Coast Releases Report on Fuel Spend

NEW YORK — Coast has released it’s report called Inside Fleet Spending: What Efficient Fleets Do Differently.

Built from hundreds of thousands of anonymized card transactions across industries including pest control, HVAC, construction, landscaping, and roofing, the company said the report gives fleet operators real benchmarks for fuel spend by industry, region, fleet size, and season.

Coast said the report is designed to help business owners and fleet managers understand how their fuel spend compares to peers doing the same type of work, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement are hiding. Among pest control fleets specifically, the report benchmarks average spend at $271 per vehicle per month, the lowest of any trade industry in the data, with July as the peak spending month.

Additional findings from the report include:

• Fleet size has a measurable impact on efficiency, but larger isn't always better. Fleets in the 30-99 vehicle range consistently outperform both smaller operations and 100+ vehicle fleets across every industry in the data.
• An estimated 3% of annual fuel spend is lost to unauthorized transactions and personal use, roughly $3,000 per year for a fleet spending $100,000 on fuel.
• The average fleet paid above-market pump prices more than twice per week, typically because no system was in place to guide where drivers fill up. Within a single market, the price spread between the cheapest and most expensive stations runs 10-11%.

The report includes a self-service Efficiency Audit where operators can benchmark their own fleet against the full dataset by industry, region, and fleet size.

The full report is available free here.