The True Cost of Running a Work Van: The 2026 Numbers

The true cost of running a work van in 2026 is roughly 55 to 65 pence per mile for a mid-size panel van doing 20,000 miles a year, once you add lease or depreciation, fuel or electricity, insurance, tyres, servicing, road tax and repairs. That is the vehicle alone. Add the driver's loaded hourly cost for the time spent behind the wheel and the real figure for most one-van firms lands closer to £1.20 to £1.60 per mile. The per-mile number sitting in your quote template is almost certainly a few years old, and almost certainly too low.

Why the old number is wrong in 2026

Three things moved at once. Electric vans changed the shape of the cost (higher monthly, lower per mile). Vehicle tax rules changed, and electric vans no longer sit outside them. And insurance for light commercial vehicles has run well ahead of general inflation for several renewals, driven by parts costs and tool theft claims.

So a rate you set from a 2021 diesel van, with 2021 fuel and 2021 insurance, is not describing the van on your drive. Rebuild it from scratch. It takes twenty minutes.

Build the number: the eight lines that matter

Pick a period (one year) and a mileage (your real one, from the odometer, not the one you feel like you do). Then fill in eight lines. Everything else is noise.

• Lease, or depreciation if you own it. If you own, take purchase price minus honest resale value in three years, divided by three. Do not use zero because "the van is paid off". A paid-off van is still losing value every year, and it still has to be replaced.
• Fuel or electricity. Real consumption, loaded, with a rack on, in winter. Not the brochure figure.
• Insurance, including goods-in-transit and tool cover if you carry stock.
• Tyres. A set, divided across the miles the set lasts.
• Servicing and inspection, plus the annual roadworthiness test.
• Road tax, plus any congestion or clean-air zone charges you actually pay.
• Repairs and contingency. A real line, not optimism. Clutch, turbo, windscreen, kerbed alloy, a door lock after a break-in.
• Extras: breakdown cover, parking, ferries and tolls, racking amortised, telematics or tracker subscription, cleaning.

A worked example: diesel vs electric, 20,000 miles

Mid-size panel van, one technician, mixed urban and rural, 20,000 miles a year. These are defensible mid-market figures for 2026, not quotes. Use them as a shape and put your own numbers in the boxes.

That result surprises people who expected electric to be either a bargain or a disaster. At 20,000 miles it is a coin toss. What actually decides it is where you charge and how far you drive. Charge at home overnight and run 30,000 miles a year, and electric pulls clearly ahead, because the lease is fixed and the energy is cheap. Rely on public rapid chargers at motorway prices and do 12,000 miles, and diesel still wins comfortably. Work out your own crossover before you sign anything, and check the current tax rates rather than trusting a blog: in the UK that is gov.uk, in Sweden it is Transportstyrelsen.

The line everyone forgets: dead time

The van costs 57p a mile. The person driving it costs far more. Take a technician's loaded cost, which is wage plus employer contributions plus holiday, insurance and non-productive time, and be honest about it: for most small firms that is somewhere near £30 to £40 an hour, not the £16 on the payslip.

Now count the driving. Two hours a day, five days a week, 46 working weeks, is 460 hours. At £35 an hour that is £16,100 a year of paid time producing nothing billable. It is bigger than the van. If your quotes only recover the van, you are giving away the driver.

At 20,000 miles and 460 hours, the fully loaded figure is £11,375 plus £16,100, which is £27,475, or £1.37 per mile. That is the number that decides whether the job across the county is worth taking.

Three ways to get it back, and when each one works

1. A call-out fee (Swedish: framkörningsavgift)

A flat fee per visit, covering the drive out and back. Clean, visible, easy for the customer to understand and easy to compare. It works well when your jobs are short and your travel varies a lot: a 40-minute fix an hour away is a loss without it.

Set it from your real average round trip, not the shortest one. Twenty miles each way plus one hour of driver time is roughly £23 of van and £35 of time, so a fee under £60 is subsidising the customer. Many firms band it by zone: zone 1 free or low, zone 2 medium, zone 3 higher, publish the map, and stop arguing.

2. Baked into the hourly rate

Take the yearly van-plus-travel cost and divide it across your billable hours, not your worked hours. If a technician bills 1,200 hours a year, £27,475 is £23 an hour on top of everything else you were already recovering. Simple to quote, no arguments, but it quietly overcharges local jobs and undercharges distant ones, so competitors who charge travel separately will beat you on the ten-minute-away work.

3. Per mile or per mil

Most defensible, most work. Fair on both sides, and it survives scrutiny when a customer challenges the bill. It needs mileage you can actually evidence, which means either a tracker or a field app that logs start and finish per job rather than a technician guessing on Friday afternoon. If the log is a guess, do not use this model.

Most firms end up with a hybrid: a call-out fee that covers the first X miles, and a per-mile rate beyond it. Publish both. Uncertainty is what causes disputes, not price.

The Swedish version of this maths

If you operate in Sweden, the same model runs in kronor per mil. A mil is ten kilometres, which is the unit Swedes actually quote travel in, so a rate of 45 kr/mil is 4.50 kr per kilometre. The lines are the same but a few have Swedish names and Swedish rules attached:

• Fordonsskatt (vehicle tax) is set per vehicle and looked up at Transportstyrelsen. It is not a flat number you can memorise.
• Trängselskatt (congestion tax) applies in Stockholm and Göteborg, is charged per passage with a daily ceiling, and is invoiced monthly. If your work is inside those zones it is a real per-job cost, not a rounding error.
• Milersättning is the tax-free mileage allowance you can pay someone using their own car for work. There is a set tax-free amount per mil, and separate, lower amounts when the car is a company car and the employee pays for the fuel. The amounts are revised, so check the current year at Skatteverket rather than reusing last year's figure. Anything above the tax-free amount is taxed as salary.
• Förmånsbil (benefit car) is the trap. If the van is available for private use beyond a very limited amount, a taxable benefit value arises for the employee and employer contributions follow. A pure service van with fixed racking, used only for work, is usually treated differently from a crew van the family also drives at weekends. Get this wrong for three years and the back-tax is worse than the van. Read the rules at Skatteverket or ask your accountant before you assume the van is "just a tool".

The English-market equivalents are close enough to reason with: mileage allowance rules and the van benefit charge for private use. Different names, same shape of problem.

Do this today, in twenty minutes

1. Pull twelve months of van costs from your accounts. All eight lines.
2. Read the odometer. Get the real annual miles.
3. Divide. That is your van cost per mile.
4. Estimate driving hours per week honestly, multiply by loaded hourly cost, add it in.
5. Compare against what your current quote template charges for travel. Note the gap.
6. Pick a recovery model, write it on your quotes in one sentence, and stop absorbing it.

The one thing that makes step 2 and step 4 possible is a record of where the van went and how long the technician was driving, captured without anyone filling in a form. That falls out of a system that already knows the job address, the scheduled visit and the clock-in time. In OdinTask, the planner, the geofenced time clock and the job card sit on the same record, so the travel time between two jobs is data rather than a guess, and the call-out fee can go on the quote before the customer says yes.

Rebuild the number once a year. Fuel moves, insurance moves, tax rules move. A rate you have not touched since 2023 is not a rate, it is a habit.

Want the travel on every quote to come from real mileage instead of a guess? Start a free 14-day trial or see what is included on the pricing page.