Ask most tradespeople what their van costs and they’ll tell you the lease, the fuel and the insurance. That’s the number on the bank statement. But it’s not the number that’s actually hurting you. The real cost of your van — the expensive one — is the work you don’t do because you’re buried in paperwork instead of out earning.
Your van doesn’t cost you what you think. The lost billable days do.
The visible cost: what a van actually costs
Let’s be fair to the van first. For a typical sole trader, the direct running costs land somewhere like this:
| Cost | Rough annual figure |
|---|---|
| Lease or finance | £3,000–£4,800 |
| Fuel | £1,500–£3,000 |
| Insurance, tax, MOT, servicing | £1,000–£1,800 |
| Total | ~£5,500–£9,600 |
Call it roughly £5,000–£7,000 a year for a sensible van once you net off the mileage you can claim back (more on that below). That’s real money — but it’s a known, fixed, manageable number. It’s not the one quietly draining your business.
The invisible cost: the days you never billed
Here’s the cost nobody puts on a spreadsheet. Every hour you spend writing quotes on the sofa at 9pm, hunting for a receipt, re-typing an invoice, or chasing a customer who hasn’t paid — that’s time you could have been on a job, earning.
Say your day rate is £275. If admin and disorganisation cost you just one billable day a week, that’s:
- 1 day × £275 × ~47 working weeks = ~£13,000 a year of work you didn’t do.
Read that again. The time you lose to paperwork can cost you roughly double what the van costs. The van is the cheap part. Your disorganisation is the expensive part — you just never get an invoice for it.
Why this flips the whole question
Most tradespeople try to save money by squeezing the visible costs: a cheaper van, a tighter fuel card, shopping around on insurance. Worth doing — but you’re haggling over the small number while the big number runs free.
Flip it. Instead of asking “how do I make the van cheaper?”, ask “how do I get those lost days back?” Because if you reclaim even half a day a week, that’s about £6,500 a year of recovered income — enough to pay for the van outright. Organise your time well and the van stops being a cost at all. It pays for itself out of the hours you used to waste.
Where the lost days actually go
For most sole traders, the time leaks from four places:
- Quoting slowly. Writing each quote from scratch instead of from a template.
- Invoicing late. Letting jobs pile up, then losing an evening to paperwork.
- Chasing payments. Ringing round for money that should have been collected on the day.
- Receipts and records. A glovebox of crumpled receipts that becomes a lost weekend at tax time.
None of these earn you a penny. All of them are fixable — and fixing them is worth more than any saving you’ll find on the van.
Don’t forget the mileage you’re owed
While we’re on the van: make sure you’re actually claiming the tax relief on it. The HMRC approved mileage rate rose to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles in 2026 — the first increase since 2011. If you’re not logging your business journeys, you’re leaving money on the table that directly offsets the van’s cost. See what the new 55p mileage rate means for tradespeople.
How Yoley turns lost days into billable ones
This is the whole point of Yoley. It attacks every one of those four time-leaks: build a quote from a saved template in under a minute, convert it to an invoice in one tap with a payment link built in, scan receipts straight into the right HMRC category, and see at a glance who still owes you. The hours you used to lose to paperwork go back into the diary — and that’s where your van’s real cost gets paid. It’s free, with no monthly fee.
Not sure what your time is actually worth? Work it out with our free day rate calculator.