How Travel Time and Vehicle Costs Eat Your Job Margin

On paper, a $275 service call with an hour on site looks profitable. Then you add 50 minutes of drive time, 28 miles on the truck, and overhead on both — and the job that felt "fine" barely covers gas and payroll taxes. Travel is not overhead you can ignore. For many shops it is the difference between a healthy margin and a busy loss.

Travel time is labor cost

Every minute your tech is on the clock driving to a customer is paid time. If you bill $45/hour burdened labor and the round trip is 45 minutes, that is $33.75 of cost before anyone touches a wrench. On a short diagnostic, travel can cost more than the onsite work.

Flat-rate pricing often hides this. A $189 "standard service call" sounds clean until three of those tickets each carry 40+ minutes of windshield time in the same afternoon.

Vehicle cost is more than gas

Fuel is visible. Depreciation, tires, maintenance, registration, and insurance on a work van or truck are not — but they accrue with every mile. A common planning range for light commercial vehicles is $0.55–$0.75 per mile, depending on fuel prices and how hard you run the fleet.

Twenty-eight miles at $0.65/mile adds $18.20 to the job. Pair that with travel labor and a "small" ticket can carry $50+ of invisible cost before materials and overhead.

A realistic example

Consider a $320 drain-clearing job:

• 1.0 hour onsite at $48/hour burdened labor = $48
• 0.75 hours travel at $48/hour = $36
• 22 miles at $0.65/mile = $14.30
• $18 materials, $15 overhead allocation, $25 lead cost from a paid platform

Total cost: about $156. Net profit near $164 — roughly 51% margin. Healthy, but only if you counted everything. Skip travel and vehicle lines and the same job looks like 75% margin on a napkin.

Now shrink the ticket to $185 with the same drive. Margin collapses. That pattern repeats across hundreds of calls a year.

What to change in your operation

• Zone or minimum charges for outlying ZIP codes.
• Batch routing so one trip serves multiple stops when possible.
• Price travel explicitly on time-and-materials jobs, or bake a realistic average into flat rates.
• Track miles per job for a month — owners are almost always surprised.
• Decline or surcharge jobs from expensive lead sources when travel is long.

Model it before you quote

Guessing is how shops stay busy and broke. Run the next ticket through a calculator that separates onsite hours, travel hours, and vehicle cost per mile. You will see quickly whether the price on the truck still works.

Use the free job profitability calculator to plug in revenue, travel time, distance, burdened labor rate, and vehicle cost per mile alongside materials and overhead. The margin number you get is only as honest as the inputs — but honest inputs beat optimism every time.