What is my real cost per mile, and what rate do I need?

Chapter 01

Why is there no money left when the rates look good?

Most often, you are comparing rates with the wrong cost figure. Many owners check a rate against fuel and driver pay, and treat what is left as profit. But the truck payments, the insurance, the plates, the repairs and your own time are all paid out of what is left. Your cost per mile is the full cost of running the trucks, divided by the miles they ran. Until you know it, you cannot tell a good rate from a losing one. Finding it starts with one month of your own bills.

Here is how that looks in real life. Say you run three trucks with dry vans. You drive one of them yourself. Two drivers run the other two, and you pay each of them 70 cents for every mile. Your freight invoices look fine. In August, your trucks earned $59,500, and most loads paid around $2.50 a loaded mile. You figure fuel and driver pay come to about $1.60 a mile. So each mile should leave you about 90 cents.

But on Saturday, September 5, 2026, you look at the bank account. It is lower than it was on August 1. You took $5,000 out in August to live on, and nothing seems to have come back in. So where did the money go?

This page follows you as you find out. You will work out your real cost from your own bills, first for August and then for September. At the end, you will have one number: the lowest rate per loaded mile you will accept. Every figure in the example is made up to show the arithmetic. Your own bills will give different numbers, and those are the only numbers that count.

Brokers talk to you about the rate per mile. The rate only means something next to your cost. A rate of $2.50 is good money if your cost is $2.10. It is a loss if your cost is $2.80.

So why not take a cost figure from the internet? One useful industry benchmark comes from a dedicated study. The American Transportation Research Institute, called ATRI, studies trucking costs every year. In July 2026, it put the average cost of running a truck in 2025 at $2.336 per mile (ATRI’s report release). That average comes from the carriers that took part. ATRI’s own release shows that costs moved differently for small fleets and for fleets with more than 1,000 trucks. It is a useful yardstick. It is not your cost, because your loans, your insurance, your trucks and your lanes are your own.

So you pull out the August bills. The first question is which of them belong in the math.

Chapter 02

Which costs go into my cost per mile?

All of them. Every dollar the business pays out to run the trucks goes in. It helps to sort the bills into two piles. Fixed costs come every month, whether the trucks run or sit. They are truck and trailer payments, insurance, plates and permits, the federal heavy vehicle use tax, the ELD and software, and the office. Variable costs grow with every mile: fuel, repairs and tires, tolls, and driver pay by the mile. You need both piles, because they act differently when your miles change.

Start with the fixed pile. You go through August’s bank statement and write down each bill that comes every month.

Say your three trucks cost $2,200 a month each in loan payments. That is $6,600. Your three trailers cost $600 each, or $1,800. Your insurance is $51,000 a year, paid at $4,250 a month. It covers liability, cargo and damage to your own trucks.

Some bills come once a year. Spread each one over twelve months, so every month carries its share. Say your IRP plates, your UCR registration and your other permits come to $6,450 a year for the fleet. Then there is the heavy vehicle use tax, which you pay to the IRS on Form 2290. The tax year runs from July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027. The tax starts at $100 for a truck with a taxable gross weight of 55,000 pounds. It rises by $22 for each 1,000 pounds above that, and it stops at $550 for any truck over 75,000 pounds (IRS Form 2290). The IRS’s own example uses a truck of 80,000 pounds, and it owes $550 for the full year (the IRS instructions for Form 2290). Your trucks run at 80,000 pounds too. So you pay $550 each, or $1,650 for three. How to file the form and get your proof of payment is in our guide to Form 2290. Plates, permits and the tax together make $8,100 a year, or $675 a month.

Then come the smaller bills. Your ELD service, load board, phones and software cost $480 a month. Your office, yard parking, bank fees and accountant come to $695. Now add those bills: $6,600, $1,800, $4,250, $675, $480 and $695. Your fixed costs are $14,500 a month.

One note on the truck payments. How the trucks are treated for taxes is a separate question, and your accountant handles it. For this number, use the payments you actually make each month. If a truck is paid off, its payment line is zero. That does not make the truck free. It is wearing out, and one day it will need big repairs or a replacement. When that day comes, our guide to repairing or replacing a truck walks through the choice.

Now turn to variable costs. You measure these costs per mile, because they follow the miles.

Fuel comes first, and it is the biggest. Your fuel receipts for August show 4,300 gallons for $24,080. That is an average of $5.60 a gallon. To turn it into cents per mile, you need the month’s miles. The next section shows where to find them. In August, your three trucks ran 28,000 miles. So $24,080 divided by 28,000 miles is 86 cents a mile. The same two numbers show that your trucks got about 6.5 miles per gallon.

