Time & delegation · 2 min
The commute is the largest standing purchase most working people never priced: bought twice a day, five days a week, in a currency — attention at the edges of the day — that doesn't appear on any statement. This instrument states the annual bill in hours and money, and prices the two levers that actually move it.
The honest figure — parking, platforms and the walk included.
Sets your effective hourly.
Fuel, tickets, parking, the car's share of wear.
Everything is calculated in your browser as you type. Nothing you enter is sent or stored, and no account is needed.
A heavy standing order.
276 h / yr
5.5 working weeks a year, spent in transit
| Hours in transit, per year | — |
| Those hours at your rate | — |
| The transport bill, per year | — |
| The commute's full annual cost | — |
| Per office day, all-in | — |
| If the pattern were | Hours / yr | Full cost / yr |
|---|---|---|
| — | — | — |
| — | — | — |
| — | — | — |
Commute time is not uniformly dead. A train with a laptop returns some of it; a car in traffic returns none. Discount the hours honestly by what you genuinely reclaim.
The reading prices the commute you have — not the rent you'd pay to shorten it. Closer housing costs more; the honest comparison is this annual bill against that annual premium.
Consistency beats intensity in the damage: research on commuting satisfaction keeps finding that people never adapt to a long commute the way they adapt to almost everything else.
Everything below is calculated from your inputs. Nothing is fetched, nothing is looked up.
hours = minutes × 2 × office_days × 46 / 60
cost = hours × (net / (weekly_hours × 46)) + transport × 12
gauge = hours / (weekly_hours × 46)
The gauge reads transit hours as a share of working hours, the house line at 10% — the level at which the commute has become a second standing meeting with everyone in the region. The scenario table prices one more remote day and a halved distance, the only two levers that genuinely move the figure.
Limitations. The hour valuation uses your working rate; some argue leisure hours price lower, others that the marginal evening hour prices higher. Health and attention costs of long commutes are real and outside the arithmetic.