What a wheelchair van costs to run for a year: fuel, insurance, lift service, and depreciation

The seven lines in a wheelchair van budget

A wheelchair van costs money whether it moves or not, and more for every mile and every lift cycle it adds. Budget it as seven lines, each with its own source.

Driver wages, dispatch, and office costs are not on this list. They belong to the trip, not the vehicle, and the driver cost calculator handles them separately.

A worked year for one lift van

Here is one year for one full-size van, built from published figures where they exist. It is an example to copy, not a benchmark. Two lines, insurance and lift service, have no reliable published average, so the table uses placeholders you should replace.

The assumptions: a full-size van with two wheelchair positions and a rear lift, bought for $69,745 (the price on a General Services Administration order signed August 7, 2026). It drives 3,000 miles a month, or 36,000 a year, and runs six wheelchair trips on each of 260 service days.

That is about $3,320 a month, $153 per service day, and $1.11 per mile driven. If 30% of those miles run empty, each loaded mile carries about $1.58 of van cost. Hold that loaded-mile figure against what a trip pays. The cost per mile calculator does the same arithmetic month by month with your own inputs.

Fuel: the line that moves every week

Fuel changes faster than any other line, so price it from current data and revisit it monthly.

The EIA’s weekly survey had regular gasoline at $4.465 a gallon nationally for the week of September 28, 2026, $1.347 higher than a year earlier. Diesel stood at $6.382. Regions vary widely that same week:

Fueling the same van for a year costs about $4,050 more on the West Coast than on the Gulf Coast. EIA’s September 2026 outlook expects 2027 prices to average lower than 2026, but a budget built only on a forecast leaves no room for a price spike.

Mileage is the other half of the fuel line, and official ratings help only with lighter vans. EPA testing leaves out cargo vans rated above 8,500 pounds and passenger vans with ratings of 10,000 pounds and up, so many full-size conversions have no official figure. Minivans do: the 2026 Chrysler Voyager and Honda Odyssey are rated at 22 mpg combined and the 2026 Toyota Sienna hybrid at 36. A lowered-floor conversion starts from those ratings and loses ground. FuelEconomy.gov estimates that each extra 100 pounds cuts mileage by about 1%, and that an idling engine uses between 0.25 and 0.5 gallons each hour. Your own fill-up records are the only figure that captures all of it.

Insurance: price your own fleet

No published average fits an NEMT van, so get a real quote before you finish the budget. Commercial insurers price each account on its own facts. Progressive’s pricing factors include where you operate and how far you travel, the drivers’ records, your claims history, the coverage you choose, and the van’s age, type, and value with its equipment. On a wheelchair van, the conversion is part of that value.

Two warnings keep the line honest:

• Personal-policy averages do not apply. AAA’s 2026 study puts full-coverage insurance at $2,098 a year on average, but that figure is for personal use. The California Department of Insurance notes that most personal auto policies exclude livery, meaning driving for hire, so a figure built on personal rates says nothing about a van carrying paying riders.
• Hard-to-place accounts pay more. RLI’s excess and surplus program for NEMT and paratransit accounts, which considers new ventures and fleets with claim problems or non-renewals, lists a $50,000 minimum premium for the policy.

Divide your annual premium by the number of vans on the policy to get this line. The NEMT insurance cost guide covers required limits and ways to lower the premium.

Maintenance, lift, and securement upkeep

The chassis, the lift, and the securements wear on three different clocks: miles, cycles, and use.

The chassis. AAA’s 2026 study puts maintenance, repairs, and tires at 11.73 cents a mile across all new vehicles and 12.16 cents for medium SUVs. That figure assumes personal driving of 15,000 miles a year over five years, with a manufacturer’s maintenance schedule and an extended warranty included. A van that idles at curbs and stops every few miles works much harder, so treat AAA’s number as a floor and move to your own invoices after the first year. The preventive maintenance guide explains the severe-service schedule most NEMT vans belong on.

