Delivery Route Cost Calculator

Cost it first: realistic hours (driving plus actual stop time plus depot time) at your loaded labor rate, miles at your full vehicle cost per mile (fuel AND maintenance AND depreciation — not fuel alone), plus the route's share of fixed costs (insurance, dispatch, management). Add margin to the result — typically 10–20% for dedicated work — and you have a defensible day rate or per-stop price. The commonest underpricing errors: quoting from fuel-only vehicle costs, forecasting optimistic hours, and forgetting that the route must also fund the depot. The calculator makes each error visible as a line item.

Fuel or charging (the visible part), maintenance and tires (predictable per-mile accruals — vans on stop-start duty wear brakes and tires fast), and depreciation (the value the odometer consumes — real money realized at replacement time). For a typical cargo van these total roughly $0.35–0.60 per mile depending on fuel prices, vehicle age and duty cycle; EVs shift the mix (cheaper energy and maintenance, more depreciation) but not the principle. Fuel-only costing — the most common shortcut — understates vehicle cost by half or more and quietly subsidizes every quote built on it.

Because delivery is time-intensive and the clock runs at every stop: an 8-hour urban route might drive only 60–90 minutes of it, with the rest spent parking, walking, finding doors, capturing proof. Wages plus employer costs typically put loaded labor at $20–30+/hour, so the day's labor runs $160–240 against perhaps $30–50 of vehicle cost. The optimization hierarchy follows: dwell-time reduction (seconds × 70 stops), sequencing quality, window design and failure reduction all pay in saved HOURS, while fuel programs pay in saved cents. Both matter; one matters ten times more.

When distance, not stops, is the binding constraint: rural and inter-town routes, milk runs between fixed sites, linehaul feeders, and any territory where the van drives far between drops. There the vehicle line grows toward parity with labor, per-mile pricing becomes the natural quote structure, and density decisions (whether to serve an area at all, or serve it twice a week instead of daily) dominate the economics. Urban operations live in cost per stop; rural ones must watch both — and the calculator's dual output is designed to show which regime your route is actually in.