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What a car rental actually costs in Pakistan
Every quote is four things added together: the vehicle, the fuel, the driver and the tolls. Here is how to read one, and what makes the same trip cost two companies very different amounts.
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- 3 min read
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- Sidhu Travel Services
Most rental quotes in Pakistan arrive as a single number. You ask for a Corolla for three days to Islamabad, and you get back "Rs 45,000". What that number contains is anybody's guess, which is why two companies can quote the same trip Rs 15,000 apart and both believe they are being fair.
A quote is really four things added together. Once you can see them separately, you can tell whether a price is reasonable, and you can tell what will change it.
The vehicle, by the day
Every vehicle has a daily rate, and that rate has nothing to do with where you are going. It covers the vehicle being off the yard and unavailable to anyone else, its servicing, its insurance and its eventual replacement.
This is the part most people compare, and it is the part that varies least between serious companies. A 2025 Corolla Altis costs roughly what a 2025 Corolla Altis costs. Where you see a daily rate far below everyone else's, the vehicle is usually older than the photograph.
The fuel, by the kilometre
This is where quotes diverge, and where most of the confusion lives.
Fuel is not a flat charge. It is the distance you will cover, divided by what the vehicle actually returns per litre, multiplied by the price at the pump on the day you travel. Lahore to Islamabad and back is about 750 kilometres. A Corolla returning 15 km/l on the motorway needs about 50 litres. At Rs 396 a litre that is roughly Rs 20,000 of fuel in a quote that also contains a daily rate.
Three things follow from that arithmetic, and they explain most of what people find unfair about rental pricing:
- A bigger vehicle costs much more to run, not slightly more. A Coaster returning 8 km/l burns nearly twice the fuel of a Hiace over the same route. The daily rates may look close; the trip totals will not.
- The quote you were given last month is not the quote you will get this month. When the government notifies a new fuel price, every quote that includes fuel moves with it. Nobody is putting the rate up on you.
- A one-way trip is rarely half of a return trip. The vehicle has to come back whether you are in it or not, and somebody pays for that fuel.
The driver, by the day
If the vehicle comes with a driver, the driver has to eat and, on an overnight trip, sleep somewhere. That is a daily allowance, and on multi-day trips it is a real part of the total rather than a rounding error.
A self-drive rental does not carry it. That is usually the whole difference between the two prices you were quoted for what sounded like the same thing.
Tolls and the rest
Motorway tolls, parking, and city entry charges are pass-throughs. They should appear as themselves. A company that folds them into the daily rate is not overcharging you, but it is making it impossible to check the quote.
What to do with this
Ask for the four parts. Any company that works this way can give them to you in a minute, because it is how the quote was built in the first place.
If you want to see the arithmetic for your own trip before you speak to anyone, the fare calculator on this site does exactly the sum above: it takes the distance, the vehicle's real consumption figures and the day's notified fuel price, and shows you each line. The fuel prices page shows the rate it is using and when it last changed.
Neither of those will give you a cheaper number than the phone. They will tell you whether the number on the phone makes sense.