Annual Car Running Cost Calculator

Running a car costs more than the payments on it. Fuel is the part people notice, because it is paid in visible weekly chunks, but across a full year insurance, depreciation, servicing, tyres and tax between them usually come to more: at this calculator's default figures they total roughly twice the fuel bill. The gap between two cars is never just the gap between their prices either, since a dearer car generally carries a higher premium and loses more value each year, and those differences repeat for as long as it is owned.

Six categories go in. Fuel is the only one that scales directly with distance, worked out as mileage divided by MPG, converted to litres, then multiplied by the pump price. Insurance and road tax are fixed costs: the same whether the car sits unused or crosses the country. Servicing and tyres wear with use but arrive in lumps, which is why both are entered as an annual average rather than as they fall. Depreciation is the line most often left out, and once counted it is usually the largest or close to it: at the default figures its 1,500 edges ahead of even the fuel bill. Only the variable part of the total responds to driving less, which is the practical reason the split matters.

Per-mile cost is the number that travels. The annual total answers a budgeting question; cost per mile answers a decision one, since it prices a specific journey against the alternatives. At the defaults it comes to 0.444 a mile, the total divided by the 10,000 miles driven. Transport is a large enough slice of household spending for that figure to carry weight: Eurostat puts it among the three biggest categories of EU household consumption, behind housing and food. Mileage allowances published by national tax authorities are sometimes used as shorthand, but they differ by country and are revised over time, so a figure built from your own inputs is the sturdier one.

How to use it

Enter annual mileage and the car's MPG rating, then set the MPG system to match where that rating came from. The choice is not cosmetic: on the default inputs the same 45 MPG produces a fuel bill of 1,464.82 read as an imperial rating and 1,219.61 read as a US one, a gap of about 245 across the year. Fuel price goes in per litre. The remaining five figures are annual: insurance, road tax or registration, servicing, tyres and depreciation. The tool returns the annual total and the cost per mile.

What the result means

The annual total is the budget figure. Per-mile is the comparison figure, and it is the one that tends to land hardest, because the categories that get forgotten are the ones that never arrive as a bill. Depreciation is a cost even in a year when nothing goes wrong. A per-mile number built from all six categories is going to be well above one built from fuel alone, and that difference is the whole point of running the calculation.

Some regular costs sit outside the six: finance interest where the car is on a loan, parking, tolls, cleaning, breakdown cover, and repairs that fall outside a routine service. The FAQs below take up the first two. Costs also vary by vehicle, location and driving pattern, so the output is a planning estimate rather than a quotation.