Cost Per Mile Calculator

Cost per mile is what each additional mile you drive costs you in fuel, maintenance, and depreciation. It’s the number that matters when you’re sizing up a trip offer, because every mile you accept adds wear and burn to your car.

Once you know your CPM, you can look at any offer and instantly tell whether it’s actually worth taking. A $0.80/mile trip is great if your CPM is $0.25, but barely break-even if your CPM is $0.75.

The math is simple:

Monthly variable costs ÷ Monthly miles = Cost per mile

The hard part is being honest about depreciation and wear. This calculator walks you through it.

Three buckets of costs that scale with miles driven:

• Fuel or charging — usually the biggest variable cost for most drivers.
• Maintenance & wear — oil, tires, brakes, repairs, washes. These costs go up with each mile driven.
• Depreciation — how much resale value you’re losing as the odometer climbs. The most-overlooked cost.

Insurance, your car payment, registration, your phone bill — those are real expenses, but you pay them whether you accept 0 trips or 200 trips this month. They don’t change based on whether you take a specific ride, so they shouldn’t change your answer to “is this trip worth it?”

CPM is a decision tool. When a $5 ping comes in for a 6-mile total ride, what you need to know is “will this ride cover the marginal cost of driving it?” That’s your CPM. If yes, the leftover money goes toward paying your fixed costs and paying you. If no, taking the trip actually makes your night worse.

Fixed costs still matter for the bigger picture — they tell you how many profitable miles you need each month to stay above water. But they belong in a different calculation (a monthly P&L), not in your per-trip decision.

The IRS standard mileage rate for business use of a vehicle is 72.5 cents per mile for the 2026 tax year (up from 70 cents in 2025).

This rate is set by the IRS each year and bundles ALL vehicle operating costs into one number: fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance, registration, and other fixed costs combined. It’s a tax deduction figure, not a decision tool.

As a rideshare or delivery driver, you can deduct 72.5 cents for every business mile you drive (P1 waiting, P2 pickup, P3 with passenger) regardless of what your actual costs are. You don’t need to prove your true cost per mile to claim the deduction — you just need an accurate mileage log.

If your real costs are a higher number, you may be eligible to deduct your real costs instead. See the IRS rules.

Most rideshare drivers come out ahead with the standard mileage rate because it’s simple and generous. This calculator is about per-trip decision-making, not tax deduction calculation.

This is not tax advice. Consult a tax professional for your specific situation.

The calculator does it in two steps. First, we estimate your car’s current value from its MSRP, age, and odometer — using a curated MSRP for ~240 popular models (or a category average), aging it down with a yearly depreciation curve for the vehicle class, then adjusting up or down for high or low odometer.

Second, we calculate per-mile depreciation as a small fraction of that current value. Each vehicle class has its own per-mile wear rate: pickups lose ~0.30% of current value per 1,000 miles, midsize sedans ~0.55%, luxury cars ~0.95%. So a $17,000 three-year-old Camry comes out to about $0.09/mile; a $30,000 BMW around $0.29/mile.

Honest caveat: these per-mile wear rates are heuristics we calibrated against industry rules of thumb (AAA’s per-mile depreciation figures, lease-overage rates), not measured directly from resale data. They’re directional, not precise. If you have a better current-value number from KBB or Carfax, edit the field directly and the per-mile number will scale from it.

A $35,000 car can drop to $18,000 in value after one year of full-time rideshare use. That loss is a real business expense — it just doesn’t show up as a receipt.

A driver who pockets $4,000/month but burns $1,500 of resale value in the same period isn’t actually making $4,000. Depreciation is often the single largest cost on a per-mile basis for newer or luxury cars.

There’s no universal number. A driver in an older Prius might run at $0.22/mi while someone in a new SUV could be over $0.50/mi. What matters is knowing your number so you can evaluate trip offers against it.

As a general guide:

• Under $0.30/mi — lean (efficient car, low maintenance)
• $0.30–$0.45/mi — typical
• Above $0.45/mi — high (be very selective about which trips you accept)

Three levers that genuinely move the number:

• Drive a more efficient vehicle. A hybrid or efficient EV can cut your fuel cost per mile by 50%+, and EVs often save on maintenance too (no oil changes, longer brake life from regen braking).
• Drive a less expensive car. Per-mile depreciation scales directly with your car’s current value — a $15,000 used Camry loses much less per mile than a $40,000 new SUV.
• Drive more smoothly. Aggressive acceleration and hard braking hurt real-world MPG and chew through tires and brake pads faster.

Smaller wins: using regular instead of premium gas (if your engine permits), home charging instead of DC fast-charging for EVs, and doing your own oil changes if you’re handy. Or make use of Mystro's free oil change benefit.

What doesn’t lower CPM: declining low-pay trips, positioning before peak demand, working busier hours. Those are all great for profit, but your cost per mile is set by your car and how you drive it — not by which trips you accept. Profit per mile = trip rate − CPM, so you can improve either side of that equation to make more money.