EV Pay-Per-Mile Road Pricing Calculator Trending

The true per-mile cost of running a car includes fuel, insurance, road tax, MOT, servicing, tyres, depreciation and breakdown cover. Most drivers underestimate the figure badly because they count only the fuel they can see going into the tank. The AA puts the average UK cost at 30 to 50p a mile depending on the vehicle, with depreciation the single largest component and the one nobody writes down.

Fuel cost per mile is the easy part: at 40 MPG and £1.72 a litre, the UK average petrol price in the week commencing 21 September 2026, it comes to 19.5p. Fixed costs behave differently, because insurance, tax and the MOT cost the same whether you drive or not, so you divide them by the miles you actually cover. A car with £2,000 of annual fixed costs adds 20p a mile at 10,000 miles a year, but only 10p a mile at 20,000. That is why low-mileage drivers often have the most expensive miles, and why an underused second car is usually the first thing to sell.

Adding the categories up yourself is useful for comparing cars, deciding between driving and the train, working out a fair share for passengers, and judging HMRC's mileage allowance of 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles. A Ford Focus doing 10,000 miles a year illustrates the shape of it: 19.5p of fuel at £1.72 a litre (DESNZ weekly average, w/c 21 September 2026), insurance at £500 a year adding 5.0p, road tax at £200 adding 2.0p, MOT and servicing at £300 adding 3.0p, and depreciation at £2,500 adding 25.0p, for a total of 54.5p a mile. Depreciation alone is nearly half the cost. The calculator above deals with the newest line in that budget, the per-mile charge on electric cars.

Per-mile charging for electric cars is now confirmed. The government's July 2026 response to its consultation sets an Electric Vehicle Excise Duty (eVED) from April 2028: 3p a mile for battery electric cars and 1.5p for plug-in hybrids, rising with CPI from 2029-30 and paid on top of normal Vehicle Excise Duty rather than replacing it. The motivation is arithmetic rather than ideology: as drivers switch to electric cars, the £26 billion a year the Treasury collects in fuel duty disappears with it. Petrol and diesel cars stay on fuel duty and pay nothing per mile, and vans, buses and HGVs are outside the scheme at launch. London already runs a rough version of usage charging with its £18 a day Congestion Charge and £12.50 ULEZ, and Nottingham's workplace parking levy is another local attempt at the same idea.

What eVED adds depends on how far you drive. Vehicle Excise Duty is £200 a year at the standard rate in 2026/27 for petrol, diesel and electric cars alike, and eVED comes on top. At 3p a mile, 5,000 miles adds £150, 8,000 miles £240, 10,000 miles £300 and 15,000 miles £450, which is still well below the roughly £580 of fuel duty, plus the VAT charged on it, that a 40 mpg petrol car pays over 8,000 miles. The calculator above works out the charge for your own mileage and sets it against that petrol comparison.

The tracking question has been settled without tracking. GPS-based charging would mean a record of where every car had been, and public resistance was consistent, so eVED works from the odometer instead: you declare your expected mileage when you renew your vehicle tax, and the figure is checked against the reading taken at the MOT. The government dropped an earlier idea of separate mileage checks for cars too new to need an MOT, to keep the administration simple.

Electric drivers have already seen part of this reform arrive. Before April 2025 an EV paid no Vehicle Excise Duty at all, which was a substantial incentive. From that date they pay £10 in the first year and the standard rate from year two, £200 in 2026/27. The expensive car supplement of £440 a year for five years applies above a list price of £40,000 for petrol and diesel and, from April 2026, above £50,000 for electric cars. Owners who paid a premium for a cleaner car feel penalised by that, and it is the argument the debate keeps returning to. VED is not being scrapped: from April 2028 eVED is simply added to it, so an electric car doing 8,000 miles will pay about £440 a year in the two taxes combined.