Freight Cost Indicators

Diesel is the largest single line in a trip, but it is not the only one. When the price rises thirty per cent the trip cost does not rise thirty per cent: driver cost, depreciation, insurance and maintenance do not all move the same way at the same time. To turn a change in fuel into a change in trip cost you need your own basket — that is, what share of your total cost fuel actually is. That is precisely why there is no per-kilometre figure on this page: the share differs in every fleet and cannot be written down by estimate.

Tolls behave differently. They are not a monthly market movement but the result of a routing decision: between the same two points, which road you take sets the amount directly, and for a heavy vehicle the gap runs into thousands of lira on a single crossing. Fuel price is something that happens to you; the toll is a decision you make. That is the use of tracking both in one table — you see whether what you lose on one can be recovered on the other.

In practice: write both lines onto the trip's own row. Once fuel and tolls are recorded per trip, you see the change in your own numbers rather than in a general series like this one — on which lane, in which vehicle, in which month. A cost deducted in bulk from a monthly statement never shows which trip carried it; that trip looks profitable and the gap surfaces in the fleet account.

It also matters which figure this is. The bulletin gives the pump price, taxes included; a business buying fuel through a vehicle recognition system or a fleet agreement may face a different effective price per litre. And for a VAT-registered business the amount that enters cost is the figure excluding VAT. Which one you use when building your own trip cost — pump price or contracted price, with VAT or without — changes the result directly; the series here does not make that choice for you, it only shows the published reference.

The same two figures do the work when quoting. If the route is known the toll is not an estimate but a known amount, and fuel can be worked out from the current price and the vehicle's consumption. The floor a quote cannot go under is these two plus the lines that remain.

This is not a cost-per-kilometre index. Publishing a figure per kilometre requires a reference vehicle's cost basket: fuel consumption, driver cost, tyres, maintenance, depreciation and insurance. No public, regularly published source covers those lines for Türkiye — which is why you will not find an estimated per-kilometre figure here.

The diesel price is not a national average. The EPDK bulletin it comes from is the average of prices declared by distributors for their dealers on the European side of Istanbul, and the bulletin is published for price-difference calculations in public procurement. It is reproduced here with that scope stated.

Toll tariffs are not all updated at the same time, and every row carries its own effective date. Amounts include VAT.

The two lines also update on different rhythms: the diesel series advances monthly as EPDK publishes its bulletin, while tolls change only when a tariff changes, on no fixed calendar. The last-updated date at the top of the page shows the newer of the two datasets; which figure belongs to which date is set out row by row in the tables. If you cite this page elsewhere, carry the date along with the amount.