Drive Cost per Job Calculator

Enter the round-trip distance for a typical job, what you paid for fuel and how much your truck uses. You get the cost of driving to one job, and what it comes to over a year.

Round-Trip Distance per Job

The whole trip: out to the job and back again. Not one way.

Distance Unit

Fuel Price

What you paid at the pump. Your price, from your receipt. Nothing here fills this in for you.

Fuel Price Is Per

Read this off the receipt. It does not have to match how the truck is rated.

Vehicle Fuel Use

The figure your truck reports. Pick the matching mode beside it: the two gallon sizes are not the same volume.

How Your Truck Reports Fuel Use

Pick the one your truck actually shows. A US gallon and an imperial gallon are different sizes, so reading one as the other makes the truck look about a fifth better than it is.

Jobs per Week

A normal week, not your busiest one.

Weeks Worked per Year

Take off holidays and the dead weeks. 48 weeks is a common working year.

Result

Fill in a few more boxes and the answer will show here.

Opens your print dialog. Choose Save as PDF. Your figures stay on this device.

Loading the calculator.

This is a calculator, not advice. Check the numbers against your own records before you price a job.

What drive cost per job really measures

Every job starts before you arrive. The fuel burned getting there and back is a cost of doing that job, but it rarely lands on the job. It lands on a receipt in the door pocket and gets thought of as a truck cost instead. This calculator puts it back where it belongs, per job and per year.

Three numbers carry the answer: the round-trip distance, the price you actually paid for fuel, and how much fuel the truck uses. The last one is where people go wrong. A US gallon is 3.785 liters and an imperial gallon is 4.546 liters, so reading an imperial figure as a US one flatters the truck by about a fifth. Pick the mode that matches what your truck reports, and set the fuel price unit from your receipt. The two do not have to agree, and this tool never assumes they do.

Read the result as a share, not as a total. Twenty dollars of driving on a four-hundred-dollar job is noise. The same twenty dollars on a ninety-dollar service call is most of what you thought you made. The annual figure is there to make the size of it obvious once and for all.

The common mistake is entering one-way distance: half a drive cost looks reassuring and is wrong. The second is leaving drive time out, because an hour behind the wheel is an hour nobody pays you for. Every rate here is yours to enter; no fuel price and no mileage rate is supplied for you. Zeus keeps the real fuel receipts attached to the jobs they were driven for, so next quarter you are working from what happened instead of a guess.

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