Fuel, Fines and the Dartford Toll: Twelve Months of Real Van Costs, Written Down at Last

Ask a van-driving grafter what they earn and they'll quote you a day rate. Ask them what the van costs and you'll usually get a shrug and a guess. That gap between the two numbers is where side hustles quietly die.

We asked three UK hustlers to keep honest logs for a full year — every litre of diesel, every toll, every yellow-stickered windscreen — and tally it up. One runs a mobile valeting round in Kent, one shifts furniture and flatpacks around Manchester, one does garden clearances across the West Midlands. Their numbers differ, but the pattern doesn't: the van eats between 28% and 41% of everything they bill.

The Big Three: Fuel, Insurance, Depreciation

Fuel is the obvious one, and our three logs came in at £2,840, £3,610 and £4,150 for the year. That's not just work mileage — it's the trip to the trade counter, the run back for the forgotten ladder, the school run on the way home. If you're not logging it separately, you're guessing.

Insurance for business use ran £1,150 to £1,900 a year. If you're still on a social, domestic and pleasure policy while carrying tools and taking payment for jobs, stop reading and fix that — an insurer can refuse a claim the moment they smell undeclared business use.

Depreciation is the sneaky one. Nobody writes you a cheque for it, but a three-year-old Transit on 60,000 work miles is not the van it was. Our valeters' van lost roughly £3,200 in value over the year. Add servicing, two tyres and a brake job and his 'cheap' runabout cost £9,600 before he'd washed a single car.

The Small Stuff That Isn't Small

Then there's the long list:

• Dartford Crossing: £2.50 a crossing, and our Kent man crossed it 214 times. That's £535 before you've bought a sandwich.
• ULEZ and clean air zones: £1,740 for the Manc with a 2014 Sprinter. His answer was a newer van, which created its own finance payment of £310 a month.
• Parking: £680 across the year between the three of them, in permits, pay-and-display and the odd multi-storey.
• The fines: one PCN for £60 (doubled from £30 for missing the 14-day window), one for stopping on double yellows 'for two minutes' in Birmingham, and a bus lane camera that caught our gardener three times in one month. Total: £395. Our gardener calls it 'the fortnight I worked for Walsall Council.'

Add the small consumables — waste disposal fees, tolls, a new jack, replacement straps — and the 'little costs' added £1,200 to £2,000 a year each. Little costs, plural, are never little.

The Spreadsheet That Ends the Guesswork

You don't need accounting software to know your true cost per job. You need four columns:

1. Fixed annual costs — insurance, tax, breakdown cover, finance payments, MOT.
2. Variable costs — fuel (log every fill-up against work miles), tolls, parking, ULEZ.
3. Wear costs — set aside 8–10p per mile for servicing, tyres and eventual replacement.
4. Revenue — every invoice, every cash job, every round.

Then do one calculation: total costs divided by total billable jobs. Our valeter discovered his true cost per valet was £14.80 — against a £35 price. Fine. But our furniture man found some jobs cost him more than he charged once the toll and a two-hour round trip were included. Those jobs got repriced or binned.

What the Logs Changed

All three made changes. The Kent man shifted his round to cluster crossings — fewer Dartford charges, tighter routes, same customers. The Manc traded the Sprinter for a Euro 6 van and killed his ULEZ bill overnight. The West Midlands gardener now walks the last fifty metres from legal parking spots instead of risking the kerb, and hasn't had a PCN since March.

None of them earned more by working harder. They earned more by knowing the numbers.

The Graft Takeaway

A van is a tool, not a personality trait. It either pays its way or it doesn't, and you'll never know which until every pound that passes through it is written down. Spend one evening this week doing the four-column audit. If your cost per job makes you wince, that's the wince that saves the business.