How Much to Charge for Delivery Per Mile: Courier Rates, Worked

October 26, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge for delivery per mile, add your own vehicle cost per mile to your time per mile (your hourly floor divided by the miles you cover in an hour), multiply by one plus the empty miles you drive for every loaded one, and put your margin on top. In the illustrative courier below, that is $3.18 per loaded mile. A per-mile rate is not a whole courier price, though: stops, tolls and waiting cost time the miles do not carry, and the two-stop delivery worked below prices at $82.24, $25.00 more than the per-mile rate alone would charge.

None of these figures are market rates. Every price, speed and vehicle figure belongs to one made-up courier and is there to be replaced with your own fill-ups, receipts and trip log. Nothing here uses any official mileage rate or says anything about what a delivery app pays.

The delivery pricing formula

hourly floor   = (income / (1 - tax share) + yearly costs)
                 / paid job hours a year
cost per mile  = (fuel + upkeep + insurance + value lost a year)
                 / miles a year
rate per loaded mile = (cost per mile + floor / mph)
                       x (1 + empty miles per loaded mile)
                       / (1 - margin)
delivery price = (job hours x floor + miles x cost per mile + tolls)
                 / (1 - margin), and at least your minimum

Step 1: your hourly floor

The example courier wants $45,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside and has $6,000 of yearly costs that are not the vehicle: phone, dispatch software, cargo cover, advertising. On shift 40 hours a week for 48 weeks, with 20% of shift hours spent waiting for work, that is 1,536 paid job hours. The year needs $66,000.00, so the floor is $42.97 per hour on a paid job, before the vehicle. Ignore the idle hours and you would set it at $34.38.

Step 2: what a mile really costs you

The vehicle stays out of the floor because it is cheaper to price where it is spent: per mile. With 24 miles per gallon over 30,000 miles a year:

Fuel is only 38% of the $0.372 a mile. Upkeep, insurance and the value the car loses are the larger part, and a price built on fuel alone leaves them out. This is the example’s own cost from its own figures, not an official rate.

Step 3: the price per loaded mile

At 30 miles an hour on the example’s routes, traffic included, each mile takes $1.43 of your time at the floor. With the vehicle, a mile driven costs $1.804.

The miles a customer pays for are the loaded ones, pickup to drop-off. The drive to the pickup and back from the drop-off is empty, and the example’s log shows 0.50 empty miles for every loaded mile. So one loaded mile carries $2.707 of cost, and a 15% margin makes it $3.18 per loaded mile. Ignore the empty miles and you would charge $2.12, which loses money on every return trip. The markup vs margin chart shows the markup that matches a margin, if your price list uses markup.

Step 4: price one delivery

Take a job with 18 loaded miles, 9 empty, 2 stops (a pickup and a drop-off) and some tolls:

The table shows the lines to a tenth of a cent so the column adds up: the cost is $69.905, which rounds to $69.91. The price is $82.24, or $4.57 per loaded mile for this job, above the example’s $25.00 minimum charge.

The per-mile rate alone would charge 18 x $3.18 = $57.24, $25.00 short. Of that gap, $24.93 is the stop time and tolls at your margin, which a per-mile rate never sees; the other $0.07 is the rate rounded to the cent. So a per-mile rate needs a pickup or per-stop fee beside it, and tolls billed at cost.

Rush, after hours and waiting

Say the same delivery is a rush, after hours, and you wait 40 minutes at the pickup with 15 free. A 50% rush surcharge on the base adds $41.12, the after-hours fee is $20.00, and 25 billable minutes at your floor add $17.90. The job comes to $161.26, 96% more than the base. Waiting is billed at your floor only: the car is parked, so no vehicle cost goes on it.

Pricing a multi-stop route per stop

Routes are where per-stop pricing earns its place. A 12 stop route runs 38 miles, with 12 empty miles to start and from the end, at 6 minutes a stop. That is 2.87 hours and costs $141.78. A quote of $30.00 for the route plus $8.50 a stop comes to $132.00, $9.78 below cost. Break-even is $9.32 a stop, and the example’s 15% margin needs $11.40 a stop on top of the route fee. The moving company prices post works the same time-and-miles method for bigger loads.

For a shop setting its own delivery fee

A shop or kitchen with its own driver runs the same arithmetic from the other side. A run 4 miles out (8 round trip) at 25 miles an hour, carrying 1.5 orders per trip by the shop’s own log, with 5 minutes at each door and a driver costing $18.00 an hour with payroll costs, comes to $7.32 an order in driver time and vehicle. A $4.99 delivery fee leaves $2.33 an order for the order’s own margin to cover, which at a 30% margin takes an order of $7.78 or more. Free delivery only breaks even on orders of $24.41 or more.

The insight: miles are not the whole job

A per-mile price feels complete because the miles are easy to count. But in the two-stop job, the stop time and tolls were $24.93 of a $82.24 price, and on the route any price per stop under $9.32 lost money. Price the miles with the empty ones paid for, then price the stops, the tolls and the waiting as their own lines.

Did the week pay?

After a week, check it. Say the example courier invoiced $2,050.00 over 820 miles, or $2.50 per mile driven. Take off the vehicle at the example’s cost per mile, a 3% card fee, tolls and parking, and $1,648.46 is left. Over 32 paid hours that is $51.51 an hour, above the $42.97 floor. Yearly costs are not taken off again here because the floor already includes them.

How these were calculated

The floor is (income / (1 - tax share) + yearly costs) / (shift hours a week x (1 - idle share) x weeks). Cost per mile is a year’s fuel, upkeep, insurance and value lost over a year’s miles. The rate per loaded mile is (cost per mile + floor / miles per hour) x (1 + empty miles per loaded mile) / (1 - margin). A delivery’s cost is its driving and stop hours at the floor, plus all its miles at the cost per mile, plus tolls; its price is cost / (1 - margin), or the minimum if higher. Waiting is billable minutes at the floor. A route’s break-even per stop is (cost - route fee) / stops. A shop’s cost per order is the round trip’s driver time and miles shared over the orders, plus door time. Figures are carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them: money to the cent, cost per mile to a tenth of a cent. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that builds the vehicle from a year’s spend and each job from its minutes, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not market rates or official figures. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own vehicle, routes and year, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to the week check.