Gas is at $4.48 a gallon, and every moving family with a car and a long way to go is asking the same question: is it cheaper to ship a car or drive it? We priced both sides with real numbers, our own 2026 shipping prices against today’s gas, hotel and meal costs, and the answer is sharper than the usual “it depends.” On cash alone, shipping wins past about 2,000 miles. Count the workdays a long drive eats and shipping wins from about 550 miles, which covers roughly four in five of the moves we handle.
Ship A Car has been moving cars across the country for more than a decade. This report sets the prices our customers actually paid over the last twelve months beside the full cost of driving the same distance, and shows exactly where the lines cross.
The Break-Even Is About 2,000 Miles
Here is the comparison, move by move. The shipping column is the typical price our customers paid to ship an ordinary car on an open carrier, plus one airline ticket, because if the car rides a truck you still have to get there. The driving column is everything the trip costs in cash: gas, tires and maintenance, the depreciation the miles add, hotel nights, and meals on the road.
Read the second and third columns first. For a move of a few hundred miles driving is not close to a contest; the car costs a few hundred dollars to drive and a truck plus a plane ticket costs several times that. The gap narrows steadily with distance, because shipping gets cheaper per mile the farther a car goes while driving gets more expensive per mile once hotel nights pile up. The lines cross at about 2,000 road miles. A coast-to-coast move of around 2,750 miles costs about $2,350 to drive and about $1,950 to ship and fly, a saving of roughly $400 before anyone counts the week.
Across the moves of 300 miles or more in our recent book, shipping came out cheaper in cash on about one in four. That share is almost entirely the long hauls: nearly all of those moves covered 1,500 miles or more, and most of them started or ended in California.
Count Your Time and It Drops to 550
The cash comparison leaves out the biggest cost of a long drive, which is the drive. At 500 miles a day, a 1,100 mile move is three days behind the wheel and a coast-to-coast run is six, time most people take off work or out of a move that is already on a deadline. The fourth column prices each driving day at eight hours of the average American wage, about $302 a day.
With that one change the break-even collapses from about 2,000 miles to about 550. On that basis shipping was the cheaper choice on roughly four in five of the moves over 300 miles in our records. A family moving from New York to Florida, around 1,100 to 1,300 road miles, saves roughly $350 to $400 in cash by driving and pays for it with two or three workdays.
Retirees and snowbirds heading south this fall face a different math, and the cash column is theirs. A couple driving shares one hotel room but eats twice, and a couple shipping buys two plane tickets, and those roughly cancel: the break-even for two travelers lands at the same 2,000 miles as for one.
The Gas Spike Did Not Change the Answer
The natural guess is that $4.48 gas, up from $3.18 a year ago, tilts the scales hard toward shipping. It does not, and the reason is that car carriers burn fuel too. Diesel costs flowed straight into transport rates: on long hauls our typical price per mile is up about 15 percent on last year. Run last year’s shipping prices against last year’s gas, holding hotels and meals steady, and the break-even lands at the same 2,000 miles it sits at today.
What the spike did change is the size of both bills. A coast-to-coast drive now burns about $150 more in gas than it did a year ago, and shipping the same car costs roughly $250 more. Anyone who priced this decision last fall should price it again, but should expect the same verdict.
What Car Shipping Costs per Mile
The reason shipping wins long hauls is visible in its price per mile. A carrier’s fixed work, loading, inspections, and the slow city miles at each end, is the same whether the car rides 200 miles or 2,700, so the longer the trip the thinner that cost is spread. In our last twelve months of open-carrier car moves, the typical price per mile fell by more than two thirds from the shortest runs to the longest:
Two cautions on using a per-mile figure. First, it is a result, not a rate card: carriers price the lane, and a popular corridor with plenty of trucks often prices below a quiet one of the same length, a pattern we mapped in our lane report. Second, the calendar moves it, as our price calendar shows, with the snowbird months firming rates on the north to south lanes. For a real number on your route, the auto transport calculator prices your two zip codes directly.
What the Numbers Leave Out
We kept the comparison conservative toward driving. It leaves out the rental car you may need for a few days while your own car is on the truck, which favors driving. It also leaves out everything that favors shipping: a second car in the household that someone would have to drive separately, the risk of a breakdown or a crash on an unfamiliar interstate, and the fatigue of eight-hour days in a row. Enclosed transport, which costs about a third more than open on the same lane, pushes the break-even farther out, and a gas-sipping hybrid pulls the driving line down a little.
Even so, the shape holds under every reasonable change we tried: short moves favor the steering wheel, long moves favor the truck, and your time decides everything in between.
How We Priced Driving
Every driving figure comes from a published national source, so anyone can check it or swap in their own numbers.
The per-mile cost of the car deserves a word. AAA’s full ownership figure, which includes insurance, finance charges and registration, overstates what one trip costs, because you pay those whether you drive or not. Instead we used what AAA’s own table implies each extra mile costs: comparing its 10,000 and 20,000 mile a year totals, an additional mile runs about 38 cents at the $4.15 average gas price AAA measured, or about 39 cents at today’s price. That covers gas, tires and maintenance, and the extra depreciation the miles add.
Methodology
Shipping prices are the tariffs our customers paid on dispatched Ship A Car, Inc. orders for a single passenger vehicle (cars, SUVs and pickups) on an open carrier between the lower 48 states, from September 2025 through mid-August 2026; golf carts, motorcycles, powersports, vans and box trucks, trailers, boats and multi-vehicle orders are excluded, and quotes that never moved are not counted. Distances are road miles, estimated from the straight-line distance between pickup and delivery zip codes and scaled by road-routing factors we calibrated against driving routes for a sample of real lanes (about 1.25 on short moves falling to about 1.16 coast to coast). Each figure is the median of the moves in its distance band, so half paid less and half paid more. The year-on-year comparison sets January through mid-August 2026 against the same weeks of 2025. No absolute volumes appear in this report, and all figures are aggregates with no customer information included.
Journalists, researchers and bloggers are welcome to cite or chart these figures with a link to this page. For a regional cut or a specific lane, call the number below and ask about the data behind this report.
Common Questions
Is it cheaper to ship a car or drive it? On cash alone, driving is cheaper for most moves under about 2,000 miles and shipping is cheaper beyond that, once gas, depreciation, hotels, meals and a one-way flight are counted. If your time off work counts, shipping becomes the cheaper option from about 550 miles.
How much does it cost to ship a car per mile? In our 2026 bookings an ordinary car on an open carrier typically ran about $2.10 a mile under 300 miles, about $1.00 a mile around 1,000 miles, and about $0.60 a mile on coast-to-coast moves. The total still rises with distance; only the per-mile rate falls.
How much does it cost to drive a car across the country? For one driver covering about 2,750 miles at today’s prices, roughly $2,350: about $1,080 for the car’s gas, wear and depreciation, five hotel nights near $860, and six days of meals near $410. Add six workdays if you would otherwise be earning.
Did high gas prices make shipping the better deal? Not by themselves. Transport rates rose alongside gas, about 15 percent per mile on our long hauls year on year, so the break-even distance is essentially where it was a year ago.
Should snowbirds ship their car to Florida or drive? From the Northeast or Midwest, a Florida run is usually 1,000 to 1,500 miles, where driving is cheaper in cash for a retired couple with time to spare. If the drive would cost workdays, or if a second car has to come too, shipping usually wins; our snowbird migration index shows which weeks book up first.
Get a Quote
Call Ship A Car, Inc. at (866) 821-4555 with your two zip codes and what you drive, and a coordinator will give you a real price to set beside your own driving math, or start with the instant calculator.
