Group Training Travel Cost Calculator
Paste in where your people travel from, add the sites you could use, and see what each option costs the group in travel. Travel only — room hire, catering and trainer fees are not included. Nothing you enter is stored, and no personal details leave your browser.
Why the site you choose changes the cost — and what it usually saves
Been here before? Click to paste your saved code
Paste the code you saved last time and we will bring back everything you entered and work the figures out again.
Paste a column straight from a spreadsheet. Add a name first if you like: J Smith, LS12 6LN
Name first, then postcode or town. The name is optional.
Suggestions are course names only — locations and online versions are left out, since this is for training run at your own site. Type anything if yours is not listed.
Set this to whatever your expenses policy pays. The default of 55p is the HMRC approved rate for an employee's own car on the first 10,000 business miles.
Everyone is costed at this rate unless you say otherwise. If somebody travels differently — a company car, the train, or they simply do not claim — add their own rate to the end of their line in the first box and it overrides this one for them alone: J Smith, LS12 6LN, 25, or S Whitfield, BD1 1PR, 0 for anyone not claiming at all.
The cost figures assume every person drives their own vehicle and claims mileage. Car sharing, public transport, company vehicles, or people who simply do not claim will all bring the real figure down, so treat these as an upper bound and a way of comparing options rather than an expenses forecast. Distances are straight-line between postcode centroids rather than driving routes. Postcode and place lookups use postcodes.io.
Which of your sites is cheapest for everyone to reach?
When a group is spread across several depots, the cheapest place to hold training is rarely obvious. It is not the site with the most people at it, and it is not the one in the middle of the map. It is whichever site produces the lowest total mileage once every person's round trip is added up and weighted by how many people are making it.
The calculator works that out for each site you enter, and shows four things per option: total miles across the group, the average per person, the longest single journey and who is making it, and the cost per head at your mileage rate. The longest journey matters as much as the total — two sites can cost within a few pounds of each other while one leaves somebody driving 90 miles before a full day of training.
Is it cheaper to run training on site or send people out?
Usually on site, and by more than people expect once travel is counted properly. A worked example: twelve delegates spread across West and South Yorkshire, at the HMRC approved rate of 55p per mile for return journeys.
| Where it runs | Total miles | Group travel cost | Longest single trip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head office, Leeds LS1 | 389 | £213.78 | 97 miles |
| Works, Sheffield S9 | 656 | £360.91 | 98 miles |
| Depot, Hull HU3 | 1,104 | £607.41 | 123 miles |
Choosing Leeds over Hull saves that group £393.62 in mileage alone, before anyone has been paid for the hours spent travelling. That is often more than the difference between two providers' course fees, and it is the part most training budgets never account for.
The same twelve people also produce a theoretical best location — the single point in the country where total travel is lowest. In this example it lands near Leeds and comes to £208.09, which is £5.69 less than simply using the head office. So hiring a room would only be cheaper overall if it cost under £5.69 for the day. It will not. That is why, for a clustered group, using your own premises almost always wins, and why the calculator shows the hire threshold rather than recommending a venue.
How many people before on-site training makes sense?
As a rough guide, a closed course held for your team alone starts to make sense from around six delegates, though it varies by course — some are capped at eight or ten by the awarding body. Below that, booking several places on a scheduled course is usually simpler and quicker to arrange. The travel figures are what tip the balance: six people each driving 40 miles is 480 return miles and £264 at 55p, which is frequently enough on its own to justify bringing the trainer to you.
If you are weighing this up, the on-site and group training page sets out the three formats — at your premises, at a venue near you, or places on a scheduled course — and what each one suits.
What you can enter
The two boxes take one entry per line, so a column pasted straight out of a spreadsheet works without tidying. A full postcode is most accurate, but a town name is fine — Bradford works as well as BD1 1PR, and the two can be mixed freely in the same list. Part-postcodes are accepted too: if only BS7 or BS7 0B is entered, the surrounding district is used and the result is flagged as approximate rather than dropped.
Names are optional. Put one before a comma — J Smith, LS12 6LN — and it appears against that person's journey, which matters when you are looking at who faces the longest trip rather than just the total. The same applies to sites: Head office, LS1 4AP labels the option in the results and in any enquiry you send.
Different mileage rates for different people
By default one rate covers everyone, which overstates the total whenever somebody takes the train, shares a car, drives a company vehicle or simply does not claim. Add a rate as a third value on any line and it overrides the default for that person only:
- J Smith, LS12 6LN, 25 — costed at 25p rather than the main rate
- S Whitfield, BD1 1PR, 0 — not claiming, so contributes nothing to the cost
- WF1 1LT — no rate given, so uses whatever is set below the boxes
You do not have to use it. Leave the third value off every line and the tool behaves exactly as before. Where it earns its keep is the one or two obvious exceptions in a group — and those exceptions move the number more than people expect. Three people travelling to a Leeds site, one at the default 55p, one not claiming and one at 25p, come to £6.16 rather than the £20.30 you would get by assuming everyone drove and claimed.
When any per-person rate is set, the results say so, and the per-journey breakdown under the cheapest option gains a rate column marking which figures are somebody's own and which fell back to the default.
