How Much Does a Fleet Cost? A Breakdown of the 8 Cost Categories

By Hilde Lavrijssen · August 2026

You know the purchase price of a delivery van. But you usually don’t know what that vehicle will actually cost you over four years— because that total is spread out across fuel bills, repair bills, insurance premiums, and hours that no one keeps track of.

Below are the eight items that together determine your fleet costs, which you can manage, and how to track them for each vehicle.

The purchase price is not the cost price

When it comes to vehicles, companies often focus on the amount on the purchase order or the monthly lease payment. That’s the visible part. The invisible part—fuel consumption, maintenance, tires, downtime—continues for four or five years and, for most company vehicles, ends up costing more than the purchase price itself.

That difference has a name: total cost of ownership, or TCO. It is the reason why a cheaper car can end up costing more. Two vans with the same price tag can differ by thousands of euros after four years, due to fuel consumption, driving habits, and whether maintenance was performed on time.

The Eight Cost Items

They don't all weigh the same, and the ratio differs between a passenger car, a van, and a truck. But all eight of them appear.

• 1
  Depreciation or lease payment

  For a purchase: the depreciation over the useful life, i.e., the purchase price minus the residual value. For a lease or rental: the monthly payment. This item is usually the largest, and also the most predictable—although the residual value depends on the mileage and condition of the vehicle, and you can influence both of those factors.
• 2
  Fuel or charging costs

  The largest variable cost, and the area where the difference between two identical vehicles is most clearly evident. Driving behavior, load capacity, route selection, and idling all combine to determine the actual cost. For electric vehicles, the cost shifts to charging, with differences between charging at home, charging at work, and fast charging on the road.
• 3
  Maintenance and Repairs

  Routine maintenance, replacement parts, and repairs after damage. This expense increases with the vehicle’s age and mileage. Maintenance that is delayed, shifts from a planned expense to a costly one: a timely service is almost always cheaper than the breakdown that follows.
• 4
  Tires

  Replacement, seasonal changes, and storage. The service life depends heavily on tire pressure, load capacity, and driving style. For trucks and vans that carry heavy loads, this is a recurring expense that you should factor into your hourly rate or the per-kilometer rate.
• 5
  Insurance

  Civil liability, and—depending on your choice—comprehensive coverage, legal assistance, and driver’s liability insurance. The premium depends, among other things, on your claims history. Reducing claims will lower this expense over time—but to do so, you must be able to track those claims by vehicle and by driver.
• 6
  Taxes and Taxation

  Road tax, vehicle registration, and the vehicle’s tax treatment. For company cars, deductibility and the benefit in kind are also factors to consider. These rules change regularly and vary depending on the engine type, so when deciding on a replacement, always have your accountant compare them with the other items.
• 7
  Downtime and Replacement

  The expense that doesn't appear on any invoice. A vehicle in the garage incurs additional costs for depreciation, insurance, and taxes, while a replacement vehicle is rented, and work is left undone. In the case of unplanned maintenance, these costs add up faster than the repair itself.
• 8
  Management and Administration

  The hours spent on planning, following up on inspections, checking fuel cards, processing damage claims, and—for trucks—reading and storing tachograph data. With a small fleet, someone handles these tasks on the side, which means that the cost remains invisible but still exists.

What You Can Focus On

Gas prices, insurance rates, and tax rules are beyond your control. Four things are not:

The latter is rarely noticed. A delivery van that sits idle three days a week, costs just as much in depreciation and insurance as one that is driven every day. If you look at how much each vehicle is actually driven, you may find that the fleet can be smaller.

And how much does fleet management software cost?

That's a valid question if you're considering tracking those costs digitally. Three factors determine the price:

• The number of vehicles you want to track.
• The subscription tier. Live tracking and trip logging are included in FLEET.START. If you also want driving behavior analysis, CAN bus data, maintenance tracking, or driver logging, choose FLEET.PRO.
• The hardware and installation. Installing a tracker in a van is different from installing a unit with a CAN bus connection in a truck, or a standalone tracker on a trailer.

Since that combination varies by company, we offer customized pricing. What you can do in advance is flip the calculation around: how much does a single unplanned breakdown cost, or a single month in which you didn’t realize a vehicle wasn’t being driven enough? See the difference between FLEET.START and FLEET.PRO

How to View Those Figures by Vehicle

All eight tasks have one thing in common: you can only assign them if you can track what’s happening for each vehicle. In FLEET.connect, this is done via a unit in the vehicle that transmits data to the platform.

Trips and Kilometers

Exact departure and arrival times, the route traveled, and the mileage per vehicle. This forms the basis for allocating costs to projects or customers rather than to the fleet as a whole. Live tracking fleet management

Consumption

Fuel consumption per vehicle and per period, with notifications of refueling events and unexplained fuel level drops. Comparing consumption patterns side by side reveals which vehicle or driver stands out. Fuel Monitor

Driving behavior

Scores for each driver on braking, acceleration, and speed. This is the category where fuel consumption, tire wear, and accident frequency all come together—three costs linked to the same driving behavior. Driving Behavior Monitoring

Maintenance and inspections

Schedule maintenance based on mileage or date, with a notification when a vehicle is due for maintenance. This shifts maintenance from reactive to predictable, and reduces expense item 7 accordingly. Maintenance Planning

Tachograph

For truck drivers: automatically retrieve driver and vehicle records remotely, within the legal deadlines. This directly reduces item 8. Tachograph data download

Frequently Asked Questions

Hilde Lavrijssen — Marketing Manager at AllConnects

Closely follows the digitization of fleet management, equipment management, and time tracking in the construction industry and translates these developments into practical insights for companies on the road and at the construction site.