What does this truck actually cost you per kilometre?
Most freight calculators quote you someone else's rate. This one works the other way round: it costs your own vehicle on your own lane, including the fixed costs operators routinely forget, and tells you whether the rate on the table clears break-even.
Lane & utilisation
Empty running is where lane margin dies
Running cost
Fixed cost
Where a trip’s money goes
Per round trip · ₹1,14,850 total
At 60% return loading you are running 2,240 km empty each month, costing roughly ₹91,880. Pushing return loading up is almost always worth more than shaving the outbound rate.
Starting values are a worked example for a 32 ft MXL on a long-haul lane, not a published rate. Replace every one of them with your own figures — the output is only as good as the inputs.
How the cost per km is built
Four steps. The third is the one that gets skipped.
Variable cost per round trip
Fuel for the full out-and-back distance, toll both ways, maintenance and tyres at a per-km rate, plus driver batta. These only occur when the vehicle moves.
Fixed cost per month
Driver salary, EMI, office and admin overhead, and one-twelfth of the annual insurance, permit, fitness and road tax. These occur whether the vehicle moves or not.
Allocate fixed cost to trips
Divide the monthly fixed cost by trips actually run. Fewer trips means each one carries more of it — which is why utilisation changes your cost per km without a single input price moving.
Divide by kilometres run
Total monthly cost over total monthly kilometres, counting both legs. That is the number to price against.
The three costs operators leave out
- The return leg. Costing only the loaded direction roughly halves the apparent cost of the lane.
- Fixed cost allocation. EMI and salary do not disappear in a slow month; they land harder on the trips you did run.
- Deferred maintenance. Tyres and major servicing are incurred per kilometre even though they are paid in lumps months later.
Working out what a load will occupy?
This tool prices the vehicle. To size the freight itself, the CBM calculator totals cubic metres and checks the load against Indian truck bodies, and the volumetric weight calculator handles per-parcel courier billing.
Costing questions, answered
The ones that decide whether a lane makes money.
Add every variable cost for a round trip — fuel, toll both ways, maintenance and tyres, driver batta — then add that trip's share of the monthly fixed costs, which are driver salary, EMI, insurance, permit, fitness, road tax and office overhead. Divide the total monthly cost by the total kilometres run in the month. Fixed costs are what most operators leave out, and they are exactly why a lane that looks profitable on fuel alone loses money.
One lane is a calculator. Two hundred is a system.
This page costs a single lane from figures you typed in. FleetERP does the same arithmetic continuously across every vehicle and every trip, using the fuel entries, toll transactions, workshop jobs and trip sheets already in the system — so the cost per km is measured rather than estimated, and you find out a lane has gone underwater in the same week it happens rather than at year end.