True Cost of Running a Mobile Service Van: 2026 Overhead Breakdown

A service van is a business expense that pretends to be a vehicle. Most solo operators I've talked to in the Collingwood and Georgian Bay area underprice their hourly rate by $20-35 because they're quietly absorbing van costs they never actually wrote down.

So this is the full stack. What a mobile service van actually costs to run in 2026, line by line, in Canadian dollars. Then what that means for your hourly rate.

The Monthly Cost Stack

Let's take a reasonably typical setup. A 2-3 year old Ford Transit 250 mid-roof, financed, solo operator, 180km average daily route in southern Ontario. This isn't the cheapest possible configuration and it isn't a loaded Sprinter either - it's roughly the median.

Payment or Depreciation

A used 2023 Transit 250 with 60-80k km runs around $42,000-48,000 in 2026. Financed at current rates (let's say 7.5% over 60 months on $45k with $5k down), you're at roughly $800/month. If you paid cash, the monthly depreciation cost is still real - about $650/month for the first three years. Either way, budget something in this zone. The van is losing value whether you're making a payment or not.

Fuel

At 180km/day, 22 workdays a month, that's 3,960km. A Transit 250 with the EcoBoost typically does 14-16L/100km in mixed real-world service use (loaded, idling on jobs, short trips). Call it 15L/100km. At $1.65/L average Ontario pump price, that's $980/month. If you're running a smaller Transit Connect you can roughly halve that. A full Sprinter 2500 with a diesel? Probably $700-780/month because diesel efficiency offsets the fuel price.

(And yes, fuel is the line operators underestimate most often. Track it for a month. The real number is usually 20-30% higher than the guess.)

Insurance

This is where a lot of solo operators quietly carry risk they shouldn't. Personal auto insurance on a van used for business work is - in almost every Canadian jurisdiction - invalid if you get in an accident on the way to a job. Commercial fleet insurance for a single van with one named driver, clean record, $2M liability, comprehensive, in Ontario, runs $320-400/month. Rural Quebec or Alberta can be cheaper. GTA is meaningfully more.

The gap between a personal policy ($180/month) and commercial ($360/month) feels painful. But the gap in what actually gets covered is massive. A single denied claim wipes out 10 years of savings on the wrong policy.

Maintenance Reserve

A mobile service van takes a beating. Stop-and-go driving, loaded cargo, short trips that never let the engine fully warm up. A realistic maintenance reserve for a 3-5 year old van is $180-220/month averaged across the year. You won't spend it every month - you'll spend $0 for 8 months and then $1,800 on brakes and a water pump in one afternoon. Budget anyway.

Tires

Mobile service vans chew tires. A full set of commercial-grade LT tires for a Transit 250 is around $1,400 installed and you'll replace them every 60-80k km. Plus winter tires in Ontario (non-negotiable, and legally required in some use cases). Amortized: $70-90/month.

Cargo Buildout

Shelving, power, lighting, ladder rack, bulkhead. A decent buildout from Ranger Design or Adrian Steel is $4,500-7,000 installed. Cheaper DIY plywood builds run $1,200-2,000 but they don't last and they look rough on customer driveways. Amortized over 5 years: $120-170/month.

Signage and Wrap

A partial wrap with logo, phone number, services, and QR code is $1,800-2,800. Full wrap is $4,500+. For a first van, a partial is almost always the right call. Amortized over 4 years (wraps fade, businesses change numbers): $45-65/month.

Telematics, Phone, Admin Tech

GPS tracking (Geotab or similar) runs $25-40/month. A decent business phone line is another $60. Fleet card for fuel tracking adds another $10-15. Call it $100/month combined.