Repair and tire bills arrive unevenly. One month brings a new set of tires, and the next brings nothing. So use a longer stretch of time. Say your repair and tire bills for the last 12 months come to $63,000, and your trucks ran 300,000 miles in that time. That is 21 cents a mile. Planned service is the part of this line you can see coming, and our guide to a preventive maintenance schedule covers it.

Tolls come from your toll account. Say August’s tolls were $840. That is 3 cents a mile.

Driver pay by the mile is the last variable cost. Your two drivers earn 70 cents for every mile they drive, loaded or empty. In August, they drove 18,200 miles between them, so their pay was $12,740. If you pay anything on top of that, take it from your payroll records and add it. Some owners pay drivers a share of each load instead. That cost grows with the rate, not the miles, and the last section shows how to handle it. How pay plans and settlements work is in our guide to driver pay.

Now add August up. Fixed costs were $14,500. Fuel was $24,080. Repairs and tires, at 21 cents a mile, come to $5,880. Tolls were $840, and your drivers’ pay was $12,740. Altogether, August cost $58,040. Your trucks earned $59,500. So on paper, August left you $1,460.

That looks like a small profit. But you took $5,000 out to live on, and you drove a truck all month. Something is still missing from the list.

Chapter 03

Do I count my own pay as a cost?

Yes. Your own pay is a cost of the business, just like a driver’s pay. If you drive a truck, that truck needs a driver, and right now the driver is you. If you run the office, that work would cost money if someone else did it. Leave your pay out, and a business that loses money can look like it makes a little. The only way to know is to put a fair wage for your work into the costs before you look for a profit.

So you put a price on your own work. You do two jobs.

The first is driving. You drove truck 1 for 9,800 miles in August. If you hired a driver for that truck, you would pay 70 cents a mile, the same as your other drivers. So your driving is worth $6,860 for August.

The second job is the office. You book the loads, chase the invoices, pay the bills and keep the files. Say a fair wage for that work is $2,000 a month. It goes into the fixed pile, because it comes every month. Your fixed costs are now $16,500 a month.

Now look at August again. The costs were $58,040 before your pay. Add $6,860 for driving and $2,000 for the office. August really cost $66,900. Your trucks earned $59,500. So August did not leave you $1,460. It lost $7,400.

That is where your money went. The $5,000 you took out was not profit. It was part of the wage for your own work, and the trucks did not earn it. The business paid you less than a driver’s wage and still lost money. This is an easy way for a small fleet to fool itself. The bank account keeps going down, and yet every load seems to pay.

How much should your pay be? That is your call, and there is no official figure for it. What you would pay someone else to do your two jobs is an honest place to start. What you need to live on is another. Whatever you pick, write it down and keep it the same from month to month. Then you can compare months fairly.

Now you have the full cost of August. Next you need the right number of miles to divide it by.

Chapter 04

How many miles should I divide by?

The miles your trucks really ran, taken from your records, not the miles you hoped for. Your ELD records each truck’s miles by itself. Your IFTA fuel tax records hold every mile for each quarter. Use all the miles, loaded and empty, to get your cost per mile. Then watch what happens when the miles fall. Your fixed costs do not shrink when a truck sits. They spread over fewer miles, so each mile costs more.

When you started the business, you told yourself each truck runs about 10,000 miles a month. That makes 30,000 miles for three trucks. It is a nice round number, and nobody ever checked it.

So you check it now. The ELD in each truck records its miles by itself. Federal rules make the device record “vehicle miles” each time the driver’s duty status changes. It records the date, the time and the place too (the ELD rule). You must keep those records for at least 6 months (the hours of service rule). So you can pull the miles for each truck and each month. In August, truck 1 ran 9,800 miles, truck 2 ran 9,500, and truck 3 ran 8,700. That is 28,000, not 30,000.

Your IFTA records are the second check. IFTA is the agreement that splits fuel tax among the States, and you file its return every quarter. Its rules count all the miles your trucks run, “regardless of whether the miles or kilometers are considered taxable or nontaxable”. You must also keep records that back up what you report (the IFTA Articles of Agreement). So your IFTA records already hold every mile, loaded or empty, and all the fuel. If your ELD miles and your IFTA miles for a quarter do not match, find out why before you trust either one. How those miles and gallons turn into the quarterly return is in our guide to the IFTA quarterly return.

