Fuel & job travel cost
Miles, mpg and the current pump price — the real cost of getting to the job.
Trip & vehicle
Round trip distance to the job, in miles.
Your van or car's real-world fuel economy.
Current price at the pump, per litre.
Trip cost
— burning through 3.4 litres to get there and back.
A running cost, not a quote. Real mpg varies with load, traffic and driving style — use this to price travel time and fuel into a callout, not as an exact fuel receipt.
Travel time and fuel are real costs on every job, but they're easy to undercharge for because nobody wants to do the maths standing on a doorstep. This tool turns three numbers you already know — the miles for the trip, your vehicle's mpg, and today's pump price — into a straight cost figure you can build into a quote or a callout charge, rather than guessing and hoping it roughly covers itself.
Why it's worth pricing in properly
A five-mile job across town feels cheap to get to, but do that trip twice a day for a fortnight and the fuel adds up to real money that rarely makes it onto an invoice. Most trades either fold travel into a flat callout fee or ignore it altogether, and both approaches tend to undercharge on the jobs that are furthest away — which is exactly where the actual cost is highest. Knowing the real cost per mile for your own van, at today's fuel price, means you can set a callout radius or a mileage rate that actually covers what you're spending, rather than a number picked out of the air a few years ago and never revisited.
The pump price matters more than people think, too. Diesel and petrol prices move by ten or twenty pence a litre over a few months, and a rate that made sense last winter can be quietly losing you money by summer. Punching in the price you paid this week keeps the figure honest.
A worked example
A 30-mile round trip in a van doing 40mpg, with diesel at £1.45 a litre, works out to roughly 3.4 litres used and a fuel cost of about £5 — call it 17p a mile. Stretch that same trip to 80 miles and the fuel cost climbs to around £13, which starts to matter if you're quoting a fixed callout fee for jobs across a wide area. Swap the van for something doing 25mpg and the same 30-mile trip nearly doubles in fuel cost, even at the same pump price — worth knowing if you run more than one vehicle.
What this isn't
This is fuel only — it doesn't include wear and tear, insurance, tax, or the value of your own time sat in traffic, all of which a proper mileage rate should also cover. The mpg figure you enter is only as good as your knowledge of your own vehicle: a loaded van, stop-start town driving, or a heavy right foot will all pull real-world economy below the number on the spec sheet, so it's worth checking your own figure against a few tanks of actual driving rather than trusting the manufacturer's claim outright.
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