How Do You Estimate Travel Time and Fuel Costs for Service Jobs?

Price drive time the same way you price labor — by the hour, using your loaded crew rate — and add a separate per-mile cost to cover fuel, maintenance, and depreciation on the vehicle. Then draw a line on a map: inside it, travel is baked into your price; outside it, you add a flat trip charge. That combination is the whole system.

Most contractors either ignore travel cost entirely or guess at it with a vague "gas money" line item. Both are expensive habits. If your crew spends 35 minutes each way to a job 18 miles out, that's over an hour of paid time and roughly $12-$15 in vehicle cost before anyone picks up a tool. Multiply that across a week of scattered appointments and you can lose a full billable day to windshield time that never made it into the estimate.

Step 1: Price drive time as paid labor

If you pay your crew for the time they spend driving — and in most states, if it's between jobs or to a jobsite in a company vehicle, you're legally required to — then that time belongs in the job cost the same way install time does. Use your actual loaded labor rate (wages plus payroll taxes, insurance, and benefits), not just the hourly wage on the paycheck. If you haven't worked out that number yet, this breakdown of how contractors calculate labor cost walks through the math.

The simplest version: round-trip drive time × number of techs on the truck × loaded hourly rate. A 40-minute round trip for a two-person crew at a $38/hour loaded rate is about $51 in labor before the job starts. That's not overhead to absorb quietly — it's a real cost that belongs in the price.

Step 2: Add a per-mile vehicle cost

Separate from labor, your vehicle costs money to run: fuel, oil changes, tires, insurance, and the slow burn of depreciation. Most contractors land somewhere between $0.60 and $1.00 per mile all-in for a service van or pickup, depending on vehicle size, fuel prices in your area, and how hard you drive it. You don't need to track this to the penny — pull your actual fuel spend and maintenance costs over a few months, divide by miles driven, and you'll have a number specific to your fleet instead of guessing.

Keep this per-mile figure updated once or twice a year. Fuel prices swing, and a rate you set two years ago can quietly undercharge every job you book this season.

A worked example

Say a plumber gets a service call 14 miles from the shop, roughly 22 minutes each way in local traffic.

Here's how it stacks up:

• Drive time: 44 minutes round trip × $42/hour loaded rate (one tech) = about $31
• Vehicle cost: 28 miles round trip × $0.75/mile = $21
• Total travel cost to bake into the job: about $52

That $52 doesn't need its own line on the invoice — fold it into the labor or trip portion of the estimate so the customer sees one clean number. But internally, you should know it's there. Without it, a $225 service call that actually costs $52 to simply get to and from looks a lot more profitable on paper than it is in the bank account.

Set a service-area boundary and a trip charge

Averaging travel cost into every price works fine inside your normal operating radius — say, a 15-20 minute drive for most trades, tighter for same-day service work. Beyond that radius, averaging breaks down: a job 45 minutes out shouldn't cost the same as one five minutes down the street, and padding every quote to cover the occasional long drive just makes you less competitive on the jobs that are actually close.

The fix is a hard boundary. Draw a service area on a map — by zip code, by drive-time radius, or just by memory if you've worked the territory for years — and attach a flat trip charge for anything outside it. Common approaches:

• A flat fee ("$35 trip charge beyond 20 miles") added to the estimate automatically once the address falls outside your zone
• A per-mile charge beyond the boundary, calculated the same way as your internal vehicle cost but passed through to the customer
• A minimum job size for out-of-area calls, so a 40-minute drive is only worth it if the job clears a dollar threshold

Whichever method you use, say it up front. A trip charge that shows up as a surprise on the invoice generates more complaints than the dollar amount ever justifies. If you're already explaining range-based pricing to customers, the logic is similar to giving an estimate range without making a firm promise — set the expectation before you're standing in the driveway.

Where this actually belongs in your numbers

Travel cost isn't materials and it isn't pure profit margin — it sits closest to overhead, alongside insurance, tool replacement, and the admin time nobody bills for directly. If you're building out a full overhead cost breakdown for pricing jobs, travel should be one of the line items you're accounting for, either averaged into your hourly rate or tracked separately by zone.

For contractors running multiple jobs a day across spread-out addresses, this math gets tedious fast if you're doing it by hand for every estimate. Trusso's estimating tools let you set a price book with labor rates and travel assumptions baked in, so a quote for a job 20 minutes out automatically reflects the real cost of getting there — not a guess made under pressure on the phone. It also handles scheduling and crew routing in the same app, so the people setting appointments can see drive time between jobs before they book them back to back.