The Small Stuff That Adds Up

• Car washes and detailing (customers notice): $40/month
• Parking and tolls (407, downtown jobs): $30-80/month
• Emergency roadside membership: $15/month
• Registration and safety inspection (amortized): $25/month

The Running Total

Adding it up for our median Transit 250 operator:

• Payment/depreciation: $800
• Fuel: $980
• Commercial insurance: $360
• Maintenance reserve: $200
• Tires: $80
• Cargo buildout: $145
• Signage: $55
• Telematics/phone/admin: $100
• Washing and small stuff: $120

All-in monthly: roughly $2,840. Cheaper setups (used Transit Connect, paid-off, personal garage, rural route) get you closer to $1,800. Sprinter 2500 buildouts with financing and GTA insurance easily push past $3,600.

The point is not the exact number. The point is that very few solo operators have this number written down anywhere.

What This Means Per Billable Hour

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. A solo mobile operator does not bill 40 hours a week. In most service trades I've looked at, realistic billable hours land between 20 and 28 per week (drive time, admin, quoting, callbacks, and the 10am jobs that actually start at 10:40 all eat into it).

Let's say 24 billable hours a week, 48 weeks a year. That's 1,152 billable hours annually. Your $2,840/month van cost is $34,080/year. Which means the van alone adds $29.58 to your true hourly cost of doing business. Before you've paid yourself a dollar. Before tools, software, insurance on the business itself, accounting, or taxes.

If you're charging $85/hour and you've never backed out your van overhead, you're probably netting $40-45/hour in take-home. Which is fine. If you meant for it to be fine. It's a problem if you thought $85/hour meant $85/hour.

Transit Connect vs Transit vs Sprinter vs ProMaster

Different jobs need different vans. The monthly cost stack scales with the choice.

Transit Connect (small urban)

Best for mobile detailers, locksmiths, IT service, light electrical. About 60-70% of the running cost of a full-size van. Fuel under $500/month is realistic. Insurance slightly cheaper. Payload is the limit - if you carry a pressure washer and a 200L water tank, you've outgrown it.

Transit 250/350 mid-size

The median choice for a reason. Enough room for a proper buildout, acceptable fuel economy, huge service network, good resale. If you're not sure what to buy, this is the default.

Sprinter 2500

Premium option. Better build quality, higher payload, diesel efficiency on long routes. But the total cost of ownership is 15-25% higher once you factor in the more expensive service parts and the fact that a Mercedes dealer charges differently than a Ford one. Only makes sense if your margins support it (high-ticket plumbing, HVAC, mobile welding).

RAM ProMaster 2500

Front-wheel-drive, flat floor (easier buildouts), cheaper than a Sprinter. Weaker resale in most Canadian markets. Good value choice for buildout-heavy trades (mobile tire, dog grooming, florists).

Buying vs Leasing

The honest answer is that for most solo operators in most Canadian markets, buying used (2-3 years old, financed over 60 months) wins the spreadsheet. You avoid the steepest depreciation, you build equity, and by year 4 your payment is gone.

Leasing wins if:

• You want predictable numbers for the business (no surprise $2,400 transmission bills)
• You plan to upgrade every 3-4 years anyway
• Your accountant specifically prefers the lease write-off structure (ask them - this varies)
• You're using the van hard enough that maintenance risk is real past year 5

Leasing loses if you drive more than the mileage cap (every lease I've seen caps at 24,000km/year - a service van doing 180km/day does 40,000km/year). The overage charges are brutal.

The Insurance Mistake Most Solo Operators Make

I want to be direct about this one because it comes up in almost every conversation I have with first-year mobile operators.

You register the van in your personal name, you insure it on a personal auto policy, you tell yourself you'll upgrade to commercial "once the business is bigger." Then you rear-end a Tesla on the way to a 2pm job. The insurer does the accident investigation, finds three months of invoices in your glovebox, and denies the claim for commercial use violation.

This isn't a hypothetical. Every commercial insurance broker I've talked to in Ontario has at least one story like this per year. The delta between personal and commercial is roughly $1,800/year. The cost of a denied claim starts at $40,000 and goes up fast.

If you're billing customers and you're using the van to get to them, you need commercial coverage. That's the whole argument.

