How much does commuting really cost per year?
A five-day commute at £12 a day with an hour door-to-door costs £2,724 in cash and 227 hours a year. Both numbers are worse than they look — the cash is after-tax money and the hours are unpaid.
The worked example
Same £38,000 job, 25 days' leave plus bank holidays — once fully remote, once on-site five days with a 60-minute round trip costing £12 a day.
Fully remote
0 office days
Five days on-site
227 office days · 60-min round trip · £12/day
227 is the honest day count: 52 weeks minus your 25 days' leave and 8 bank holidays leaves 45.4 working weeks. Back-of-envelope sums often assume 260 working days or a guessed £10 a day; counting your real leave and real fares changes the answer.
The cash is after-tax cash
Fares and fuel are paid from take-home. On a salary where each extra gross pound keeps 59p (basic rate + NI + Plan 2), funding £2,724 of commute takes about £4,600 of gross salary. That is the number to hold against a higher-paying office job, and it is why the calculator subtracts commute cash from the net position rather than mentioning it in passing. Our commute-vs-rise guide works a full example where an £8,000 rise loses to this arithmetic.
The hours are negotiable — if you can use them
227 hours is about 30 working days standing in for unpaid overtime. But an hour reading on a train is not an hour in traffic: tell the calculator how usable your commute genuinely is and it part-discounts the time — a train seat you can work or read in (60% usable) cuts the committed-hours cost from 227 to 91 hours a year; driving counts in full. The cash cost stays either way, and both feed the verdict: the cash on the money axis, the hours on the life axis where they weigh against your free-time priority.
Run this scenario with your own numbers
The button opens the calculator pre-loaded with this exact worked example — change anything, including the ratings and your priorities, and every figure recomputes live, in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded.