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Cost per mile calculator

Work out what a vehicle really costs to run per mile - fuel beside the total, so you can see how much of it is not fuel.

For one period - a month, a quarter, a year. Use the same period for every cost below.

Matches the unit you picked above.

Per gallon or per litre, matching the toggle above.

Wear and tear for the same period - maintenance, tyres, repairs, oil. Costs that grow with distance.

Payments, insurance, permits, licences, depreciation. Charged whether the vehicle moves or not.

Deadhead - distance you drive but are not paid for. Included in the total above, not on top of it.

Turns the break-even into the rate you need to charge.

Enter your distance, fuel economy and fuel price. Add your other costs to turn it into a real cost per mile.

How this is calculated

Fuel used   = distance / 100 x litres per 100 km
Fuel cost   = fuel used x fuel price

Total cost  = fuel cost + running costs + fixed costs
Cost per mile = total cost / distance driven

With deadhead:
  Cost per PAID mile = total cost / (distance - empty distance)

Rate to charge = cost per mile / (1 - target margin)

Assumptions

  • Every cost is yours to enter. Fuel prices move weekly and maintenance rates depend on the vehicle, the route and the driver, so a calculator that supplied any of them would be wrong for nearly everyone using it.
  • Use one period for every figure. A month containing a tyre change overstates your cost per mile and a month without one understates it, so a full year is the figure to quote against.
  • Running costs are the ones that grow with distance - maintenance, tyres, repairs. Fixed costs are charged whether the vehicle moves or not, which is why fewer miles makes your cost per mile worse.
  • Empty distance is counted inside the total distance, not added on top of it. You drove those miles, you just were not paid for them.
  • Depreciation belongs in fixed costs. No invoice arrives for it, which is why it is the cost most often left out and the reason a rate can look profitable while consuming the vehicle.

How to use this cost per mile calculator

The answer appears as you type, in whichever units you actually use. Distance in miles or kilometres, fuel economy as mpg, km per litre or litres per 100 km, and fuel priced per gallon or per litre - all three toggles are independent, because the combination people really have is rarely the one a calculator assumes.

Pick a period and use the same one for every figure. A month, a quarter, a year - it does not matter which, as long as the distance and the costs describe the same stretch of time.

Fuel, economy and price are the only required fields, and on their own they give you a fuel cost per mile. The two cost fields underneath are what turn that into a real number. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

Worked example

An owner-operator running 10,000 miles in a month:

  • Fuel economy 6.5 mpg, diesel at 3.85 a gallon
  • Maintenance, tyres and repairs: 1,400
  • Truck payment, insurance and permits: 2,600
  • Of those 10,000 miles, 1,800 ran empty

Fuel first: 10,000 ÷ 6.5 = 1,538.46 gallons, at 3.85 each, so 5,923.08 of fuel.

Total cost is 5,923.08 + 1,400 + 2,600 = 9,923.08.

Across 10,000 miles that is 0.99 per mile. But fuel alone was 0.59 per mile - so fuel is only 60 per cent of the cost, and the other 40 per cent is the part nobody quotes.

Now the deadhead. Only 8,200 miles were paid, so the real break-even is 9,923.08 ÷ 8,200 = 1.21 per paid mile. That is 22 per cent above the headline figure, and it is the number a load has to beat.

At a 20 per cent margin, the rate to quote is 1.21 ÷ 0.8 = 1.51 per paid mile.

Fuel is the number everyone watches and rarely the one that matters

Ask an operator their cost per mile and you will usually get a fuel figure. It is the easiest one to know, because it arrives as a receipt every few days.

It is also, in most operations, somewhere between a third and a half of the real total. Maintenance and tyres are lumpy and easy to forget in a month nothing broke. Insurance and payments do not feel like a per-mile cost at all because they arrive monthly regardless. Depreciation never sends an invoice.

That is why this calculator shows the two figures side by side rather than just returning the total. The gap between them is the point. If your fuel number is 0.59 and your real number is 0.99, then every decision you made using 0.59 - which loads to take, what rate to accept, whether a route was worth it - was made against a figure that could not cover its own wear.

Deadhead: the miles you pay for twice

An owner-operator is paid for loaded miles and pays for every mile.

Drive 10,000 miles with 1,800 of them empty and you have 8,200 paid miles carrying 10,000 miles of cost. Your break-even per paid mile is not the same as your cost per mile, and it is the first figure that should go into a rate conversation.

None of the calculators this was built against models it. They divide total cost by total distance and hand you a number that quietly assumes every mile earns. On a lane with a lot of repositioning, that assumption is the difference between a profitable month and a busy one.

Enter your empty distance and the calculator returns both figures, plus the percentage gap between them. If that gap is large, the fix is usually backhauls or lane selection rather than rate negotiation.

Fixed costs are why a quiet month hurts

Running costs behave the way people expect: drive less, spend less on fuel and tyres.

Fixed costs do the opposite. The payment, the insurance, the permits and the depreciation arrive whether the vehicle turns a wheel or not. Spread them over fewer miles and your cost per mile rises without anything about your operation changing.

This is worth knowing before you accept a cheap load to “keep the truck moving”. Sometimes that is right, because a mile at thin margin still absorbs fixed cost that would otherwise be absorbed by nothing. Sometimes it is wrong, because the load consumes capacity that a better one needed. The calculator will not make that call, but it will tell you what the load has to beat.

Cars, vans and personal vehicles

The same arithmetic works for a car, and the same blind spot applies.