Electric and Hybrid for Mobile Service

In 2026 the EV option is real but it's situational. A Ford E-Transit or Mercedes eSprinter costs about $15-20k more up front, qualifies for federal and some provincial rebates, and cuts your fuel bill by 75-85%. If you're doing tight urban routes under 200km a day and you have home charging, the math works in about 3-4 years.

For rural service work, it's harder. A winter day in Meaford with a loaded E-Transit pulls the usable range down to around 180km. If you're doing 280km days, you're charging mid-shift. That's 40-60 minutes of non-billable time per charge. Kills the economics.

My pragmatic take for 2026 (and this may shift by 2028 as charging infrastructure improves): hybrid if available, efficient gas van if not, electric only if your route geography clearly supports it. Don't buy an EV van because it feels like the future. Buy it because the per-km numbers on your specific routes work.

Does a Wrap Actually Pay For Itself?

Short version: yes, for most mobile trades, if you do it right.

A partial wrap ($2,000 installed, roughly) with your logo, services, phone number, website, and a QR code is a rolling billboard that sits in customer driveways for 4-6 hours a day. Every neighbour who walks past is a potential lead. You won't track all of it, but the "where did you hear about us" data I've seen from operators who ask that question puts van-sighting referrals at 10-20% of new customers.

Pay back on a $2,000 wrap is typically 4-8 jobs. If you're charging $300-600 per job, that's 2-3 months. After that it's pure upside.

What doesn't pay off: full wraps with elaborate graphics that cost $5,000+ and take six weeks to design. Keep it simple, legible from 20 feet away, and include a way to contact you that works at a glance (phone number plus QR code).

When to Add a Second Van

Not before the first one is booked out. I've watched operators add a second van because they had three busy weeks in a row, then spend the next eight months staring at an empty second van that's still costing them $2,800/month in overhead.

The trigger for a second van isn't "I had a good month." It's:

1. You've been turning down 2+ jobs per week for 8 straight weeks
2. You have a named hire who is starting in the next 30 days
3. Your booking system shows 4+ weeks of forward backlog consistently

If you're doing solo mobile work and thinking about growth, I wrote a longer piece on running a mobile service business as a solo operator that covers when the second-van decision makes sense and when it's a trap.

What To Do With This Number

Once you have your real monthly van cost written down, you can do something useful with it. Three things, in order.

First, back it into your hourly rate. Take your monthly overhead (van + business insurance + tools + software + phone + accounting), divide by realistic billable hours, and that's your cost floor. Your actual rate is cost floor + target take-home + a margin for taxes. The hourly rate calculator handles the math if you'd rather not spreadsheet it.

(Most operators discover their current rate is $15-30 below where it should be. This is uncomfortable but fixable - you don't have to raise everyone overnight.)

Second, track fuel and maintenance for 90 days. The numbers above are industry averages. Your numbers may be meaningfully different. 90 days of real data beats any blog post estimate.

Third, revisit the stack annually. Fuel prices move. Insurance renews. Your van gets older and maintenance creeps up. What was $2,840/month in year one is often $3,100 by year three. If you don't revisit, your margin quietly shrinks and you never notice until you're wondering why the business feels tight.

The Bigger Picture

The reason this exercise matters isn't really about the van. It's about knowing your actual numbers well enough to make decisions that aren't panic-driven.

When you know your van costs $2,840/month and adds $29.58 to every billable hour, you can look at a $180 same-day-emergency quote and know whether it's worth the drive. When you don't know, you take the job because it "feels like money," lose money on it, and burn out twelve months later wondering why you're working 55 hours a week and still tight on rent.

The van is the biggest line item in most mobile service businesses. Respect it with a spreadsheet.

If you want a tool that handles the job tracking, customer reminders, and invoicing side (so your admin hours shrink and your billable hours grow), FixyFlow is free to try. But honestly, even if you never use our software, please just write down your monthly van cost. It's the single cheapest exercise in small business finance and almost nobody does it.

— Lasse
Built FixyFlow in Collingwood