The lift. Lifts are serviced by cycles, not miles. FMVSS No. 403 requires a cycle counter on every certified lift and a maintenance schedule tied at least partly to it. BraunAbility’s Century 2 operator manual calls for inspection, lubrication, and maintenance every 750 cycles by an authorized technician, with further checks at 1,500 and 4,500 cycles.

Count your cycles to count your service visits. Each boarding and each drop-off is one full down-and-up cycle, so a wheelchair trip adds two. In the example, six wheelchair trips a day across 260 days is 3,120 cycles, or about four scheduled services a year. Get your dealer’s price for one visit and multiply.

The same manual shows why the warranty card matters. Parts are covered for 3 years or 10,000 cycles. Labor is covered for 1 year or 3,000 cycles, rising to 3 years or 10,000 cycles if the registration card reaches the maker within 20 days of the lift going into service. The example van would pass 3,000 cycles before its first year ended.

The securements. Budget for straps and belts, not only hardware. Q’Straint’s instructions call for replacing frayed, contaminated, or damaged webbing, and for replacing every part used during a collision, floor and wall anchorages included. A crash can put a full set of securements on the invoice even when the van itself is repairable.

Depreciation and financing

Depreciation is the largest single ownership cost in AAA’s study, and it is also the largest line in the example. It is easy to leave out of a budget because no bill ever arrives for it.

Work it out from three numbers: what you paid, what you expect to sell it for, and how long you will keep it. The Florida Department of Transportation’s 2026 useful-life table for transit vehicles sets 5 years or 200,000 miles for modified minivans and for modified minibuses of 8,500 to 10,360 pounds. The example assumes 5 years and a $10,000 resale value, which gives $11,949 a year. The resale figure is an assumption, and a lift van with 180,000 miles may bring more or less.

The IRS offers a cross-check. Notice 2026-10 treats 35 cents of each business mile as depreciation for owners who use the standard mileage rate. At 36,000 miles that is $12,600, close to the example’s figure.

Financing is smaller but real. AAA’s 2026 study puts finance charges at $1,184 a year on a vehicle with an average price of $39,376, on a five-year loan with 15% down. That is about 3% of the price a year, or roughly $2,100 on the example van. Use your own lender’s statement once you have one. The lease or buy guide compares the two ways to pay for a van, and the tax basics guide covers how the write-off differs from the budget figure.

Checking the total against the IRS rate

The IRS business mileage rate is a quick test of whether your total is realistic. The rate comes from an annual study of what it costs to own and operate an automobile, and it was 72.5 cents a mile for the first half of 2026 and 76 cents from July 1.

At 76 cents, 36,000 miles comes to $27,360, about $12,500 less than the example van. The gap makes sense. A converted van costs more to buy than a typical car, it needs lift service a car never gets, and it carries commercial insurance.

You cannot use that rate for your own taxes once you run five or more vehicles at the same time. IRS Publication 463 bars it for fleet operations, so a growing company deducts actual expenses, and the same records that back the deduction also build this budget.

Tracking your own numbers

After a year of real records, the published figures above become unnecessary. Set up a simple routine for each van:

1. Record the odometer at the start and end of every month, and at every service visit.
2. Tag every expense to a vehicle. Fuel cards issued per van, and shop invoices filed by unit number, make this automatic.
3. Read the lift’s cycle counter at each service and note it on the invoice.
4. Split loaded and empty miles. Cost per loaded mile, not cost per mile driven, is the figure to compare with what a trip pays.
5. Review each van’s cost per mile every quarter. A van whose repair bills climb while its miles stay flat is telling you it is time to plan a replacement. The guide on when to replace a NEMT vehicle covers that decision.

Real miles for every van in HealthRide

The per-mile figures in a budget are only as good as the mileage behind them. In HealthRide, drivers record the odometer when they check a van out at the start of a shift and when they check it back in, and those readings sit alongside the GPS miles from each trip. That gives you each van’s total and loaded miles without a separate log. See how vehicle records work in fleet management.