Disclaimer: This is not the cost of making the TARDIS. This is an estimate of how much the Doctor could rent it out for.

That is to say, how much we think that people would pay for it. We’ve decided to go for a year-long hire of the TARDIS, and make a flying guess at what we would expect the market price to be. Roughly.

The easier bits first.

For one, the TARDIS is like a mobile translator. Wherever you go, the TARDIS allows you to speak fluently to local people. We’ve taken that to be equivalent to hiring ten full time interpreters, costing £260,000 a year for all of them.

Next, having a TARDIS means that wherever you are, you have a place to stay, a room. Sort of like having a luxury hotel room booked every day for a year. At a rough but generous estimate of £1,000 per night, that’s £365,000 per year.

Getting trickier now. The TARDIS in theory can take you anywhere in the world as a means of transport. Want to go to Uganda? In you get and pull a lever. So sort of like having a private helicopter. We emailed the folks at Elite Helicopters and they gave us an estimate of hiring a helicopter for a year, with pilot, as costing £566,400 for 5 days a week service.

Now, the TARDIS doesn’t just travel on Earth, but in space. Remember how we’re asking not what the cost of making the TARDIS is, but how much people are willing to pay? Well, Virgin Galactic takes people to space at the cost of £125,840, so that is the market value of going to space. Or, £125,840 is an estimate of the sort of price people are willing to pay for space travel. For our TARDIS we’re going to assume that people will travel to a new planet once a week over the year, so the cost is £6,546,380 for the year.

Finally, the hardest estimate. How much are people willing to pay to travel through time? This doesn’t have to be the cost of actually going to the future, but how much people are willing to pay to try. Our best guess for this is cryogenics. These are people willing to spend vast sums of money to effectively travel to the future. Taking the cryogenic freezing price of £145,567 to be a guess for a single time travel journey, then assuming our TARDIS goes a new place each week our market value of weekly time travel per year is £7,569,484.

In total then? We think that the market value of hiring the TARDIS would be £15,140,064 or $23,930,385 or 504,668,800 jelly babies.



Although we’re reasonably sure that the sonic screwdriver is worth more than that.

And whilst this may not sound like a lot of money for the TARDIS, this is the equivalent of renting out a fleet of around 76 Aston Martin DBSs. You know. The car that James Bond drives.

The age of the Doctor is notoriously difficult to determine. But let’s say that for the past 900 years or so instead of saving the universe the Doctor hired out his TARDIS, he would now be £13,626,057,600 better off. Or, at $21,547,228,016 he would be the world’s twentieth richest man!

Centives would like to thank Bill at Elite Helicopters for his help contributing data for this article.

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