How we set our rates
Last updated July 2026
LinkRide is a cost-sharing platform, not a licensed taxi or private hire service. UK law only allows that if riders are genuinely sharing what a trip costs to run, not paying a fare that turns a profit for the driver. So our rates need to track what a trip actually costs, not just a number that felt about right. Here’s what we checked ours against.
The short version
- Short urban trips (0–5 miles): 55p/mile— this is HMRC’s own approved mileage rate, the UK government’s figure for the full cost of running a car (fuel, insurance, servicing, and maintenance). Stop-start city driving is the least efficient kind, so the full rate applies here.
- Local trips (5–20 miles): 35p/mile — between the full running-cost rate above and the fuel-only cost below. A mid-length trip still carries real wear on top of fuel, just less of it per mile than a short stop-start journey.
- Regional trips (20–100 miles): 22p/mile — close to fuel cost alone for mixed driving conditions, at current UK petrol prices.
- Long motorway trips (100+ miles): 16p/mile — close to fuel cost alone for efficient motorway cruising, at current UK petrol prices. The cheapest kind of driving there is.
- Base cost: £2.00— a flat amount added to every trip regardless of distance, covering the fact that even a short trip is a real detour for the driver. This one isn’t benchmarked against a per-mile figure since it isn’t a per-mile cost.
The numbers behind it
HMRC’s Approved Mileage Allowance Payment (AMAP) is the UK government’s rate for reimbursing someone tax-free for using their own car — set at 55p per mile for the first 10,000 miles in a tax year (raised from 45p in April 2026). It’s designed to cover fuel, insurance, servicing, and maintenance in one figure — as close to an official “genuine cost” number as exists in the UK, which is exactly what our short-trip rate is checked against.
Fuel cost we worked out from the current UK average petrol price, around 153.5p per litre per RAC Fuel Watch. At typical modern-car fuel economy — roughly 45mpg cruising on a motorway, dropping to around 30mpg in mixed or stop-start driving — that comes to somewhere between 15p and 23p per mile, which is where our regional and long-distance rates sit.
Worth knowing
- These are checked against UK averages, not your specific car — real fuel economy, insurance, and running costs vary by vehicle.
- Fuel prices move. We’ll revisit these rates if they drift far from reality, rather than leaving them frozen indefinitely.
- Every rider sees the same full breakdown before booking — there’s no hidden markup on top of these figures.