What an hour of drive time actually costs

Two costs run at once

When a van is between jobs, you are paying for two things at the same time: the person sitting in it, and the vehicle carrying them. Both are measurable. Neither is usually the number people have in their head.

What the hour is worth

Start with the wage. The most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, for May 2025, put the median hourly wage at $30.67 for plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, $30.38 for electricians and $29.33 for heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers. Those are medians across the whole occupation: half of workers earn more, half earn less.

What the truck costs while it moves

AAA's Your Driving Costs study, published in September 2026, puts the average cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $12,863 a year, and half-ton pickups specifically at $1.10 a mile. That figure covers fuel, maintenance, repairs, tires, licensing, registration, taxes, depreciation and finance charges.

One caveat that matters for a service fleet: AAA models personal use over five years and 75,000 miles, which is about 15,000 miles a year. A service van doing 25,000 miles a year depreciates faster in calendar terms but spreads its fixed costs over more miles, so your own per-mile figure will differ. Treat $1.10 as a starting point to adjust, not a number to adopt.

Work out your own number

You need four things, and you already know three of them:

1. Your loaded hourly cost per technician. Wage plus everything you pay on top of it.
2. Your cost per mile. Start from your own fuel and maintenance records if you have them; use a published figure if you do not.
3. Extra minutes. Not all driving — only the driving you would not have done if the job had been booked in a tighter order.
4. Average speed between stops. To turn those minutes into miles.

Then: extra minutes ÷ 60 × loaded hourly cost, plus extra miles × cost per mile. That is one truck, one day. Multiply out by trucks and working days for the year.

Why the third number is the hard one

Loaded cost and cost per mile come off your books. Extra minutes do not, because nothing records the drive you did not have to make. A job booked across town at 2pm when the same tech is three streets away at 4pm does not show up anywhere as a mistake. It looks like a normal day.

That is the gap worth closing, and it closes at the moment of booking rather than afterwards. Once the time is promised to a customer, the drive is fixed. See how to cut drive time between jobs for the scheduling side of it.

What not to conclude

You will find plenty of software marketing, ours included, that wants to turn this arithmetic into a promised saving. Be suspicious of it. The calculation above tells you what avoidable driving costs. What share of it you can actually avoid depends on how spread out your service area is, how much of your work is emergency call-outs, and how much slack the schedule has. A dense residential route and a rural install territory are not the same problem.

The honest version: knowing the number tells you whether this is worth your attention at all. If the answer is a few hundred dollars a year, leave it alone. If it is five figures across the fleet, it is worth changing how jobs get booked.