile?
- Keep them separate but look at them together. Cost per mile should measure the vehicle so you can compare vehicles and decide about replacements. Drive time is a labour cost and belongs in your labour burden and utilisation numbers. That said, when you are pricing a job or deciding whether to serve a distant customer, the number that matters is the combined figure — vehicle cost plus the burdened cost of the hours spent driving, which is usually the larger of the two.
- How do I use cost per mile to price a job?
- Multiply your cost per mile by the round-trip miles for that job to get the vehicle cost of showing up. Compare it against the ticket. If a two-hour job 40 miles away carries $60 of vehicle cost plus drive-time labour against a $350 ticket, the trip is eating a meaningful share of the margin before anyone picks up a tool. Most contractors either build this into overhead recovery or set a trip charge for work beyond a defined radius.
- Does depreciation or the loan payment belong in the calculation?
- Use one or the other, not both, or you will double count. If you want the cash cost of operating the van, use the loan or lease payment. If you want the economic cost — what the van is actually consuming in value — use depreciation, which is roughly the purchase price minus expected resale, divided by the years you will keep it. Owners deciding whether to keep or replace a vehicle should look at the depreciation version.
- How many miles per year does a typical service van drive?
- Most residential service vans run somewhere between 12,000 and 25,000 miles a year, depending on service area density and how tightly routes are built. Rural and wide-territory operations push higher. The figure is worth measuring rather than estimating, because it is the denominator in the entire calculation — a 20% error in annual mileage moves your cost per mile by roughly 20% in the opposite direction.
- What is the fastest way to lower cost per mile?
- Drive fewer miles for the same revenue, which is a scheduling problem rather than a vehicle problem. Tighter routing, grouping jobs by area on the same day, and cutting return trips for parts all reduce miles without touching the ticket. Fuel and maintenance savings are real but small by comparison; the leverage is in the denominator and in how many times a van has to visit the same address to finish one job.
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See how SubcontractorHub keeps scheduling, dispatch, and job records in one place — so crews drive fewer miles per job and second trips stop quietly eating the margin.
Book a DemoVehicle operating costs vary widely by vehicle class, region, fuel prices, driving conditions, insurance market, and how the vehicle is financed. Published per-mile benchmarks are drawn largely from delivery and logistics fleets and may not represent a low-mileage service van. This tool excludes drive-time labour, on-van parts inventory, downtime, tolls, and tax treatment such as Section 179 or standard mileage deductions. All calculations are estimates based on historical information and should be verified by the user. This tool is provided as a free service for planning purposes only and is not a substitute for professional accounting, financial, or tax advice.