A delivery driver in Singapore earns around $2,500 a month (Glassdoor and Indeed, 2026), but the driver is the cheap half. Add the van, the fuel, the insurance and the rest, and one driver plus one van runs close to $5,900 a month before you deliver a single parcel.
A $2,500 driver really costs you $2,925 a month
Start with the person, because most owners anchor on the salary and stop there. A delivery driver in Singapore earns around $2,500 a month, with the range running $2,300 to $2,800 (Glassdoor and Indeed, 2026).
Add the 17 percent employer CPF and that $2,500 is really $2,925, before you count leave cover or a sick day. That number is fixed, every month, whether the van does one job or forty.
And that is the cheap half. The van costs more.
The van is a $1,200 installment that runs whether it moves or not
You do not pay for a commercial van in one shot. You finance it, and the installment lands every month like a second salary.
A goods van in Singapore runs around $1,200 a month on a typical financing package. The sticker is brutal because of the Category C COE, which cleared $91,545 in the first August 2026 exercise (Motorist.sg, 2026), but you do not feel that as a lump sum. You feel it as the installment, due on the first, whether you booked ten jobs that month or none.
The van does not care how busy you are. It costs the same parked as it does loaded.
Fuel, insurance and ERP add another $1,740 a month
Now the running costs, and this is where owners lowball hardest. A working van is not a family car doing a thousand kilometres a month.
Run it properly six days a week and fuel alone is around $1,200 a month at current diesel prices (Mothership, 2026). On top of that sit commercial insurance at about $200 a month, road tax around $120, a carpark season pass around $120, and cashcard and ERP roughly $100. That is about $1,740 a month in running cost, and every dollar of it goes on moving or waiting to move. To see how these numbers roll into a per-parcel figure, read our breakdown of what last-mile delivery costs in Singapore.
None of it stops when the orders do.
Add it up and one driver plus one van is $5,865 a month
Put every line in one place and the real number lands hard. This is one driver and one owned van, per month, in Singapore.
Owning a driver and van in-house (monthly)
- Driver salary: $2,500
- Employer CPF (17%): $425
- Van installment: $1,200
- Fuel: $1,200
- Insurance: $200
- Road tax: $120
- Carpark: $120
- Cashcard and ERP: $100
- Total: about $5,865 a month
That is roughly $70,000 a year, and it does not flex. Busy month or dead month, the bill is identical. For a closer look at the labour side of this decision, see our comparison of man and van versus an in-house driver in Singapore.
The question is not whether you can afford a van. It is whether your volume justifies a $5,865 fixed monthly cost.
When the maths favours renting the driver and van instead
Most small operators should not own a van at all. If you are not running it hard, six days a week, ownership loses.
The logic is simple. A $5,865 monthly fixed cost only pays off if you pull more than $5,865 of value out of that van and driver every single month. Below roughly 20 to 25 busy delivery days a month, the fixed model bleeds you on the quiet days. Above it, ownership can work, but only if you keep the driver moving instead of idle between jobs.
In our experience running the BoxPls fleet, the break-even is higher than most founders guess, because the installment, the insurance and the CPF all keep charging on zero-order days. That is the whole point of BoxPls Man and Van: we turn a roughly $70,000-a-year fixed cost into a variable one you switch on only when you have work. It is from $165 per half-day and from $299 per full-day on weekdays, and the exact price is always shown before you book. For lighter parcel runs, our multi-stop delivery service quotes instantly from $9 per stop with the full price confirmed upfront, and no service fee bolted on.
If you would rather keep that money in your business than parked in a depreciating van, check the exact BoxPls rates for your job before you commit to owning anything.
