What a month on the road actually costs

Every time someone asks us what a month in the van costs, we give a vague answer and feel bad about it. So this spring we kept the receipts. Thirty-one days, France into Italy, up through the Dolomites and Tyrol, home across Switzerland. Two of us, one 2.1-litre diesel van, 4,300 km. Here is what it came to, including the bits that surprised us.

The short version: €2,275, or about €73 a day for the two of us. That is not a shoestring number and it is not a comfortable-hotels number. It is what happens when you sleep in the van most nights, cook most dinners, and refuse to skip the €9 espresso-and-pastry stop in a good square.

Where the money actually went

Fuel was the biggest single line, and it was bigger than we expected because mountain driving is thirsty. Over the whole month we averaged about 8.5 litres per 100 km, which is roughly a litre worse than our motorway figure. Sleeping came second, and that is the line with the most give in it.

The costs you can price before you leave

Fuel and tolls are the only parts of the budget you can work out in advance to within a few euros, and doing that is worth an evening. Vignettes are fixed prices published by the operator. Distance tolls are a per-kilometre rate you can multiply. Everything else is guesswork until you are on the road.

A month in four legs

Where we cut, and where we stopped bothering

After three years of this we have a decent sense of which savings are real and which just make the trip worse. The ones that work all share a shape: they are decided at home, once, and then you never think about them again.

• Alternating campsite and aire nights. A shower and a proper water fill every second day is enough, and it halved the sleeping line.
• Filling up before Switzerland and before Italy's motorway service areas. The price gap between a motorway pump and a supermarket pump 3 km off the junction was routinely 20 cents a litre.
• Driving the routes nationales in France. Slower, cheaper, and honestly the better road.
• Buying the vignette from the official operator, not the first search result. The reseller sites sell the identical digital vignette with a fee attached.
• What we stopped doing: hunting for free overnight parking every single night. An hour of driving around at dusk to save €12 is a bad trade, and we always ended up somewhere we did not like.

We keep the numbers now because they take the guilt out of the decisions. Knowing the month runs at about €73 a day means the €38 campsite in Liguria is a choice with a size, not a vague worry, and the two nights we took a proper room in Bolzano stopped feeling like a failure. Prices move, so check the official links above before you build your own version of this. But the shape holds: fuel is a third of it, sleeping is where the flexibility lives, and tolls are the one line you can settle at the kitchen table before you go.