Road trips can be an affordable way to travel — provided you plan them properly. Here’s a guide to help you estimate how much you should expect to spend on fuel for your next family vacation.
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Figure out your travel distance
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In order to get a ballpark estimate on your road trip fuel expenses, you’ll need a few bits of data. First, you’ll need to estimate the length of your road trip. An app like Google Maps or Waze is perfect for this part of planning your trip. While calculating the distance you’ll travel, don’t forget to consider the detours, points of interest, and breaks you’ll take. Make sure you’ve accounted for your adventure being a round trip, and don’t be afraid to pad your estimate a bit — it’s better to budget for a bit more fuel than it is to find yourself running short on gas money.
The next piece of the puzzle you’ll need is your car’s fuel economy. You can get an estimate your gas costs from FuelEconomy.gov, which offers a convenient road trip calculator to save you the trouble of doing the math yourself. However, if you want a more precise measure of your vehicle’s fuel economy, Reader’s Digest recommends collecting some real-world data.
First, figure out your car’s gas tank size, which should be available in your owner’s manual. Then, fill up your tank and reset the odometer. Drive as you normally would, until your tank is nearly empty. Then, divide the number of miles you traveled by the amount of gallons in your tank to find your car’s fuel economy. For instance, if you traveled 300 miles on 10 gallons of gas, you’re getting 30 miles per gallon.
Fuel prices
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Gas prices can be tricky — they can change from day to day and across state lines. For some solid estimates, try an app like GasBuddy to help you find the lowest prices along your route. It even offers savings for users via its GasBack rewards program. Another popular app, dubbed Gas Guru, will help you crunch numbers and estimate your gas costs before you hit the road.
If you’d rather estimate your costs the old-fashioned way, simply take the distance of your road trip and divide it by your estimated fuel economy. The result will be the number of gallons you’ll need for the trip.
For example, a 1,000-mile road trip in a vehicle that earns 25 mpg would require 40 gallons of gasoline.
Once you know how many gallons you’ll need, just multiply that figure by the estimated cost of gasoline per gallon. If you expect to pay $2.50 per gallon of fuel on a road trip that requires 40 gallons of gas, you should budget $100 for gasoline.
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For more trips on saving money on your next adventure, check out our handy guides to cutting back your road trips dining expenses.
Kimiko Kidd is a native Daytonian. She graduated from Wright State University with degrees in environmental science and sociology. She loves her trusty old Honda Civic, but dreams of owning a 1974 Ford Falcon XB with a custom paint job and a vintage Kawasaki Z1000. In her free time, Kimiko can be found watercolor-painting, baking muffins, collecting rocks, playing old-school Nintendo games, writing her novel, sewing stuffed animals, and cosplaying as her favorite Mad Max characters. See more articles by Kimiko.
