Fuel Cost Calculator
What your driving costs in fuel each month and each year, and the cost per mile.
Fuel is the most visible car cost and the easiest to underestimate, because it arrives in small amounts and adds up over thousands of miles.
Enter your monthly distance, your car’s consumption and the price at the pump, and this calculator gives the monthly bill, the annual total and what a single mile costs you.
At a glance
- What you enter
- Distance driven per month, Consumption (miles per gallon), Price per gallon
- What you get
- Fuel cost per month, Fuel cost per year, Cost per mile
- Formula shown
- Yes - every step, right below your results.
- Cost and privacy
- Free, no account needed, and nothing you type is stored.
See worked examples ↓ Read the FAQ ↓ Share this calculator ↓
Results are estimates for general information only - always verify with a professional or official source before acting on them.
How to use the Fuel Cost Calculator
- 1 Enter Distance driven per month (in your distance unit)
- 2 Enter Consumption (miles per gallon)
- 3 Enter Price per gallon
- 4 Press Calculate. You get Fuel cost per month, Fuel cost per year, Cost per mile, and every intermediate step stays visible under “How is this calculated?”
- 5 Change one number at a time to see what moves the result - that is usually the most useful thing a calculator can tell you.
Worked examples
Real numbers run through this calculator. Open any example to load it into the form above and change it.
1,000 miles a month at 32 mpg
A $3.40 price per gallon.
You enter
- Distance driven per month
- 1,000 in your distance unit
- Consumption (miles per gallon)
- 32
- Price per gallon
- $3.40
You get
- Fuel cost per month
- $106.25
- Fuel cost per year
- $1,275.00
- Cost per mile
- 0.11 per mile
That is about 31.3 gallons a month, or $106.25, which comes to $1,275 a year and roughly 10.6 cents a mile. If your measured average turns out to be nearer 29 mpg, the same driving costs about $117 a month.
1,400 miles a month at 24 mpg
A $3.90 price per gallon.
You enter
- Distance driven per month
- 1,400 in your distance unit
- Consumption (miles per gallon)
- 24
- Price per gallon
- $3.90
You get
- Fuel cost per month
- $227.50
- Fuel cost per year
- $2,730.00
- Cost per mile
- 0.16 per mile
About 58.3 gallons, or $227.50 a month and $2,730 a year, which is roughly 16.3 cents a mile. The cost per mile is the figure to hold against a season ticket or a mileage rate.
Guides that go with it
What a car really costs each month
The payment is one line of five. Insurance, fuel, maintenance and depreciation decide whether a car is affordable.
How Much Does It Cost to Drive 100 Miles?
A hundred miles is a nice round trip to price out: one weekend outing, one leg of a longer journey, one week of commuting. By the end of this guide you will be able to work out your own cost for that…
How Much Money Should You Budget Per Day While Traveling?
You can read this in about ten minutes, and by the end you will have a daily travel number you actually trust: one built from your destination, your style, and your fixed costs, not from a generic blo…
Frequently asked questions
Why is the official miles per gallon figure optimistic?
Official consumption is measured on a standard test cycle with a warm engine, mild conditions and no load. Real driving includes cold starts, stop and go traffic, air conditioning, hills, roof racks and higher motorway speeds, and every one of those uses more fuel than the test. It is normal for a real average to be 10% to 20% worse than the quoted figure.
The calculator works in miles and gallons: distance in miles, consumption in miles per gallon, price in dollars per gallon. It divides your monthly distance by the consumption to get gallons, then multiplies by the price. If your real figure is 20% lower than the one you entered, the cost comes out about 25% higher.
How do I work out my real miles per gallon?
Fill the tank, note the odometer, drive normally, then fill it again and note both the odometer and the gallons the pump added. Miles driven divided by gallons added is your real consumption for that tank. Do it three or four times and use the average, because one tank can be unrepresentative.
Use that average in the calculator rather than the brochure figure or a single best-ever motorway trip. If most of your driving is one kind, such as a daily commute in traffic, the average from those tanks is the honest input for the monthly bill.
What does the cost per mile tell me?
It is the monthly fuel cost divided by the monthly distance, so it is what a single mile costs you in fuel. It is the figure to compare against a train ticket, a bus fare or a mileage rate, and it is the easiest way to see what a detour or a longer commute actually costs.
Remember that it covers fuel only. Insurance, servicing, tyres, road tax and depreciation are not in it, so the full cost of driving a mile is always higher. For the whole monthly picture, use the Car Affordability Calculator.
What if I buy fuel in litres or measure distance in kilometres?
The arithmetic only works if the units agree, because it divides distance by consumption and multiplies by a price. Mixing miles with a price per litre, or kilometres with miles per gallon, produces a number that looks plausible and is simply wrong.
The simplest fix is to convert everything to one system first: turn a price per litre into a price per gallon, or turn litres per 100 kilometres into miles per gallon, and enter kilometres as miles only after converting them. Write the units down next to your numbers before you type them in.
Terms used here
Short, plain-language definitions of the words this calculator uses.