Cost Per Mile & Break-Even Calculator

Why loaded-mile break-even is the number that matters

Every dollar you spend — payments, insurance, fuel, tires, your own pay — has to be earned back on the miles somebody actually pays you for. Empty miles still burn diesel and still wear out the truck, but nobody sends a check for them. That is why this calculator reports the same cost two ways: spread across all miles, and spread across loaded miles only. The second figure is the one that belongs in your head at the load board, because it is the rate at which a paid mile finally covers everything it has to cover.

One definition to get right: deadhead % here means empty miles divided by total miles (empty ÷ everything), not empty divided by loaded. 12,000 empty out of 100,000 total is 12%. Enter it the other way around and the tool will understate what you need. Because deadhead sits in the denominator, its effect compounds rather than adding: with the shipped defaults, moving from 12% to 20% deadhead pushes the loaded break-even from $2.53 to $2.78 without a single cost line changing.

Fixed costs, variable costs, and why the split changes the decision

Fixed costs accrue whether or not the truck turns a wheel: the note on the tractor and trailer, insurance, plates and permits, the ELD subscription, parking, the dispatch or factoring fee you pay regardless. Variable costs happen only when you roll: diesel, tires, maintenance, tolls. The form asks for the first group in annual dollars and the second in dollars per mile because that is genuinely how the two behave.

The split matters more than the total. Fixed cost per mile is not a property of your truck — it is a property of how many miles you run. Same equipment, same payments, 80,000 miles a year instead of 100,000: fixed cost rises from $0.60 to $0.75 per mile and the loaded break-even from $2.53 to $2.86. Run 120,000 and it falls to $2.31. Nothing about the truck changed; only the divisor did. That is also why unplanned downtime is expensive twice over — the fixed bills do not pause while the odometer does.

The split also tells you what a cheap load is really costing. A rate that clears your variable cost but not your full cost still puts something toward bills you owe either way; a rate that does not clear variable cost takes money out of your pocket for the privilege of moving freight. Those are two different situations, and the difference is invisible until you have sorted your expenses into the two buckets. This page will not tell you which loads to book. It tells you which of those two situations a given rate puts you in.

Where the fuel line comes from, and why it drifts

The diesel default is the EIA U.S. average on-highway price, $5.313 per gallon for the week ending July 27, 2026, shown rounded as $5.31. EIA surveys pump prices every Monday and publishes the new average around 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, which makes this the input on the page most likely to be stale by the time you open it — and the first one you should overwrite with what you actually paid at the pump.

Fuel enters the arithmetic as price ÷ MPG, so fuel economy pulls the same lever as fuel price. Holding everything else at the defaults, 6.0 MPG instead of 6.5 raises the loaded break-even from $2.53 to $2.61; 7.0 MPG lowers it to $2.46. Get MPG from your own settlements rather than a spec sheet or a memory of one good month, because that single number is multiplied against every mile in the result.

Your number and a fleet average are different animals

ATRI's Operational Costs of Trucking report put the 2025 industry figure at $2.336 per mile, a record. It is a useful reference point and a poor target. It is an average taken across motor carriers, and it describes their cost structure, not yours: your note, your premium, your fuel economy, your annual miles, your deadhead. An owner-operator whose result lands well above or well below it has not made a mistake — they have discovered that they are not an average fleet. Before comparing your line items against theirs, read the report itself for how each category is defined, because two cost figures are only comparable when they were measured the same way.

Which input actually moves the answer

Ten fields, and they do not carry equal weight. The honest way to find out which ones matter is to nudge each one by the same proportion and watch the loaded break-even move. Below, every input is raised by ten percent on its own, with the shipped defaults holding everywhere else, and the result is sorted by how far it pushed the answer.

Two things fall out of that table. The first is that the bottom of it barely exists. Tires and tolls together move the answer by seven tenths of a cent — less than a third of what the maintenance line alone does, and small enough that agonizing over whether your tire number is four cents or four and a half is time better spent almost anywhere else. Insurance, which people quote at each other constantly, moves the loaded floor by a cent and a half.

