Guide
A simple formula tells you how many minutes of driving a job can carry before it stops being worth doing. Here's the maths, a worked example, and the opportunity-cost check most people skip.
"How far should I drive?" is the wrong question on its own. Distance doesn't cost you money directly — time and fuel do. A 40-minute motorway run and a 40-minute stop-start city crawl cover different mileage but cost roughly the same in time. So the real question is: how much total time and true vehicle cost can this specific job's profit absorb before it breaks even?
That's a number you can calculate for every job, in about thirty seconds, once you know two figures: your loaded hourly cost and the job's gross profit.
Your loaded hourly cost is what an hour of your time (or your technician's time, plus the van) actually costs the business — wages or drawings, overheads, insurance, fuel base cost, tools, all divided across billable hours. Most owner-operators underestimate this badly because they only count wages. If you haven't worked yours out, use the hourly rate calculator to get a real figure rather than a guess.
For this article we'll use $65/hour as a working example loaded cost. Yours might be $45 or $95 depending on your market and overheads.
The mistake most people make is pricing travel on fuel alone. Fuel is maybe a third of what a mile actually costs once you add depreciation, tyres, maintenance, and insurance loading for higher annual mileage. A realistic all-in vehicle cost is $0.45–$0.65 per mile, depending on your vehicle and how hard you use it.
So true trip cost has two parts:
Example: a job is 25 minutes each way (50 minutes round trip) and 18 miles round trip. At $65/hour loaded cost and $0.55/mile:
That $64 has to come out of the job's gross profit before you've earned a cent for the actual work.
Break-even drive time is the point where travel time plus job time equals what the job's gross profit can pay for, at your loaded hourly cost. The formula:
Break-even total time (hours) = Job gross profit ÷ Loaded hourly cost
Say a job has a gross profit of $180 (price minus materials, subcontracted parts, and any direct costs — check this on the job profitability calculator rather than eyeballing it). At $65/hour loaded cost:
$180 ÷ $65 = 2.77 hours
That 2.77 hours has to cover everything: drive there, do the work, drive back. If the job itself takes 1.5 hours, you've got about 1.25 hours of travel budget — roughly 37 minutes each way — before the job nets zero. Past that, you're paying to work.
Here's where it gets useful. Two jobs land on the same morning slot. Which do you take?
| Job A (far) | Job B (local) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $340 | $290 |
| Gross profit (before travel) | $280 | $260 |
| Drive time (each way) | 45 min | 10 min |
| Round-trip time cost (at $65/hr) | $97.50 | $21.67 |
| Round-trip vehicle cost (14 mi vs 40 mi @ $0.55) | $17.50 | $7.70 |
| Net profit | $165 | $240.63 |
Job A has the bigger sticker price. It's also the worse job. Once you strip out the true cost of getting there and back, Job B — smaller, closer — nets you $75 more.
This is the part most pricing guides skip: it's not enough to check that a job clears its own travel cost. You have to compare it against what else that slot could have earned. If Job A is the only job on offer, taking it at $165 net still beats an empty slot. But if it's displacing a local job worth $240, saying yes to the far one is a $75 mistake, even though both jobs look profitable in isolation.
Before accepting anything more than about 20–25 minutes out, ask two questions:
If you're in a slow patch with genuinely nothing else on the books, the far job usually wins — some margin beats an idle van. If you're consistently full and turning away local work, the far job is competing with jobs that pay better per hour, and the maths above tells you it's losing money in the way that matters: opportunity cost.
Distance stops being a problem when you stack it. One 40-minute-out job on its own eats a chunk of your day in dead travel time. Three 40-minute-out jobs booked back-to-back in the same area on the same day means you drive out once, work three jobs, and drive back once. The travel cost gets divided across three gross profits instead of one.
Rule of thumb: if a customer or area is far enough that a single trip doesn't clear your break-even time comfortably, don't decline the market — batch it. Hold requests from that postcode until you've got two or three, then run them as a single circuit. It turns a marginal job into a good one without changing your prices at all.
You don't need to run this calculation by hand every time. Set a rule based on your own numbers: for jobs under $200 gross profit, cap drive time at X minutes each way; above $400, you can stretch further. Run your actual loaded cost and typical job profit through the break-even calculator once, and you'll have a drive-time ceiling you can apply on the phone in ten seconds, before you've committed a technician and a van to a trip that was never going to pay.
The Small Business Operations Kit ($19) turns guides like this one into fill-in-once worksheets: rate card, quoting sheet, job costing, payment terms and follow-up templates. Built by the same people who write these guides.