Now divide. August cost $66,900, and the trucks ran 28,000 miles. That is $2.39 a mile. Split it into its two parts, and you will see why the miles matter. Your fixed costs of $16,500, spread over 28,000 miles, make 59 cents a mile. Your variable costs add $1.80 a mile. That is 86 cents of fuel, 21 cents of repairs and tires, 3 cents of tolls and 70 cents of driver pay. Together they make $2.39.

Had you used your guess of 30,000 miles, the fixed part would have been 55 cents, and your cost $2.35. Four cents looks small. But over 28,000 miles, it is $1,120 a month that you would never see coming.

Then September shows what a bad month does. On September 14, truck 3 breaks down and sits at a shop for 9 days. It runs only 5,000 miles that month. Truck 1 runs 9,600 and truck 2 runs 9,400, so the fleet runs 24,000 miles.

Your fixed bills stay the same. The payments, the insurance and your office wage still come to $16,500. Spread over 24,000 miles, they make 69 cents a mile, not 59. That is what a truck standing still costs you. Each truck’s share of the fixed bills is about $183 a day: the $16,500 split three ways, then over 30 days. So the 9 days in the shop cost you about $1,650. That is before the repair bill, and before the money the truck did not earn. When you pay the repair bill, it goes into your repair history. Your repair average over the last 12 months will rise, and next month’s numbers will show it.

Diesel moved too. The U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes the average diesel price every week, and it changes every week. For the week of September 14, 2026, it put the U.S. average at $6.285 a gallon, with all taxes. That was 31.8 cents more than the week before (EIA’s weekly diesel prices). Your own receipts for September average $6.20 a gallon. At about 6.5 miles a gallon, fuel now costs 95 cents a mile instead of 86.

So September costs 69 cents a mile in fixed costs, plus $1.89 in variable costs. The variable part is 95 cents of fuel, 21 of repairs, 3 of tolls and 70 of driver pay. That makes $2.58 a mile, 19 cents more than August. Nothing about the way you run the business changed. One truck sat, and diesel went up.

That is why the miles you divide by must be real, and why you redo the math every month. This page works out one number for the whole fleet. To see which truck pulls that number up, split the same bills by truck. Our guide to a profit and loss view for each truck shows how.

But one problem is left. Brokers did not pay you for 28,000 miles in August.

Chapter 05

Why do empty miles raise the rate I need?

Because you pay for every mile, but you are paid only for loaded miles. Empty miles, which most owners call deadhead, burn fuel, wear tires and use up hours like any other mile. Your monthly cost is spread over all miles, but a broker’s rate covers only the loaded ones. So divide your monthly cost by your loaded miles as well. That cost per loaded mile is higher, and it is the number to hold up against any rate per loaded mile you are offered.

Go back to August. Your ELD shows 28,000 miles. Your trip records show which of them had a load: each run from a pickup to its delivery. They add up to 23,800 loaded miles. The other 4,200 miles were empty. That is 15 percent of all your miles, driven for nothing.

Did your drivers get paid for those miles? Yes, you pay 70 cents on every mile. Did the fuel burn? Yes. Only the broker’s payment left them out.

So divide August’s cost by the loaded miles. $66,900 divided by 23,800 is $2.81. That is your cost per loaded mile. Your average rate in August was $2.50 per loaded mile. So every loaded mile lost about 31 cents. Over 23,800 loaded miles, that is about $7,400, the same loss you found before. The two ways of counting agree.

Now September. With truck 3 in the shop, the fleet ran 24,000 miles, and 3,600 of them were empty. That left 20,400 loaded miles. September cost $61,860: the $16,500 of fixed costs, plus $1.89 a mile over 24,000 miles. Divided by 20,400 loaded miles, that is $3.03 per loaded mile. At the same $2.50 average rate, September lost about 53 cents on every loaded mile.

Empty miles are not only your problem. ATRI’s release says that across the industry, deadhead mileage “remained elevated” in 2025 (ATRI’s report release). You cannot get rid of empty miles, but you can count them. And every load you take decides some of them: the drive to its pickup, and the place where it leaves your truck.

That is why one monthly figure is not the whole check. Two loads can pay the same rate per loaded mile and leave very different amounts of profit, because one needs a long empty run to reach it. The last section shows how to test a single load against your number.

So now you know your costs for two months, and you know they move. What is the one number to keep in your head when a broker calls?

Chapter 06

What is the lowest rate per mile I should take?

Your break-even rate per loaded mile, worked out for an ordinary month, at today’s fuel price, with your own pay counted. Below it, each load loses money. Above it, the difference is profit. Use an ordinary month, not your best one, so a slow month does not catch you out. If you factor your invoices, raise the number to cover the fee in your agreement. Then check each load’s empty miles, and redo the whole thing every month from the new bills.

