Route Cost Calculator
A route is a commitment you make repeatedly, so a small error in costing it compounds every week. This calculator prices one run from its distance, its hours and its tolls, then multiplies it out to the annual cost of keeping that route on the board.
Your numbers
The complete run, including the return leg to where the vehicle started.
Gate to gate. Include driving, loading, breaks and known waiting.
Consumption on this route specifically. Terrain and stop density move it.
Distance-driven wear. Stop-start routes chew brakes faster than trunk work.
Wage plus on-costs for every hour the route occupies.
Ownership cost per hour: depreciation, finance, insurance, licensing.
Road tolls, congestion or zone charges, ferries, site access fees.
Result
Cost per run
791.27
540 km and 9 hours, gate to gate.
- Cost per kilometre
- 1.465
- Cost per hour
- 87.92
- Annual cost of the route
- 189,905
- Runs per year
- 240 runs
- Fuel
- 259.47 per run
- Maintenance and tyres
- 91.80 per run
- Driver
- 216.00 per run
- Vehicle standing cost
- 162.00 per run
- Tolls, permits and charges
- 62.00 per run
The formula
- Fuel = (Distance per run ÷ 100) × L/100km × Fuel price
- Maintenance = Distance per run × Maintenance and tyres per km
- Driver = Time per run × Driver cost per hour
- Standing cost = Time per run × Vehicle standing cost per hour
- Cost per run = Fuel + Maintenance + Driver + Standing cost + Tolls
- Cost per km = Cost per run ÷ Distance per run
- Cost per hour = Cost per run ÷ Time per run
- Runs per year = Runs per week × Operating weeks
- Annual cost of the route = Cost per run × Runs per year
Assumptions and limits
- Distance and time are averages of a route that varies. A run that takes nine hours on a good day and thirteen in weather is not a nine-hour route, and costing it as one guarantees the plan fails on the days it matters.
- Driver and standing cost are charged for the full gate-to-gate window, including breaks. The driver is paid through a statutory break and the truck still depreciates while parked at the services.
- Overtime is not modelled. If the route regularly runs past the shift, the marginal hours cost more than the flat hourly rate you entered here.
- Load and unload labour at each end is excluded unless you have folded it into the driver rate. In a fleet with dedicated dock staff, that cost sits outside this model entirely.
- The annual figure assumes the route runs the same way every week. Seasonal routes should be costed per run and multiplied by the runs you will genuinely operate.
- Empty repositioning to reach the start of the route is not included. Add it to the distance if the vehicle does not begin the run where it ended the last one.
Distance is the wrong unit for costing a route
Two routes of five hundred kilometres can differ by half in cost, and the difference has nothing to do with distance. One is motorway trunk work with a single drop. The other is thirty urban stops with a tail lift, four hours of the day spent stationary, and a driver whose shift is consumed regardless of how far the vehicle actually travels.
Costing per kilometre alone flatters the second route and penalises the first, which is exactly backwards. That is why this model asks for hours separately. Time is what the route actually consumes; distance is only one of the things that fills it.
The standing cost per hour nobody calculates
Fleets track cost per kilometre because odometers make it easy. Cost per hour is more useful and almost nobody has it, because it requires knowing how many hours a year a vehicle is genuinely available — not how many hours are in a year, and not how many the schedule optimistically claims.
Take annual ownership cost and divide it by realistic available hours after planned maintenance and known idle periods. That is the rate to enter here. It will make short, slow, stop-heavy routes look expensive, and they are. The number is doing its job.
What to do with the annual figure
One run is an operational number. The annual figure is a commercial one, and it is the version worth taking into a contract review. A route costing under a thousand per run sounds trivial until it appears as a quarter of a million a year on a customer whose rate has not moved in three renewals.
It also reframes route redesign. Removing forty kilometres from a daily run sounds like a rounding error and is not, once it is multiplied by two hundred and forty runs. Small structural changes to a repeated route beat heroic one-off savings, and this is the arithmetic that shows why.
Frequently asked questions
Everything the run consumes: fuel for the distance, distance-based maintenance and tyre wear, the driver for the full gate-to-gate window, the vehicle's ownership cost for those same hours, and any tolls, permits or access charges the route incurs. Excluding the time-based costs is the most common mistake, and it is the one that makes slow urban routes look artificially cheap.
Use both, and use them for different questions. Cost per kilometre is the right lens on trunk routes where distance dominates. Cost per hour is the right lens on multi-drop work where the day is consumed by stops rather than mileage. A route that looks efficient on one measure and terrible on the other is telling you which constraint it is actually bound by.
No. The model prices the run as entered, from the moment the vehicle starts it. If the truck deadheads sixty kilometres to reach the first pickup, either add that distance and time to the inputs or cost it separately. Leaving it out entirely is the version that produces a route which looks profitable and a depot that does not.
Honestly, you do not cost it — you cost the pattern. Take the median run rather than the best one, run the calculator again with the worst realistic case, and treat the gap between the two as the risk you are carrying. A route with a wide spread is a route that needs a different rate, not a more precise average.
Trips & Operations records the actual distance, the actual gate-to-gate duration and the actual fuel drawn for every run of a route, so the cost is built from the runs that happened rather than the one that was planned. The spread across runs is visible too, which is usually the part that changes the commercial conversation.
Stop estimating. Measure it.
Route Cost Calculator gives you the arithmetic. Trip Management Software gives you the live numbers from your own fleet.