Vehicle Cost Per Mile Calculator

A van at eighteen thousand miles a year costs about sixty-seven cents a mile. Fuel is twenty-two per cent of that.

Depreciation is thirty-three per cent — half again as much as fuel, and the only line of the two that never arrives as a bill.

That is the whole problem with the way most people work out a mileage rate. They price the fuel, because fuel is the thing with a receipt, and end up with a figure three or four times too low. The van becoming worth four thousand dollars less this year is real money, it is the largest single line, and nobody sends you an invoice for it.

The page splits the two kinds of cost, because mixing them is what goes wrong. Standing costs happen whether it moves or not: depreciation, insurance, tax, and the interest on the money sitting in it. Running costs happen per mile: fuel, tyres, servicing, repairs.

Which leads to the table, and the table is the part that changes what people charge. Cost per mile is not a property of the vehicle — it is a property of how much you use it. The same van that costs sixty-seven cents a mile at eighteen thousand miles costs two dollars seventeen at four and a half thousand, because the standing costs do not care whether it moves. A rate copied from somebody busier than you is a rate that loses money quietly.

If you charge for mileage, put your rate in and it will tell you what the gap costs over a year, and that the gap widens as the miles fall.

It does not use an official mileage rate as a cost. Those rates are tax conventions with a job to do, and that job is not to describe your vehicle.

Depreciation is a guess until the day you sell, and it is the biggest line here. The page takes your figure rather than inventing one, so the answer is exactly as good as that guess — move the resale value by a few thousand and watch the answer move. That spread is real, and a page that hid it behind a lookup table would be pretending to a precision nobody has.

Your time driving is not in the number, and should not be. An hour in the van is an hour not working, but what that costs depends on what you would otherwise have been doing. It is a cost of the job, not a cost of the vehicle.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. The van and the car on the same job are not the same cost, and averaging them hides which is which.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.