Travel Time and Working Radius for Trade Businesses UK 2026 — How to Stop Driving for Free

Why Travel Time Is a Hidden Cost

The reason travel erodes profit so quietly is that none of it appears on an invoice. A plumber who charges £45 an hour might assume that's what they earn — but if two hours of every working day are spent driving, the real hourly rate across the day is far lower. You only get paid for time on the tools, and travel steals from that pool without ever showing up as a line you can see.

There are four distinct costs hiding inside every journey:

• Unpaid hours behind the wheel: Time spent driving is time you cannot charge for. An hour lost to travel is an hour you could have spent on a job earning your full rate.
• Fuel: The most visible cost, but rarely the biggest. At current pump prices a van returning 35mpg costs roughly 22–26p per mile in fuel alone.
• Vehicle wear: Tyres, servicing, brakes, depreciation and eventual replacement all scale with mileage. Most owners massively underestimate this — it often exceeds fuel.
• Fewer chargeable hours per day: The opportunity cost. Every job further out means fewer jobs you can physically fit into a day, capping your earning ceiling regardless of your hourly rate.

Put together, an hour of driving on a 30-mile round trip can easily cost you £40–£60 in lost billable time and running costs combined — before you have turned a single screw. Do that twice a day, five days a week, and the annual number is genuinely frightening.

Working Out Your True Cost Per Mile and Per Hour

Before you can charge for travel sensibly, you need to know what it costs. There are two numbers that matter: your cost per mile (the running cost of the van) and your cost per hour on the road (which is mostly the lost billable time). Most trades only think about fuel, which is why their charging is wrong.

Start with cost per mile. Add up everything the van costs over a year — fuel, insurance, road tax, MOT, servicing, tyres, repairs and depreciation — then divide by your annual mileage. The result is almost always 40–60p per mile, roughly double what people assume from fuel alone. The HMRC approved mileage rate of 45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles exists precisely because it reflects this full running cost, not just the fuel.

Now the bigger number: cost per hour of travel. If your billable rate is £45 an hour, then every hour you drive instead of work has an opportunity cost of £45 — plus the van running cost for those miles. That is the figure that should shape your decisions, and it is why a job 25 miles away can be a loss-maker even at a healthy hourly rate.

Once you have both numbers, the maths on any far job becomes simple. Multiply the round-trip miles by your cost per mile, add your travel hours multiplied by your hourly rate, and you have the true cost of getting there and back. Compare that to the margin on the job. Many "good" jobs evaporate under this test.

Setting a Sensible Working Radius

A working radius — also called a service area — is simply a distance from your base beyond which you either charge extra or don't travel at all. Setting one is the single most effective thing you can do to protect your profit, because it stops you accepting jobs that quietly lose money.

For most one-van trades, a core radius of 10–15 miles works well: jobs inside it are priced at your standard rate with travel absorbed, jobs outside it carry a travel charge or a minimum fee. The right number depends on your area. A rural plasterer covering 25 miles may have no choice, while a London electrician might cap it at 8 miles because crossing the city eats an hour each way regardless of distance.

The discipline is in sticking to it. The temptation when work is quiet is to say yes to everything, including the job 40 miles away. Sometimes that's the right call — but only if it's a deliberate decision priced to cover the travel, not a reflexive yes that leaves you driving for free. Define your radius, publish it on your website and quotes, and make every job outside it a conscious choice rather than a habit.

The Options for Charging Travel

There is no single right way to charge for travel — what works depends on your trade, your customer base and how far you typically travel. Most successful trades use a combination of the methods below. The table compares them.

The key is to choose deliberately rather than defaulting to "travel is free." A heating engineer might bake travel into a standard day rate for local work but add a £1-per-mile charge beyond 15 miles. A locksmith doing reactive call-outs almost always uses a call-out fee. A bathroom fitter on multi-day jobs can absorb travel into the project price because the journey is amortised across a week of work.

How to Present Travel Charges Without Losing the Job

Customers don't object to paying for travel — they object to feeling surprised or fleeced. The way you present it matters more than the amount. The mistake is springing a travel line on someone at the quote stage with no warning.

Flag it early. When a far enquiry comes in, mention on the phone that "because you're a little outside my usual area there's a small travel charge — I'll include it in the quote." Said upfront, it's a non-event. Discovered on the invoice, it's a complaint. Frame it as a normal business cost, the same way they'd expect a delivery charge from a supplier.

Where you can, fold travel into the headline price rather than itemising it as a separate "travel" line — a single all-in number reads as better value even when the total is identical. If a customer pushes back on distance, you have an honest answer ready: you'd love to help, but the drive means this particular job needs a small uplift to make sense. Most people accept that. The ones who don't were probably going to be difficult anyway.

Clustering Jobs and Smart Scheduling

The cheapest way to cut travel cost isn't to charge more — it's to drive less. Dead miles, the unpaid distance between jobs, are pure waste, and a little scheduling discipline can slash them.

Cluster by area. When two enquiries come in from the same town, try to book them on the same day. Offer customers a choice of dates that suits your routing rather than theirs where you can — "I'm in your area Thursday" is a genuine win for both of you. Over a month, batching jobs geographically can eliminate dozens of cross-town trips.

Route the day sensibly. Plan jobs so you work outward from your base and back, not zig-zagging across the patch. A day that goes base → north → south → north is bleeding miles. Even a free tool like Google Maps with a few waypoints will show you the efficient order.

Mind the rush hour. Travel time isn't just about distance. Twelve miles across a city at 8am can take longer than thirty miles on an A-road at 10am. Schedule your furthest job for the start of the day so you're driving against the commuter flow, and keep local work for the congested hours.

Deciding When a Far Job Is Worth It

A working radius is a default, not a prison. Some far jobs are absolutely worth doing — the trick is making it a deliberate, costed decision. Run the journey through the simple test from earlier: round-trip miles times your cost per mile, plus travel hours times your hourly rate. If the job's margin comfortably clears that, it's a yes.

Some factors swing a borderline job into worth-it territory: it's a multi-day project so the travel is spread thin; it's near another customer you already serve, so the trip does double duty; it's a high-value job where the margin dwarfs the travel; or it's a customer who'll bring repeat work or referrals in an area you want to grow. A one-hour call-out 30 miles away, by contrast, almost never stacks up unless you charge a proper minimum.

The Difference for Employees: Travel and Minimum Wage

If you employ staff, travel time carries legal weight that doesn't apply to you as the owner. The rules around what counts as working time directly affect your National Minimum Wage obligations, and getting them wrong is a costly mistake.

The general position is that an employee's ordinary commute from home to a fixed, permanent workplace and back is not working time. But mobile workers — the majority of trade employees, who have no single fixed site — are different. For workers travelling between jobs during the day, and in many cases travelling to the first job and home from the last, that time can count as working time that must be paid at least at the minimum wage.

This matters because if you pay an employee near the minimum wage and don't account for their travel, their effective hourly pay across the paid day can dip below the legal floor once travel hours are included. HMRC enforces this and can pursue arrears and penalties. If you have employees who drive between sites, take proper advice on how their travel time is treated and build it into your pay calculations rather than assuming the commute rule covers it.

ULEZ, Clean-Air Zones and Parking

Fuel and time aren't the only travel costs anymore. A growing list of charges now applies simply to where you drive and where you park, and they're easy to forget when you quote.

• ULEZ and clean-air zones: London's Ultra Low Emission Zone charges £12.50 a day for non-compliant vans, and Birmingham, Bristol, Bath, Sheffield and other cities run their own clean-air zones with their own van charges. If your work takes you into one in an older vehicle, that's a daily cost that should be passed on or factored in.
• Parking: City-centre jobs can mean meters, permits or paid bays running to £10–£25 a day, and a parking ticket if you misjudge it. Suspended-bay applications for jobs needing van access right outside cost money and time too.
• Tolls and congestion: The Dartford Crossing, the London Congestion Charge (£15 a day, separate from ULEZ) and various bridges and tunnels all add up on certain routes.

None of these are huge individually, but a city job in a non-compliant van could carry £40 in charges before you've done any work. Either list them as a separate line on the quote — most customers accept genuine third-party charges without complaint — or fold them into your price, but never absorb them by accident. Keep a note of which postcodes trigger which charges so you can quote them instantly.

Quick Reference: Travel Cost Worked Example

A worked example for a one-van trade on a £45/hour billable rate, with a true running cost of 50p per mile, makes the point. Each row is a single job at a different distance from base.

The lesson is stark. A short local job costs you under £30 to reach; a 40-mile job costs over £150 in van running and lost billable time before you start. A one-hour call-out at that distance is a guaranteed loss unless you charge a minimum that covers the trip. Knowing these numbers turns travel from an invisible drain into a decision you control.