Public benchmark · Pharma distribution
What a pharmacy delivery really costs
Nobody publishes this number. We rebuilt it from scratch using public sources only, one region at a time: 20,000 simulations for each of Italy’s 20 regions. The national median is €14.17 fully loaded per delivery. The interesting part isn’t the level: it’s that fuel matters far less than almost everyone assumes.
Fully loaded cost per delivery
€14.17
typical range €11.45–17.95
What it is made of
- Km per delivery
- —
- Pharmacies
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- Pharmacies per km²
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- Versus national median
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Fully loaded covers driver pay, fuel, depreciation, insurance, maintenance and tyres. It does not cover the warehouse, picking or overhead: this is the cost of the route, not full cost-to-serve.
What actually moves the cost
Holding everything else at its central value (€13.35 per delivery) and varying one parameter at a time across its full plausible range, here is how far the cost shifts. The top two levers are set by route planning, not by the market.
Read it this way: taking stops per route from few to many shifts cost by 28.8%. Fuel consumption, last or second to last on the list, shifts it by 3.2%.
Diesel prices matter less than they seem
It is the line item every board meeting talks about, and it is close to irrelevant. Starting from €1.79 per litre net of VAT:
| Price change | Diesel €/litre | Cost per delivery | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| -30% | 1.25 | €12.95 | -3.01% |
| -20% | 1.43 | €13.08 | -2.00% |
| -10% | 1.61 | €13.21 | -1.00% |
| +10% | 1.97 | €13.48 | +1.00% |
| +20% | 2.15 | €13.62 | +2.00% |
| +30% | 2.33 | €13.75 | +3.01% |
A 30% diesel hike adds €0.40 per delivery. Rethinking how routes are built is worth roughly ten times that.
Every region
Sorted from highest to lowest cost per delivery. The column that explains nearly everything is density: where pharmacies are sparse, routes are long and time eats the margin.
| Region | Median cost | Range | Km/delivery | Time share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valle d'Aosta | €18.19 | 15.33–21.68 | 10.71 | 48.9% |
| Basilicata | €16.57 | 13.91–19.90 | 9.55 | 49.9% |
| Trentino-A.A. | €16.31 | 13.70–19.56 | 9.35 | 50.1% |
| Sardegna | €15.83 | 13.30–19.02 | 9.01 | 50.4% |
| Umbria | €14.78 | 12.35–17.83 | 8.28 | 51.3% |
| Molise | €14.50 | 12.11–17.59 | 8.08 | 51.5% |
| Lombardia | €13.98 | 11.39–17.57 | 5.77 | 64.2% |
| Friuli-V.G. | €13.69 | 11.39–16.68 | 7.33 | 53.3% |
| Abruzzo | €13.68 | 11.39–16.72 | 7.38 | 53.2% |
| Calabria | €13.65 | 11.34–16.68 | 7.31 | 53.5% |
| Campania | €13.65 | 11.14–17.14 | 5.87 | 62.8% |
| Toscana | €13.63 | 11.31–16.65 | 7.27 | 53.6% |
| Marche | €13.51 | 11.20–16.52 | 7.15 | 54.0% |
| Liguria | €13.43 | 10.94–16.77 | 5.99 | 61.2% |
| Emilia-Romagna | €13.42 | 11.12–16.42 | 7.00 | 54.7% |
| Sicilia | €13.40 | 11.12–16.35 | 6.98 | 54.7% |
| Piemonte | €13.35 | 11.03–16.36 | 6.89 | 55.0% |
| Puglia | €13.30 | 11.01–16.30 | 6.88 | 55.1% |
| Lazio | €13.24 | 10.86–16.44 | 6.19 | 59.5% |
| Veneto | €13.18 | 10.85–16.24 | 6.53 | 57.0% |
How it is built
For each region the model draws 20,000 scenarios with parameters sampled uniformly across plausible ranges: stops per route, minutes per stop, distance from depot, commercial speed, share of pharmacies served, annual vehicle mileage, hourly cost, fuel consumption and network circuity. Route length comes from the Daganzo (1984) formula, which ties kilometres per stop to the density of served points. Fixed seed (20260910) and no calibration on third-party data: results are reproducible by running the script.
What the model is not: a snapshot of any real company. It describes a typical delivery in a territory, so it works as a point of comparison, not as an accounting result. Operations running very dense routes or rigid time windows will sit outside the median, in either direction.
Sources
- MIT, Valori indicativi di riferimento dei costi di esercizio dell'impresa italiana di autotrasporto di merci per conto di terzi, Tabella A (peso veicolo < 3,5 t), aggiornamento marzo 2026, percorrenza 30.000 km/anno
- MIMIT, Prezzi medi nazionali dei carburanti, rilevazione settimanale del 10 settembre 2026, gasolio self su rete ordinaria
- CCNL Logistica, Trasporto Merci e Spedizione (rinnovo 6 dicembre 2024), minimi tabellari in vigore dal 1 gennaio 2026, livello B3 personale viaggiante
- Federfarma, La presenza delle farmacie sul territorio; totale nazionale 2026: 20.295 farmacie convenzionate SSN (541 dispensari e succursali inclusi). Ripartizione regionale: rilevazione marzo 2024
- ISTAT, Superficie territoriale delle regioni italiane, dati al 1 gennaio 2026
- Daganzo C.F. (1984), The Distance Traveled to Visit N Points with a Maximum of C Stops per Vehicle, Transportation Science 18(4), pp. 331-350
- AIFA, Rapporto OsMed 2025 - L'uso dei farmaci in Italia
The figures on this page are free to cite with attribution. The extended reasoning behind the model is in the article The real cost of a pharmacy delivery .
The two levers that matter are the ones Optivo works on
Stops per route and distance from depot together account for more than half the variation in cost, and they are the only two you govern by rewriting routes rather than absorbing the market. If you want to know where your operation sits against this benchmark, we start from your PODs.
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