What a journey costs in fuel
Distance, consumption, price per litre. This calculator uses YOUR pump price rather than a national average, and the page explains why that is a deliberate choice rather than a missing feature.
Use the price you actually paid. This site does not publish an average — see below.
Fuel for this journey
€11.38
7 litres at €1.75 per litre. Imperial gallons where you chose mpg — a US gallon is a fifth smaller and would overstate the answer.
Consumption used: 7 litres per 100 km.
Why there is no average pump price here
Every other fuel calculator opens with a national average already filled in. This one does not, and the omission is deliberate rather than a missing feature.
A national average pump price is a statistic with a shelf life measured in weeks. This site is a static export with no refresh loop behind it — nothing here would notice a figure going stale, and a stale average is worse than no average because it looks current. It would also be the least useful number on the page: the price you paid is on the receipt in your pocket, it is the number the answer should be built from, and it differs from the national average by more than the rounding this calculator does.
So the field starts with a plausible figure you are expected to overwrite, and the site says why rather than leaving you to wonder whether it forgot.
Imperial gallons, not US ones
If you enter consumption in miles per gallon, this calculator uses the imperial gallon of 4.546 litres, which is the one an Irish or British mpg figure means. The US gallon is 3.785 litres — about a fifth smaller — and using it would understate your consumption by roughly twenty per cent.
That is a big enough error to be believed and a small enough one to go unnoticed, which is the worst combination. A great many online converters silently assume the US gallon because they were written for a US audience.
| Unit | Direction | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Litres per 100 km | Lower is better | The European standard; what a modern car’s trip computer shows here |
| Miles per gallon | Higher is better | Imperial or US? The same car is about 20% “better” in imperial mpg than in US mpg |
What this does not include
Fuel only. Not tolls, not depreciation, not tyres, and not the annual cost of keeping the car on the road — for which see the motor tax rates, which are a fixed annual charge with no relationship to how far you drive.
It also does not adjust for the fact that consumption is not constant. A stated litres-per-100-km figure is a steady-state number; a short urban journey from cold can use half again as much. If the answer matters, use your own observed consumption over a full tank rather than the manufacturer’s figure.
Where the VAT is
Inside the pump price, along with mineral oil tax, carbon tax and the NORA levy. You do not add VAT to a pump price — it is already there, which is why this calculator does no VAT arithmetic at all. If you need to know how much of a VAT-inclusive price is VAT, the reverse VAT calculator does that, though be aware that road fuel carries excise duties which are also in the price and are not VAT.