Last-mile operating costs: where the real savings are

Ask any management meeting how operating costs are doing and the answer starts with diesel. Fair enough: it moves every week, it makes the news, and it comes with an invoice that has one big number on it. At €2 a litre, it genuinely hurts.

The problem is that diesel has become the perfect excuse not to look at the rest of the bill. And the rest of the bill has been climbing quietly for years.

Diesel goes up and down. Everything else only goes up

Three figures from the last few months in Spain:

• Hourly labour cost in transport and warehousing is on its fifth straight year of increases. In Q2 2026 it rose 3.8% year on year.
• The minimum wage went from €900 in 2019 to €1,221 in 2026. That's 36% in seven years.
• Insurance rose 8.8% year on year in Q1 2026.

Fuel is volatile: it spikes one quarter and eases the next. Wages, insurance and the price of a new van don't ease. They move in one direction.

And there's a detail that changes the whole conversation. In the cost structure published by Spain's transport ministry, personnel and fuel are almost level for a long-haul truck. But you don't run long haul. You run urban delivery: few kilometres, low speeds, lots of stops. In that profile fuel weighs far less and time weighs far more.

In urban delivery, almost all the cost is fixed per shift

Run the numbers on one of your own vans.

Driver. A delivery driver costs roughly €33,000 a year fully loaded. Across 220 working days, that's €150 a day.

Vehicle. The TCO of a diesel fleet van runs between €0.38 and €0.45 per kilometre, covering depreciation, insurance, maintenance and tyres. On a 110 km urban shift, about €46 a day.

Total: €196 just to put that van on the road. You pay it whether it does 40 deliveries or 80.

That's the number that governs your economics, not the one at the pump. And the consequence is simple: every extra stop that fits into the same shift lowers the cost of all the others.

Two ways to cut cost per delivery, and they aren't worth the same

With those €196 a day, 65 deliveries works out at €3.02 per delivery. At 75, it's €2.62. Forty cents of difference without touching the pump.

Now the other route. That same van burns about 9.3 litres a day. At €2 a litre, that's €18.60 of diesel. Cut 10% of the kilometres and you save €1.86 a day: less than 3 cents per delivery.

Same route, two levers, fourteen times the difference.

Fuel is a saving. Productivity changes the unit economics of the operation.

Saving diesel isn't wrong. It's that if it's the whole conversation, you're optimising the small line and leaving the big one alone. To put numbers on your own operation, start by calculating your real cost per delivery: it's almost always higher than you think, and almost never because of fuel.

What actually happens when cost per delivery drops

This is where the maths stops being a savings exercise.

You grow without buying

A fleet of 10 vans going from 65 to 75 stops per shift makes 100 more deliveries a day with the same people and the same vehicles. At 65 deliveries per van, that's a van and a half you don't buy and the driver you don't have to find, train and hope will stay.

Think about it the other way. If your volume grows 15% next year and your productivity doesn't move, the only way out is to buy. Capital, lead times, insurance, hiring in a sector where drivers are hard to find. All of that is money, but above all it's time you don't have.

You stop running at the limit

The Friday peak. A driver off sick. The 7 a.m. order that blows up the day's plan. An operation running at 100% of capacity has nowhere to put any of that, so it pays for it with overtime or a subcontractor at emergency rates.

That 15% of headroom isn't just margin: it's the cushion that turns an unexpected event into a plan adjustment instead of an afternoon of firefighting. It's the difference between an operation that holds and one that depends on nothing going wrong.

Where that productivity comes from

Not from driving faster or pushing drivers harder. From removing the time that's wasted today:

• Realistic sequencing and time windows. A stop order that respects real traffic and customer slots removes backtracking and waiting.
• Fewer second attempts. Every failed delivery is paid for twice. A reliable ETA notification is what lifts the first-attempt delivery rate most.
• Less dispatch time. The two hours spent building routes each morning are pure cost, and they concentrate the risk in the one person who knows how to do it.
• Replanning during the day without rebuilding the whole plan when an urgent order comes in.
• Execution data to know which routes have slack and which are choking, instead of guessing.

For the full calculation with every lever, we break it down in how to calculate the ROI of an optimisation project.

What to measure starting Monday

Four numbers. If you can only track four, make them these:

1. Deliveries per vehicle per shift. That's your productivity, plain and simple.
2. Real cost per delivery. Every cost for the month divided by the deliveries that landed.
3. First-attempt delivery rate. The most expensive failure and the easiest to bring down.
4. Planning hours per week. Invisible cost and key-person risk at the same time.

You'll find the detail on each one in our guide to last-mile metrics.

The price of diesel isn't up to you. How many deliveries each van makes per day is. And that's the number that decides whether next year you buy vans or you buy margin.