The True Cost of Running a Commercial Van in Singapore

What actually leaves your account

A van costs you money on the day you buy it and on most days after that. The price you pay for it is one line. These are the others, and none of them appear on the advertisement.

COE

In Singapore every vehicle comes with a COE, and its cost is already inside the price you're quoted. What matters later is the category your van sits in and what happens when it runs out — renew, or replace. That decision is years away, but it's set on the day you buy.

Road tax

Payable every year, and worked out differently for a goods vehicle than for a private car. Small, predictable, and easy to forget until a reminder arrives.

Insurance

Commercial premiums don't behave like private car premiums. Who drives, what you carry and how the business is classified all move the number. Worth checking before you commit to a model, not after.

Servicing

Some vans come with a servicing package and some don't. How often it needs servicing, what each visit costs, and how far the workshop is from where you park all add up quietly over the years.

Fuel or charging

Diesel, petrol and electric behave very differently once the mileage is high. If your drivers cover a lot of ground every day, this is often the biggest running cost of the lot — and the one that most separates two vans with the same sticker price.

Downtime

A van in the workshop isn't earning. Parts availability and how quickly it gets fixed rarely appear in any comparison, and for a small fleet they can matter more than the price you paid.

What it's worth later

You will eventually sell it or scrap it. What it's worth then is part of what it cost you, even though you can't know it precisely on day one.

The "cheapest van" that isn't

There's a pattern worth knowing about, because it wastes a lot of people's time.

You see a used vehicle advertised at a price that looks unusually good. You call, or you drive down. That particular unit has just been sold. But while you're there, there's another one — a bit more, a different spec, available today.

Sometimes that's genuinely what happened. Often the cheap listing was doing its job, which was getting you through the door.

The tell isn't the price. It's whether the person in front of you will put the full number in writing, including everything above, before you commit to anything.

A fairer way to compare two vans

The sticker price on its own tells you very little. Try cost per working day instead.

Take everything you expect to spend across the years you'll own it. That means the price, road tax, insurance renewals, servicing, fuel or charging — plus a sensible allowance for time off the road. Divide by the number of days it will actually work for you.

It's a duller number and a far more honest one. It's also the number that tends to reorder the shortlist: two vans with the same price often don't finish anywhere near each other.

You won't get it exactly right, and you don't need to. Getting the shape right is enough to stop an expensive mistake.

Before you commit

A short list of things worth asking, whoever you buy from:

What's the all-in price?

Everything included, in writing, with nothing to be added later.

What's the servicing schedule, and what does each visit cost?

And how far is the authorised workshop from where the van is kept?

What's the warranty, and what isn't covered?

The exclusions matter more than the headline period.

How quickly can it be fixed if something goes wrong?

Ask specifically about parts. This is the cost nobody quotes.

What licence does the driver need?

It depends on the vehicle's weight, and it's a bad thing to discover late.

What happens when the COE runs out?

Whoever's selling should be able to walk you through both options without hesitating.

The honest summary

Nobody can tell you what a van will cost you without knowing what you'll do with it. Anyone who gives you a confident single figure without asking about your mileage, your load and your routes is guessing.

What you can do is compare properly: the same list of costs, over the same period, for every vehicle on your shortlist. Most of the expensive surprises come from comparing one van's sticker price against another's, and calling that a comparison.

What it actually costs to fill up: electric vs diesel

This is the difference that shows up in your bank account every month, so it's worth doing properly rather than arguing about in the abstract.

Below is a worked example for a van covering 1,500 km a month — a typical last-mile round. Every price is a real Singapore figure as at August 2026, and every consumption figure is clearly marked as an assumption, because that part depends on your load, your routes and your driver. Swap in your own numbers; the method is the point.