You want one number you can say on the phone. So you use the average of the two months to represent an ordinary month. August and September ran 52,000 miles in all, or 26,000 a month on average. They had 44,200 loaded miles, or 22,100 a month. You use September’s fuel price, because that is what diesel costs now. So your variable cost is $1.89 a mile.

An ordinary month then costs $16,500 in fixed costs, plus $1.89 times 26,000 miles, which is $49,140. That makes $65,640. Divide it by 22,100 loaded miles, and you get $2.97. That is your break-even rate per loaded mile. You round it up to $3.00, so the number is easy to remember and leaves a few cents to spare.

Here are the two months and the ordinary month side by side.

Look down the last row. The loads that paid $2.50 in August were losing money all along. You could not see it, because you were holding $2.50 up against $1.60.

Break-even is a floor, not a goal. At $3.00, you pay every bill and yourself, and almost nothing is left to put aside. Profit is whatever a load pays above that line. There is no official figure for how much profit a small fleet should aim for. But profit margins in the industry are thin. ATRI found that truckload carriers averaged an operating margin below 1 percent in 2025 (ATRI’s report release).

Now test a single load. A broker offers $1,500 for a load of 500 miles. That is $3.00 per loaded mile, so it meets your floor. But the pickup is 150 miles away, empty. So the trip is really 650 miles. Your cost across all miles in an ordinary month is $2.52 a mile. At 650 miles, the trip costs you $1,638. The load pays $1,500, so you lose $138, even at your floor rate. Now say the pickup is only 50 miles away. The trip is 550 miles and costs $1,386, so the same load leaves you $114. Before you say yes, multiply all of the trip’s miles, the empty ones too, by your cost per mile. Then compare that with what the load pays.

Some costs are a share of the load’s pay, not a cost for each mile. The factoring fee is one. If you factor your invoices, take the fee from your own factoring agreement. Say yours takes 3 percent of each invoice. Then you keep 97 cents of each dollar a load pays. Your floor becomes $2.97 divided by 0.97, which is $3.06. Drivers paid a share of each load work the same way.

If someone else books your loads, give them your floor in writing. They need to know that minimum before they can follow it. Our dispatch service brings you loads to approve, and the choice of which loads to take stays with you.

Your floor is only as good as last month’s bills. So each month, when the bills are in, run the same five steps.

1. Add up the fixed bills, with your own office wage and a twelfth of each yearly bill.
2. Take each truck’s miles for the month from the ELD, and check them against your IFTA records each quarter.
3. Split the miles into loaded and empty, using your trip records.
4. Work out fuel, tolls and driver pay per mile from the month’s bills, and repairs and tires from the last 12 months.
5. Divide the total by all miles for your cost per mile, and by loaded miles for your break-even rate.

Compare the result with ATRI’s average once in a while, just for scale. Your August cost of $2.39 a mile sits close to ATRI’s $2.336 for 2025. Take fuel out, and yours is $1.53 against ATRI’s $1.854 (ATRI’s report release). Your fuel line is bigger, because diesel costs far more now than it did a year ago. Your September cost of $2.58 sits well above the average. Neither comparison alone tells you how well your business is doing. The average mixes carriers of every size and kind, from a year with cheaper fuel.

What has changed? Costs keep rising, so an old number is a wrong number. ATRI found costs rose in every major line in 2025. The biggest rises were tolls, up 13.2 percent, repairs and maintenance, up 8.6 percent, driver benefits, up 6.6 percent, and tires, up 6.4 percent. ATRI said its data for the first quarter of 2026 show most of those trends going on. On top of that, diesel for the week of September 14, 2026 cost $2.546 a gallon more than a year before (EIA’s weekly diesel prices). A cost you worked out last year, or a rule of thumb you picked up years ago, is out of date.

There are things we could not check. Trade summaries quote industry costs line by line, in cents per mile for repairs or insurance. Those figures are not in ATRI’s public release, and we did not read the full report, so this page uses none of them. We found no official figure for a normal share of empty miles, a fair owner’s wage or a good profit margin for a small fleet. IFTA’s detailed rules for trip records sit in its Procedures Manual, which we could not open when we checked. Ask your base State’s IFTA office which records it wants. The diesel price on this page is the latest weekly figure when we checked, on September 22, 2026. It will have changed by the time you read this.

If you want the invoices, bills and payment records behind this number kept in order every month, here is what that costs.