The second is the one worth sitting with: the single largest lever in the entire form is not a cost at all. Annual miles moves the answer further than diesel, further than fuel economy, further than your own pay. That is because both fixed costs and your pay target are divided by it, so it is the only input that pulls two lines of the arithmetic at once. Ten percent more miles takes $115,000 of annual obligations and spreads it across 10,000 extra miles, and the loaded floor drops nearly twelve cents without a single bill getting smaller.

Which raises the question the rest of the industry’s cost-per-mile calculators leave alone. If miles are the biggest lever, how many miles can you actually run?

Annual miles is not a dial you can turn

Every calculator on this subject, including this one, asks for annual miles as though it were a setting. It is not. It is an output of a rule this site exists to explain, and the rule puts a hard ceiling on it that no amount of hustle moves.

Work it forward. The 70-hour cycle allows 70 on-duty hours in any 8 days, which is 8.75 on-duty hours per calendar day, sustained forever. Of the time inside a daily 14-hour window you may spend at most 11 driving, so on the most favorable legal assumption — every window filled, every driving hour used — 70 on-duty hours convert to 70 × 11 ÷ 14, or 55 driving hours per 8-day cycle. That is 6.875 driving hours per calendar day, and 2,509 driving hours in a 365-day year, for a driver who never takes a day off and never restarts.

Hold that number against the 100,000-mile default sitting in the form and it says something specific: to cover 100,000 miles inside 2,509 driving hours, you must average 39.9 mph across every driving hour the rule allows, every day of the year. Not 39.9 mph on the interstate — 39.9 mph including the yard, the fuel island, the shipper’s lot and the last four miles of city street.

A 34-hour restart buys hours back. Burn 70 on-duty hours across five maximum days, take the 34, repeat, and the cycle is 6.4167 days long instead of 8, which lifts the ceiling to 3,129 driving hours a year and drops the required average to 32.0 mph. Both figures assume you never take a day off for any reason at all. Give yourself four weeks a year — 48 working weeks, which is not generous — and the same 100,000 miles needs 43.3 mph without restarts, or 34.7 mph using them, off exactly 2,310 and 2,880 driving hours respectively.

Nothing in that table is a target and none of it is a compliance figure — it is the arithmetic of a ceiling, and your own logs are the only record of where you sit under it. But it does mean the annual-miles box should be filled in from what your clock has historically allowed, not from what you would like the answer to be. Typing a bigger number lowers your break-even on the screen and changes nothing about your truck. If you want to check what your own cycle has room for this week rather than this year, that is what the recap calculator on the front page is for.

Cost per on-duty hour, which is what you are really spending

Once you accept that hours are the binding constraint, the natural denominator changes. Add the shipped defaults up as annual dollars: $60,000 fixed, $55,000 of owner pay, and $1.0769 per mile of variable cost across 100,000 miles, or $107,692. Total, $222,692 a year. Divide by the 3,193.75 on-duty hours the 70-hour cycle permits in a year and you get $69.73 per on-duty hour.

It is the same number arrived at from the other side, which is a useful check: $2.2269 per mile multiplied by 31.31 miles per on-duty hour is $69.73 exactly. Cost per mile and cost per hour are the same fact wearing different clothes, and which one is more useful depends entirely on which resource is scarcer. On a wide-open lane, miles are scarce and the per-mile figure governs. Sitting at a dock, miles are not the constraint at all.

That is the whole argument for keeping the hourly figure in your head. An hour on a receiver’s dock costs $69.73 and produces zero miles. It burns the same cycle hour that a driving hour burns, and the cycle does not care which one it was. Two loads at an identical $2.60 per mile are not the same load if one of them takes four hours to get loaded, and the per-mile number cannot see that difference. Detention pay, when you collect it, is the market’s partial answer to exactly this arithmetic.

One more thing the hourly view exposes, and it is genuinely counterintuitive. The recap calculator offers 60 hours in 7 days as well as 70 in 8. The names make that sound like a fourteen percent difference. It is not. Sixty over seven is 8.571 on-duty hours a day against 8.75 — 2.04 percent fewer. A 60/7 carrier’s driver has almost exactly the same weekly capacity, and the identical cost base spread over it works out to $71.18 an hour instead of $69.73, a difference of 2.08 percent. The gap between the two cycles is real, and it is roughly one part in fifty rather than one part in seven.

