Is fuel the biggest cost in a truck roll?
No. Fuel is the line you notice, but it is roughly a sixth to a fifth of the cost of a roll, and tech drive time is close to 60 percent.
The national average for regular gas sat at $4.36 on October 8, 2026, a record for autumn. Every owner I talk to feels that at the pump, and the natural reaction is to slap a fuel surcharge on the invoice and call it handled.
The trouble is that fuel is a visible cost, not a large one. You see it on the card statement every week. You do not see the 45 minutes your tech spent on the highway between jobs, because that cost hides inside payroll. When owners price around the visible number, they recover a slice of the roll and give the rest away.
So before deciding whether you need a trip charge, a fuel surcharge or both, it helps to build the whole number once.
What does one truck roll cost, line by line?
At the inputs below, about $51 to $54 per roll, before a single minute of work on site.
Here is a worked example. Treat every input as a placeholder and run your own numbers from a real month of jobs.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. The 70 percent wage share is an economy-wide average, used here as a proxy, not a figure specific to the trades. Your benefits load may run higher or lower. And if your techs are plumbers, the math barely moves: the median plumber earns $30.67 an hour, which adds about a dollar to the tech line.
Assumption: 24 round-trip miles and 45 drive minutes per roll.
Vehicle: 24 miles at the IRS business rate of 76 cents a mile for July through December 2026 comes to $18.24. That rate rose from 72.5 cents mid-year, and the IRS tied the change to higher fuel prices. It already includes fuel, insurance, maintenance and depreciation.
Tech time: The median HVAC tech earns $29.33 an hour. Across private industry, wages are 70 percent of total employer cost per hour worked, so dividing by 0.70 gives a loaded rate of about $41.90. Three quarters of an hour at that rate is $31.43.
Dispatcher or office time: Call it 3 to 6 minutes per roll to book, assign and confirm. At a $20 to $28 hourly wage, that lands around $1.50 to $4 once loaded. Plug in your own payroll rate.
Total: roughly $51 to $54 per roll.
How much of a truck roll is fuel?
Roughly $9 to $11 of it at mid-October pump prices.
If you want to see fuel on its own line, the EIA's weekly survey for the week of October 12 put regular gas at $4.33 and diesel at $6.18, taxes included.
At 12 miles per gallon, a 24-mile gas roll burns two gallons, or $8.66. At 14 miles per gallon, the same roll in a diesel truck costs about $10.59. If you break fuel out this way, use only the non-fuel part of the vehicle cost for the rest, or you will count fuel twice.
Either way, fuel lands somewhere between a sixth and a fifth of the roll. Tech time is close to 60 percent.
Fuel is the line you see every week. Drive time is the line that decides whether the job made money.
What do truck rolls cost per tech per year?
At four rolls a day, roughly $50,000 per tech, and about half a million dollars a year for a ten-truck shop.
Fifty-two dollars sounds like a rounding error on a $400 repair ticket. It stops sounding that way when you multiply it out.
Four rolls a day across 240 working days is 960 rolls per tech per year. At about $52 each, that is roughly $50,000 per tech, every year, spent getting to the work rather than doing it. A ten-truck shop is moving about half a million dollars a year through windshields.
None of that is waste in itself. You have to drive to the customer. The question is how much of it you recover in price, and how much of it you can remove without losing a single job.
Should I add a trip charge or a fuel surcharge?
For most shops, a trip charge is the base and a fuel surcharge is the add-on for price spikes, because fuel alone is a small part of the roll.
This is where most of the pricing confusion lives, so it is worth separating the two tools.
A trip charge prices the whole roll. It says, in effect, that showing up has a cost whether or not the repair happens. Done well, it is set near your true per-roll number and shown clearly on the quote before anyone books.
A fuel surcharge prices only the swing in fuel. It makes sense when prices jump fast and you want a temporary, visible pass-through that you can drop when prices fall. On its own it recovers the smallest line in the worksheet.
My view: set a trip charge from the real number and treat a surcharge as an optional add-on during spikes, not a substitute. Customers accept a clear trip charge far more readily than a surprise line item at the end. Whatever you choose, put it in the estimate and quote template so every tech and every office person presents it the same way.
How do I lower my cost per truck roll?
Cut the drive minutes in every roll, and cut the rolls that never should have happened.