People costing a journey usually work out the petrol and stop there. The real cost per mile of a car includes servicing, tyres, insurance, tax and the value it loses over the year. For most private vehicles that total is a large multiple of the fuel figure, which is why “it only costs me twenty in petrol” is such a persistent way of underestimating a trip.

If you only want the fuel number - to compare two routes, or to split petrol on a shared drive - fill in distance, economy and price and stop there. The calculator will say plainly that what you have is a fuel figure rather than a cost per mile, so the number is never mistaken for something it is not.

Getting the units right

A mile is exactly 1.609344 kilometres and a US gallon is exactly 3.785411784 litres. Both are definitional rather than measured, so the conversions here cannot drift.

One thing worth knowing: mpg and kilometres per litre are reciprocals of consumption, while litres per 100 km is consumption itself. That matters if you ever average figures. Two legs at 30 mpg and 10 mpg do not average 20 mpg over equal distances - they average 15. Everything here normalises to litres per 100 km before doing any arithmetic, which is the only one of the three that stays linear in distance.

The US gallon is also not the imperial gallon, which is 4.54609 litres. Any mpg figure quoted in the United States is against the US gallon, and mixing the two overstates economy by about twenty per cent.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate the cost per mile?
Add every cost of running the vehicle over a period, then divide by the distance driven in that same period. The arithmetic is trivial and the judgement is not - almost every wrong answer comes from an incomplete cost total rather than from the division. Fuel, maintenance, tyres, repairs, insurance, payments, permits and depreciation all belong in it.
What is a cost per mile?
Cost per mile is the total cost of operating a vehicle divided by the distance it covered. It is the break-even figure - the point below which a job loses money - and it is the number that turns a pile of monthly bills into something you can price against. It is not the same as your fuel cost per mile, which is usually somewhere between a third and a half of it.
How much does gas cost per mile?
Divide the fuel price by the fuel economy. At 3.85 a gallon and 6.5 mpg that is 3.85 divided by 6.5, so 0.59 per mile. In metric, divide the price per litre by kilometres per litre, or multiply the price per litre by litres per 100 km and divide by 100. The calculator above does whichever version matches your figures, and then shows you what the fuel number is missing.
How do I calculate the rate per mile?
Start from your cost per mile, then add the margin you need on top. A rate is not cost plus a percentage of cost - it is cost divided by one minus your margin, because the margin is a share of the rate rather than of the cost. At 1.42 per mile and a 20% margin the rate is 1.42 divided by 0.8, so 1.78. Entering a target margin above returns that figure directly.
How much should I pay per mile?
Whatever the work costs to do, plus a margin that survives a bad month. There is no universal number - it depends on the vehicle, the lane, fuel prices, how much of your distance runs empty and what your fixed costs are. Anyone quoting you a national average is describing a different operation from yours. Work out your own break-even first, because a rate is only good or bad relative to that.
How to calculate mileage cost per km?
Identically, with the toggle set to kilometres. Total cost divided by kilometres driven. The only thing that changes is the unit - the logic that fuel is a minority of the real cost, that fixed costs do not shrink when you drive less, and that empty running has to be paid for by the loaded portion, is the same everywhere.
How to calculate 1 km petrol cost?
Divide your petrol price per litre by your kilometres per litre. At 105 per litre and 14 km per litre that is 7.50 per kilometre. If your figure is litres per 100 km instead, multiply the price by that figure and divide by 100. Set the economy toggle to whichever one your vehicle reports and the calculator handles the conversion.
How much pay per mile should a driver get?
That is a wage question rather than a vehicle question, and the two should be kept separate. Driver pay is a cost of the operation and belongs in your running costs if you pay per mile, or your fixed costs if you pay a salary. Mixing it into the cost per mile without deciding which it is makes the figure impossible to compare between periods.
Does wear and tear count in cost per mile?
Yes, and leaving it out is the single most common reason a cost per mile figure is too low. Tyres, brakes, servicing, oil and repairs all scale with distance and belong in running costs. Depreciation - the value the vehicle loses simply by being used - belongs in fixed costs. Neither sends you an invoice each month, which is exactly why they get forgotten.
What is deadhead and why does it change the number?
Deadhead is distance you drive empty, usually repositioning to a pickup. You pay for those miles and are not paid for them, so the loaded portion of the trip has to carry the whole cost. Twelve thousand miles with eighteen hundred empty means your real break-even is spread over ten thousand two hundred paid miles, which lifts it by around eighteen per cent. Quote against the paid figure.
What is the difference between fixed and variable costs?
Variable costs grow with distance - fuel, tyres, maintenance, repairs. Fixed costs are charged whether the vehicle moves or not - payments, insurance, permits, licences, depreciation. The distinction matters because fixed costs are the reason a quiet month is expensive - the same bills spread over fewer miles push your cost per mile up without anything else changing.
How to calculate distance per mile?
If you are converting between units, one mile is exactly 1.609344 kilometres, so miles times 1.609344 gives kilometres and kilometres divided by 1.609344 gives miles. If what you actually want is cost per mile, that is the calculator above - total cost divided by distance driven, in whichever unit you prefer.

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Sources & methodology

This calculator uses only definitional arithmetic - no carrier-specific or regulatory constants - so there is nothing external to cite.

Last updated

Results are estimates for planning purposes. Verify with your carrier or customs broker before committing. This is not professional advice - see the disclaimer.

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