Ask ten UK hauliers what they charge per mile and you’ll get ten confident answers.
Ask the same ten what it costs them per mile to turn a wheel, and the room goes quiet.
That silence is where money leaks out of a haulage business. If you don’t know your own cost per mile, every quote is a guess. Some guesses land above your cost. Some land below it, and you find out at year end, when the accountant explains why a busy year made no money.
This guide walks through the full calculation, with a worked example for a 44-tonne artic, and a free calculator so you can run your own numbers in a few minutes. No sign-up needed.
Why cost per mile is the number that matters
There’s no shortage of haulage rate guides online, and they disagree with each other by a pound a mile or more, because every lane, load and vehicle is different. Which is exactly the point: the market rate tells you what customers pay. Your cost per mile tells you what you can afford to accept. The gap between the two is your margin, and you can’t protect a margin you’ve never measured.
Knowing your number lets you do three things:
- Quote with a floor under you. You know the rate below which a job loses money before the wheels move.
- Spot the loss-makers. That long-standing customer on a rate agreed in 2022? The number tells you whether they’re still worth the diesel.
- Negotiate from facts. “Our costs on that lane are £2.10 a mile” is a stronger position than “that feels a bit thin.”
The two buckets: standing costs and running costs
Every cost in the operation goes into one of two buckets.
The calculation, step by step
Step 1. Add up annual standing costs per vehicle. One truck, one driver, one share of the overheads.
Step 2. Add annual running costs. For fuel: annual miles ÷ mpg = gallons, × 4.546 = litres, × your pence per litre. Use the price you actually pay, not the forecourt sign, and use the VAT-excluded figure, since you reclaim it. For reference, the government’s weekly road fuel price statistics track the national pump average week by week.
Step 3. Use real annual miles, not hopeful ones. The truck that could do 120,000 miles a year does 95,000 once you count VOR days, holidays and quiet weeks. Pull last year’s actual mileage from the tachograph or tracker.
Step 4. Divide. Total annual cost ÷ total annual miles = your cost per mile, across every mile the truck runs.
Step 5. Correct for empty running. This is the step that separates a real number from a comforting one, so it gets its own section.
The empty miles correction (where most sums go wrong)
You can’t invoice the miles back from the drop. But you pay for them: same diesel, same driver’s hour, same wear.
And this isn’t a small leak. The Department for Transport’s road freight statistics for 2025 show GB-registered HGVs ran 5.9 billion kilometres empty, which is 31% of every kilometre travelled. Nearly a third of the industry’s miles earn nothing.
So the number that should set your floor isn’t cost per mile. It’s cost per loaded mile:
If a fifth of your miles run empty, your billable miles have to carry the full cost of everything, and your real floor is a quarter higher than the naive figure. Most operators who do this correction for the first time discover they’ve been quoting off the wrong base for years.
If you don’t know your empty-running percentage, that’s a finding in itself. It’s one of the most expensive numbers in the business to not know.
Worked example: a 44-tonne artic
The assumptions, all in one place. Every figure below is illustrative and rounded to the nearest £100. Plug in your own numbers; that’s what the calculator is for.
- Vehicle: 44-tonne articulated lorry, one employed driver
- Annual mileage: 100,000 actual miles (from the tachograph, not the plan)
- Fuel economy: 9.0 mpg
- Diesel: 135p per litre, a bulk, VAT-excluded figure. (Pump diesel averaged around 164p including VAT in mid-July 2026, per the official weekly figures.)
- Driver employed on wage + employer NI + pension, not an owner-driver’s drawings
- Overheads allocated evenly per vehicle across the fleet
- Empty running: 20% of total miles, deliberately better than the 31% national average
- Target margin: 15%, applied as a markup on cost (explained below)
| Cost line (annual, per vehicle) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Driver wage + employer NI and pension | £48,000 |
| Vehicle finance / depreciation | £24,000 |
| Insurance (vehicle + goods in transit) | £6,000 |
| VED + HGV levy | £1,500 |
| Maintenance, repairs and tyres | £12,000 |
| Share of overheads (yard, office, compliance, software) | £8,000 |
| Fuel: 100,000 miles ÷ 9.0 mpg = 11,111 gal = 50,512 litres × £1.35 | £68,200 |
| Total annual cost | £167,700 |
Cost per mile: £167,700 ÷ 100,000 miles = £1.68
Now the correction. 20% of those miles run empty, so 80,000 miles are loaded:
Cost per loaded mile: £167,700 ÷ 80,000 = £2.10
That 42p gap between £1.68 and £2.10 is the difference between a rate that looks profitable on the spreadsheet and one that actually is.