Pricing recovers the cost. Operations shrinks it. Two levers matter most.
The first is cutting rolls that never should have happened. Wrong address, no one home, wrong part on the truck, a problem that could have been sorted on the phone. Each of those burns the full $52 and earns nothing. Better intake fixes much of it. In OptimizeIt, the CRM keeps the customer and equipment history attached to the job, follow-up automation sends confirmations before the tech leaves, and on Pro the AI Voice Agent can answer and qualify inbound calls so fewer bad bookings reach the board.
The second is shortening the rolls that do happen. Grouping jobs by area cuts drive minutes, and drive minutes are the biggest line in the math. Ten minutes off an average roll is worth about $7 at the loaded HVAC rate, which beats most fuel card discounts. For how assignment decisions get made, see What an AI Dispatcher Actually Decides and the dispatch software overview.
On cost, OptimizeIt Core runs $79 a month on annual billing with two seats, and every paid plan starts with a 14-day free trial. If removing a single wasted roll a week saves you $52, the math on the software is not close.
The Honest Take
The worksheet above is a starting point, not a verdict. Your miles, minutes and loaded rates will differ, and the only number that matters is the one you build from your own job history.
This is not for you if you run one truck in a dense area with short hops between jobs; your per-roll cost is likely well under the example and a simple flat trip charge will do. It is also not for shops whose work is mostly multi-day installs, where one roll covers days of billable time and the drive barely registers. And if you already track drive time per job and price from it, you are ahead of most of the market. Keep doing that.
For everyone else, build the number once this week. Then decide what to charge and what to cut. For the bigger margin picture, read The 2026 Margin Squeeze in the Trades, and if you are deciding where to start, What to Automate First in the Trades.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a trip charge and a fuel surcharge?
A trip charge covers the whole cost of getting a tech and a truck to the door: vehicle, fuel, drive time and the office time to book it. A fuel surcharge covers only the swing in fuel price, usually as a flat add-on or a percentage tied to a published pump price. With fuel making up well under half of a typical roll, a surcharge alone leaves most of the cost unrecovered. Many shops run a trip charge as the base and add a surcharge only when prices spike.
How do I calculate my own cost per truck roll?
Start with four inputs: average round-trip miles per call, average drive minutes per call, your loaded hourly cost for a tech, and the office minutes spent booking and confirming each job. Multiply miles by a per-mile vehicle cost such as the IRS business rate. Multiply drive hours by the loaded tech rate. Add office time at your dispatcher's loaded rate. Pull the miles and minutes from a real month of jobs, not from memory, because estimates almost always come in low.
Should I use the IRS mileage rate or track fuel separately?
Use the IRS business rate if you want one clean per-mile number. It is built from a study of fixed and variable vehicle costs, so it already includes fuel, insurance, maintenance and depreciation. Track fuel on its own line only if you want to watch price swings or pass them through as a surcharge. If you do, subtract the fuel share from the vehicle cost so you are not counting fuel twice. Either method works. Mixing them without that adjustment overstates your cost.
Does running diesel trucks change the math much?
Less than you would think. At the week of October 12 prices, diesel ran about $6.18 a gallon against about $4.33 for regular gas. On a 24-mile round trip, that works out to roughly $10.59 of diesel versus $8.66 of gas, assuming 14 and 12 miles per gallon. A two-dollar gap per roll is real money across a year, but it is still small next to the cost of the tech sitting behind the wheel for 45 minutes.
What is the fastest way to lower my cost per truck roll?
Cut the rolls that should not happen and tighten the ones that do. Wasted rolls come from bad bookings: wrong address, no one home, wrong part, a job that should have been a phone fix. Better intake and confirmation reminders reduce those. Tighter rolls come from grouping jobs by area so drive minutes fall. Drive time is the biggest line in the math, so every ten minutes you take out of an average roll is worth more than any fuel card discount.
How much does OptimizeIt cost and is there a free plan?
There is no free plan. Every paid plan starts with a 14-day free trial. On annual billing, Starter is $39 a month with one seat, Core is $79 with two seats, Plus is $159 with four seats and adds a business phone line, and Pro is $239 with six seats and adds the AI Voice Agent. Monthly billing runs 25 percent higher. Extra seats are a flat $25 a month. Full details are on the pricing page.