Free tool

RV fuel cost calculator

The math is simple: miles divided by your miles per gallon, times the price of fuel. What is hard is knowing the numbers to put in it, so every box below says where its number comes from, and the RV type presets carry real-world MPG ranges rather than figures nobody publishes.

Fields marked with a star are required. The answer updates as you type.

Your trip

How to get it: put your route into Google Maps and read the total, or add up the legs yourself. If the trip is there and back, enter the round-trip total, since that is the fuel you will buy.
Sets a real-world MPG range for the estimate. Your own measured MPG below always wins over the range.

Your numbers

How to get it: fill the tank, note the odometer, drive a normal stretch, fill again. Miles driven divided by gallons on the second fill. One tank is a rough answer, three tanks is a good one, and the number moves with wind, weight, and mountains, so measure on roads like the trip you are pricing.
How to get it: the price at your last fill is the best one. Otherwise AAA posts the daily national average for regular and diesel, and GasBuddy shows station prices along your route. Diesel is running well above regular this year, so use the diesel figure if that is what you burn.
Optional. Most gasoline motorhome generators burn roughly half a gallon to one gallon per hour under load, so the total is shown as a range. Leave empty to skip.

Where the MPG ranges come from

There are no official fuel economy ratings for RVs. The EPA does not test motorhomes, because their chassis exceed the weight limits of the EPA's fuel economy testing, and towable RVs have no MPG figure at all because the fuel economy belongs to the tow vehicle. So the ranges here come from trade sources that gathered owner reports and dealer figures: Class A gasoline 6 to 8 MPG, Class A diesel 7 to 10, Class C gasoline 8 to 11, Class C diesel 12 to 16, Class B vans 14 to 20, travel trailers 8 to 14, and fifth wheels 8 to 12.

Two of those ranges deserve a second look. The towable numbers are the tow vehicle's fuel economy while pulling, not a property of the trailer: a half-ton gasoline truck that does 18 MPG empty might do 12 to 14 pulling a travel trailer, and a three-quarter-ton diesel pulling a fifth wheel might do 8 to 12. And the Class B spread is wide because it spans gasoline and diesel vans, where a diesel Sprinter runs near the top of the range and a gasoline ProMaster near the bottom. Your own measured MPG, entered in the box, is better than any of it.

What the answer means

The estimate is the middle of the road, not a promise. Wind, elevation, speed, and how heavy the coach is loaded all move the real number, which is why the result shows what the trip costs at both ends of your MPG range as well as the middle. Camper Smarts, whose method and figures this tool follows, recommends carrying a cushion of 10 to 15 percent over the estimate, and the result applies that for you as the planning figure. Motorhomes and tow vehicles also run most efficiently somewhere in the 55 to 65 MPH band, so a trip planned at 75 burns measurably more than the same trip at 60.

Where to go next

The trip planner guide covers the whole job of planning a route: where to stop, where to book, and where to fill. The weight calculator answers the other question that decides what a trip costs, which is how heavy the load is.

Sources