About tripcost

Every December, the same question comes up: "What's this trip actually going to cost?" Fuel, tolls, and time — three numbers you need before you can budget properly. Three numbers that, until now, lived on three different websites.

SANRAL's toll calculator gives you tolls. Google Maps gives you distance. The news gives you the latest petrol price. But nobody had put all three together for South Africa — not in a way that worked on mobile, spoke in rands, and was honest about how it calculated things.

So that's what tripcost.co.za is: a single place to get your total road-trip cost in ZAR, broken down into tolls, fuel, and drive time. Type your origin and destination, pick your vehicle, hit calculate. Done.

What to expect

Right now the planner covers the major SA city pairs — Joburg to Durban, Cape Town to Joburg, Pretoria to Nelspruit, and about a dozen more. Toll data is manually verified against SANRAL, N3TC, Bakwena, and TRAC. Fuel prices are updated monthly after the official DMRE announcement.

The numbers are estimates. Traffic adds time. Fuel pump prices vary a few cents between stations. Toll prices change every March. We're upfront about all of that — you'll see "last verified" stamps on every data point, and the methodology page explains exactly how each calculation works.

More routes, toll plaza detail pages, and fuel-price history are coming. The goal is simple: before you pull out of the driveway, tripcost.co.za should be the only tab you need to open.

Spotted something off?

Toll price out of date? Distance looks wrong? Get in touch via the contact page and we'll fix it.