When one or two people are a long way from everyone else
Bringing a trainer to you removes travel for most of the group, but not for somebody at the other end of the country. Where one or two people are travelling far enough that their journeys alone dominate the bill, the results say so and show what the group travel would drop to if they were booked near home or online instead.
It does not claim that is cheaper, because whether it is depends entirely on how the course is priced. A closed course is normally charged per course up to a maximum number of delegates, so including one or two more people frequently adds nothing at all to the fee — in which case their travel is the only extra cost, and keeping them in is the simpler and often cheaper choice. Booking separate places means paying for those places on top. On a higher-priced qualification a couple of extra seats can comfortably outweigh several hundred pounds of mileage. The travel figure is the part the tool can work out; the fee is the part we quote.
This only appears in the clear-cut cases — somebody has to be both expensive in absolute terms and well out of step with the rest of the group. A long-ish drive across a county does not qualify, and where everybody travels a long way nobody is singled out, because there is no subset to split off that would help. Tick the box and we will quote it both ways so you can compare the real numbers rather than the travel alone.
One caveat on the online option. Not every qualification can be completed remotely — anything with a practical assessment, first aid being the obvious case, still needs someone in a room with an assessor. Ask us rather than assuming.
Journeys, not just totals
Two sites can land within a few pounds of each other and still be very different propositions. Each option shows the longest single journey and who is making it, and splits the group into three bands — under 50 miles, 50 to 100, and over 100 — so you can see at a glance whether one person is facing an overnight stay to make everyone else's trip slightly shorter. The row of dots beneath each option plots every individual journey along the same scale, with the outliers marked.
One way or return
Return journeys are counted by default, since most training runs for a day or more and people go home afterwards. Switch it off for residential courses, or where you only want to see the outbound leg.
Coming back to a comparison
Nothing is stored, so there is no account and no saved history. Instead, once the figures are worked out you can copy a code that carries everything you entered. Paste it into the box at the top of this page — on any device, at any point in the future — and the whole comparison comes straight back. It is useful for a quote that needs approval, or for rerunning the same group next year when the rate has changed.
How the calculation works
Postcodes and place names are resolved to coordinates using postcodes.io, the open dataset built on Royal Mail and ONS data. Where only part of a postcode is entered, or the full postcode is not on the register, the surrounding postcode district is used instead and the result is flagged as approximate.
Distance between two points is calculated with the haversine formula, which gives the great-circle distance across the surface of the earth. That is a straight line, not a driving route, so real road mileage will be higher — typically by 15 to 25 per cent in built-up areas, and considerably more where an estuary, a national park or a stretch of water sits between two points. It is reliable for comparing options against each other, which is what the tool is for, and it is not a substitute for a route planner when you come to reimburse anyone.
The most central point is found with the weighted geometric median, calculated iteratively using Weiszfeld's algorithm. It is not the midpoint or the average of the coordinates: it is the location that minimises total travel for the whole group, weighted by how many people travel from each place, so it is pulled towards your largest site rather than sitting halfway between everything.
Travel cost is return mileage multiplied by the number of people and your chosen rate. The default of 55p per mile is the HMRC approved mileage allowance payment rate for cars and vans on the first 10,000 business miles, which rose from 45p in April 2026. If your organisation pays a different rate, or your people drive company cars where advisory fuel rates apply instead, change the figure and everything recalculates.
Questions we get asked
Do I need every employee's postcode, or will a town do?
A town works. Full postcodes are more accurate — a town centroid can be several miles from where somebody actually lives — but for comparing one site against another the difference rarely changes the answer. Mix the two freely if that is what you have.
Can I use a different mileage rate for different people?
Yes. Add the rate as a third value on that person's line — J Smith, LS12 6LN, 25 — and it overrides the default for them alone. Use 0 for anyone not claiming at all. Leave it off and everyone uses the single rate set below the boxes, so you only need it for the exceptions.
What if some people will not be claiming mileage?
Either set their rate to 0 on their own line, or leave it and read the total as an upper bound. The calculator otherwise assumes everyone drives separately and claims, which is the most expensive case. Car sharing, public transport, company vehicles and people who simply do not claim all reduce it.
Does it include the cost of the training itself?
No. It covers travel only, so course fees, room hire, catering and trainer time are all excluded. That is deliberate — those figures depend on the course and the provider, whereas travel depends only on geography and is the same whoever delivers it.
Can I use it for people travelling from Northern Ireland or the islands?
You can, but read the result carefully. Straight-line distance takes no account of ferries or flights, so a journey from Belfast to Leeds appears far shorter and cheaper than it is in practice. For groups split across water, treat those figures as indicative only.
Is anything I enter saved or sent to you?
Nothing is stored. Postcodes and place names are sent to postcodes.io to be converted into coordinates, which is how any postcode lookup works, but no names, company details or contact information leave your browser unless you choose to send an enquiry at the end.
How accurate is straight-line distance compared with driving?
Close enough to rank options, not close enough to reimburse against. Expect real road mileage to run roughly 15 to 25 per cent above the figure shown in ordinary conditions, and further where the direct line crosses something you cannot drive over. Because every option is measured the same way, the comparison between them holds even though the absolute figures are conservative.