Now the margin, and a definition that matters. There are two ways to apply a 15% target, and they give different answers:
- Markup on cost (what this guide and the calculator default to): £2.10 × 1.15 = £2.41 per loaded mile
- Gross margin on the selling price: £2.10 ÷ 0.85 = £2.47 per loaded mile
Markup on cost is the simpler habit and the one most small operations mean when they say “15% on top.” Just know which one your accountant means when you compare notes, because the 6p difference is nearly £5,000 a year on this truck’s loaded miles.
Either way, this vehicle needs something around £2.40 per loaded mile before it’s genuinely earning. If that’s higher than what you’re quoting today, you’ve just learned something worth the read.
Five mistakes that quietly wreck the number
- Theoretical miles. Dividing by the mileage you’d like rather than the mileage you did flatters the result and sets your floor too low.
- Wages without on-costs. Employer NI and pension add real money per driver. Leave them out and every quote is light.
- “We own the truck, so it’s free.” Depreciation is a cost. The replacement truck won’t buy itself.
- One blended rate for the whole fleet. The 7.5-tonner and the artic don’t cost the same to run. Blend them and you’ll underprice one and overprice the other, and you’ll win exactly the wrong work.
- Setting and forgetting. Diesel moved, wages moved, insurance moved. A cost per mile calculated in 2024 is a piece of history, not a pricing tool. Recalculate quarterly, or whenever diesel shifts more than a few pence.
Work out your number now
The calculator does the whole method, empty-miles correction and both margin definitions included. It’s prefilled with the worked example; overwrite with your own figures. Nothing to sign up to.
Haulage cost per mile calculator
The catch: the number is only as good as the miles
Here’s the honest limit of the spreadsheet version of this exercise.
The calculation depends on two inputs most operations only ever estimate: real annual miles and real empty-running percentage. If jobs are planned on a sheet and mileage lives in a tracker nobody exports, both numbers are a shrug. So the number gets calculated once, from rough inputs, and drifts out of date by spring.
This is one of the places a growing operation quietly outgrows the spreadsheet. On HaulierMagic, the mileage picture builds itself: with NavigateMagic, the optional in-cab HGV navigation add-on, tracking is continuous rather than collection-to-drop only, so the miles between jobs are captured too, and that includes subcontracted work, which means a sub’s invoiced mileage can be checked against where they actually went. Rate cards hold your prices per mile, per run, per postcode or by zone against every customer, and the system’s profitability figures help you judge what a job is worth before you commit a truck to it. The exercise on this page stops being a quarterly afternoon with a calculator and becomes a number that’s simply there, current, every day.
If you’re at the stage where knowing your real number matters, explore our pricing calculator to see what the platform would cost for your own fleet.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average haulage cost per mile in the UK?
There’s no single official average. Online rate guides publish wide ranges that vary by vehicle size, load type and lane, and they measure what customers pay, not what it costs an operator to run. Your own cost per mile, built from your wages, fuel deal, finance, real mileage and empty running, is the number worth knowing. For industry cost benchmarks, the RHA’s annual Cost Movement and Pay Surveys are the standard reference.
How do I calculate cost per mile for a lorry?
Add your annual standing costs (driver including employer NI and pension, finance or depreciation, insurance, VED and levy, overhead share) to your annual running costs (fuel, tyres, maintenance, tolls), then divide by the vehicle’s real annual mileage. For a pricing floor, divide by loaded miles only, so the miles you can invoice carry the miles you can’t.
Why do empty miles matter in the calculation?
Empty miles cost the same diesel and driver time as loaded ones, but nobody pays you for them. Across the industry, 31% of HGV kilometres ran empty in 2025 according to the Department for Transport. If a fifth of your miles run empty, your billable miles must cover the full cost, which raises your true floor rate by a quarter over the naive figure.
How often should I recalculate my cost per mile?
Quarterly as a habit, and immediately when a big input moves: a fuel swing of more than a few pence per litre, a wage rise, an insurance renewal or new vehicle finance. A stale figure is nearly as risky as no number at all.
