NEMT operating budget template: trips, revenue by payer, and monthly costs

How to use this budget

Build the budget one month at a time from units, not from totals. Each line is a count (trips, paid hours, miles, gallons) times a price, so when a number moves you can tell whether the volume or the price moved. If you already run vans, start from the last three months of statements and trip logs. If you are starting out, use your rate schedules and the figures in the wheelchair van operating cost guide.

• One budget per month, twelve in a row. Copy the page for each month and change only what changed.
• Treat what does not change with one more trip as fixed. Drivers scheduled for a shift are paid whether or not trips fill it. Fuel, maintenance, and card fees rise with each trip and each mile.
• Keep timing separate. This budget shows what a month earns and costs. When the money lands is a different question, and the NEMT cash flow guide builds a 13-week view of it.
• Compare with actuals. Part F sets each month’s results beside the budget, and the monthly operations report is where the month’s real numbers come from.

The budget

Part A: Trips and revenue

Enter every payer and service level on its own line. Average pay per trip is the base rate plus the average loaded miles times the per-mile rate, taken from that payer’s schedule.

Example (made-up trips and rates, for illustration only): a four-van company running 22 service days and 8 trips per van per day.

Part B: Labor

Paid hours come from timecards. Add the payroll load as a percentage of wages.

Part C: Vans

Part D: Office and other

Part E: Result

Example of the costs and result for the same four-van company. The load on driver wages is 18 percent (7.65 percent for Social Security and Medicare, 0.6 percent for federal unemployment, 2.75 percent for state unemployment, and 7.0 percent for workers’ compensation, with the last two being example rates). The load on the dispatcher is 11.5 percent: the same three tax rates plus 0.5 percent for workers’ compensation, an example rate for office work.

Part F: Budget against actual

Part G: When the money arrives

Where each number comes from

Every input has a place to find it, and a public number to check it against.

• Trips and pay per trip. Count trips by payer and service level in the trip log, and take each payer’s rates from its schedule or contract.
• Driver paid hours. Use timecards, not trip counts. The Labor Department treats waiting between trips as work when waiting is part of the job (29 CFR 785.15), though a break long enough to leave a driver fully relieved of duty is not (29 CFR 785.16), so a van that runs 8 trips can need 9 paid hours. BLS puts national median pay at $17.93 an hour for shuttle drivers and chauffeurs and $24.20 for dispatchers outside police, fire, and ambulance, from its May 2025 survey.
• Overtime. Hours over 40 in a workweek are paid at not less than one and one-half times the regular rate for employees covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act and not exempt (Labor Department Fact Sheet 23). Budget the overtime hours in their own line, not folded into the wage.
• The payroll load. Employers owe 6.2 percent Social Security (on wages up to a $184,500 base in 2026) and 1.45 percent Medicare. Federal unemployment is 6.0 percent of the first $7,000 per employee, less a credit of up to 5.4 percent for state contributions paid in full and on time, which leaves 0.6 percent, or $42 per employee for the year, unless your state is a credit reduction state (IRS Publication 15, 2026). State unemployment and workers’ compensation come from your own notices. Hiring your first NEMT employee walks through each one, and the driver cost calculator turns them into a loaded hourly cost.
• Benefits. If you offer paid leave, health insurance, or retirement, add them. For scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that private-industry employers paid $46.89 an hour in total compensation in June 2026, of which $32.82 was wages and salaries and $14.07, or 30.0 percent of the total, was benefits.
• Fuel. Take miles and miles per gallon from the fuel log, and the price per gallon from EIA. Its survey for Monday, October 5, 2026 had regular gasoline at $4.354 nationally.
• Everything else. Use the last three statements for each line and the renewal notices for yearly bills.

Reading the result

Three numbers tell you most of what the budget says: revenue per trip, cost per trip, and the number of trips where the month breaks even.

In the example, revenue per trip is $53.11 and cost per trip is $49.33, so each trip leaves about $3.78 and the month ends $2,659 ahead. Break-even takes the fixed costs and divides them by the profit each trip leaves after its own costs. Fuel, maintenance, and card fees rise with each trip, $4,847 in all or $6.88 a trip. The other $29,884, including driver pay, is fixed, so each trip contributes $46.23. Divide $29,884 by $46.23 and the break-even is about 647 trips, 92 percent of the 704 budgeted, or 7.35 trips per van per day. The break-even calculator runs the same arithmetic with your inputs, and the cost per mile calculator turns the van lines in Part C into a cost per mile you can set against what a trip pays.

When a line is off by 10 percent or more at month end, split the gap before you react. If fuel budgeted at 752 gallons and $4.35 a gallon, $3,271, comes in at 790 gallons and $4.76, $3,760, the month is $489 over, or 15 percent. About $324 of it came from price and $165 from gallons. The price part is not the vans’ fault, and the gallons part sends you to the fuel log to see which van used more.

Rebuild the budget when a payer changes its rates, when you add or lose a payer, and when you add or remove a van. A rate change that you pass on to private-pay customers is covered in the guide to raising NEMT prices.

Pulling the inputs from HealthRide

Most of the figures above are counts, and a count is easy to find when every ride is recorded. In HealthRide, each leg in the trip log carries its GPS-recorded miles and both its scheduled and actual times, and the log exports as a CSV spreadsheet or a PDF. For any period you pick, the payer summary reports each payer’s completed and cancelled trips, what you billed, and what is still unpaid, and driver activity and timecards give the hours. Those are the counts Parts A and B ask for. See reports and invoicing.