Are you being paid to travel, or paying out of your own pocket to work? If you spend an hour every morning sitting in bypass queues and forty minutes crawling home in the dark, you are running an unbilled shift. When that travel time is missing from your pricing, you are quietly absorbing thousands of pounds a year in personal Revenue Loss.
Ask most self-employed trades how their week went, and they will tell you they put in forty-five or fifty hours. Their diary was packed, they were out the door before seven, and they did not drop their tools until late afternoon.
Yet when Friday rolls around and you check your bank balance, the money never quite reflects the graft. The cash in the business account feels tight, the fuel bill is terrifying, and you are left wondering where the profit went.
The problem is rarely your standard of work, and it is rarely because you quoted materials wrong. In almost every case, it comes down to the quietest drain on an independent trade business: unbilled transit time.
The 250-Hour Driving Trap
When you take on a job thirty or forty minutes away from your front door, you commit to well over an hour behind the wheel every single day. Across a normal working month, that is twenty hours spent in traffic. Over a full working year, that easily adds up to 240 to 250 hours spent on the road.
That is not downtime. That is six full weeks of standard working days spent sitting behind a steering wheel, wearing down commercial tyres, burning through diesel, and concentrating on the road.
If your baseline hourly rate is £40, those uncharged hours represent £10,000 worth of working time given away for nothing. You would never agree to spend six weeks on site laying bricks, pulling cables, or fitting pipework without handing over an invoice. So why absorb those identical hours behind the wheel for free?
Van Costs Are Not Just Fuel
A common mistake when quoting jobs across town is thinking, “It is only a tenner in diesel to get there and back.”
Fuel is only the visible surface of vehicle expense. Every single mile you drive down a dual carriageway or crawl through urban traffic takes a toll on your business balance sheet:
- Commercial Tyre Wear: A set of heavy-duty commercial tyres lasts roughly 25,000 to 30,000 miles. Every extra uncharged trip brings that replacement bill forward.
- Servicing & Brake Wear: Stop-start traffic destroys brake pads, clutches, and dual-mass flywheels. Servicing intervals arrive twice as fast when you soak up unbilled road miles.
- Commercial Insurance & Breakdown Cover: Goods-in-transit cover, public liability for your vehicle, and trade recovery add fixed daily overheads that tick over whether you are earning on site or waiting at a roundabout.
- The CIS Deduction Pinch: When main contractors pay a day-work rate, they apply a 20% CIS deduction to your entire labour invoice. If you absorbed your travel time into your daily labour rate without separating your expenses, that tax deduction eats straight into the money you needed just to keep the van running.
For a UK sole trader covering 8,000 to 12,000 work miles a year, operating a loaded medium trade van realistically costs between 45p and 65p per mile. A thirty-mile round trip quietly strips £15 to £20 straight off your bottom line before you even open the sliding door.
See What Van Travel Is Doing to Your Real Day Rate
If you spend seven hours a week behind the wheel without billing for it, your actual hourly earnings are vastly lower than the headline rate on your invoice suggests.
To see how much uncharged travel time and vehicle running costs are eating into your actual take-home pay, plug your numbers into my free day-rate and CIS calculator on the homepage. It separates your sunk vehicle expenses and unbilled travel from your genuine take-home pay in thirty seconds.
How to Stop Subsidising Travel for Other People
Protecting your margins does not mean pricing yourself out of work. It simply means accounting for transit cleanly so clients and main contractors are not getting a free ride at your expense:
- Define Your Free Working Radius: Pick a sensible boundary—say, eight to ten miles or a twenty-minute drive from your workshop or home. Inside that ring, travel is absorbed by your standard daily baseline.
- Build Travel Into the Daily Labour Baseline: The moment a job sits outside your primary zone, adjust your daily rate upwards by £30 to £50 per day to absorb transit time and fuel, rather than breaking it out into awkward line items that customers question.
- Refuse “Split Day” Travel: Never agree to visit two small jobs on opposite sides of a busy city in one morning. The transit time between jobs will wipe out any profit on both.
- Count the Entire Working Week: If a job demands ten hours of driving across five days, base your required financial return on a 45-hour commitment, not a 35-hour week on the tools.
Unplanned Site Moves and Extra Runs
There is another costly side to travel that catches commercial subbies out: being told halfway through the day to pack up kit and drive to a secondary site, or being sent off to collect materials that the contractor failed to have ready.
If a site manager verbally tells you to hop in the van and fetch materials or move jobs mid-shift, you burn your own diesel and lose valuable production hours. Without written confirmation, that extra run almost always gets contested when invoice valuations are checked.
Before you turn the key in the ignition, protect that extra travel time with my free JCT Clause 3.14 CVI Generator. It takes sixty seconds on your phone to generate a formal Confirmation of Verbal Instruction so you have a dated record of the agreed transit and downtime.
Put a Floor Under Your Driving Time
Driving an extra fifty miles a day to keep a project moving should reward your business, not deplete your household income. You did not go self-employed to spend your mornings stressed in traffic for less than minimum wage.
Before you quote your next project or agree to travel an hour across the county, run your genuine weekly miles and downtime through my free UK Day Rate Calculator. Know your numbers, protect your margins against Revenue Loss, and make sure your van earns its keep on every single mile.