Deadhead is a percentage, but it accelerates

The page already notes that deadhead sits in the denominator. What that actually means is that empty miles get more expensive the more of them you run — the divisor is 1 ÷ (1 − deadhead), and its slope steepens as deadhead climbs. Every row below uses the shipped defaults and changes nothing but the empty share.

Read the last column rather than the third. Going from 12 to 13 percent deadhead costs you 2.91 cents on your loaded floor; going from 30 to 31 percent costs 4.61 cents, 58.5 percent more for the identical one-point change. That is why a driver already running heavy empty miles gets a larger return from fixing them than a driver running few — the cure is worth most exactly where the disease is worst, which is not how most costs behave.

The same curve is the reason the deadhead definition on this page is worth being pedantic about. Empty divided by total, not empty divided by loaded. Twelve thousand empty against 100,000 total is 12 percent here; measured the other way it would read 13.6 percent, and by the table above that is not a rounding difference, it is roughly three cents a mile.

Building the number out of your own records

Borrowing somebody else's cost per mile defeats the exercise. Pull twelve months of settlement statements, bank records, and odometer readings — twelve, so that an annual insurance premium, a set of drives, and one ugly repair bill all land inside the window instead of distorting a shorter one. Sort every expense into fixed or variable, total the miles you truly ran including the empty ones, and let the tool do the division. Then rerun it whenever something structural moves: a new truck note, a renewed policy, a lane mix that changes how much of your week is empty.

Your own pay belongs in the calculation too, which is why it sits on its own line instead of being buried among the costs. "What keeps the wheels turning" and "what keeps my household running" are two different questions, and the table answers both. At the defaults the gap between them is exactly $0.55 per mile — a $55,000 target divided by 100,000 miles.

Measuring your own deadhead

Several inputs come straight off a settlement statement. Deadhead is the one you may have to build by hand. Note the odometer when you drop empty and note it again when you pick up your next load; the gap between those two readings is a deadhead leg. Add the legs across a quarter, divide by the total miles for that quarter, and the percentage is grounded in your own operation instead of a guess. Bobtail miles, repositioning toward home, and the crawl to a parking spot all belong in that total. The truck was moving and nobody paid for it.

Lines that belong to somebody else

Not every field applies to every driver. If you are leased on to a carrier that supplies the trailer, carries the primary liability policy, or buys your plates, enter zero on those lines rather than a borrowed industry figure. A cost somebody else absorbs is not part of your cost per mile, and padding it only makes your floor look higher than it is. The opposite mistake is quieter: an escrow contribution or a chargeback deducted from your settlement before you ever see the money is still your money leaving, so it belongs somewhere in the form — the admin line is a reasonable home for it.

Accessorial money runs the other direction. Detention, layover, stop-off and unloading pay are revenue when you actually collect them, not a discount on your costs. Keep them out of these boxes and weigh them against your floor alongside the linehaul, or you will end up counting the same dollars twice.

Checking a single load against your floor

The result is an annual average, but you can hold one run up against it two ways, and the two should agree. Suppose a load pays $1,900 for 800 loaded miles and you burn 120 empty miles reaching the shipper. First method: divide revenue by loaded miles, $1,900 ÷ 800 = $2.375. But that run's own deadhead is 120 ÷ 920 = 13%, so its floor is $2.23 ÷ 0.87 = $2.56 — higher than the $2.53 your annual 12% average produced. Second method: multiply every mile the trip will turn by your all-miles figure, 920 × $2.23 = $2,049 against $1,900 of revenue. Both roads arrive at the same place, roughly $150 short. Reach for the second method whenever a trip's empty legs look nothing like a normal week, because that is precisely when the annual percentage stops describing the run in front of you.

What this calculator deliberately keeps simple

It runs on a cash basis: your actual truck and trailer payments count, and depreciation does not appear separately, because counting both would charge you twice for the same tractor. If your truck is paid off, that line is zero — which flatters the result unless you are separately setting money aside to replace it. Detention, layover, washouts, lumpers, and idle days are not line items either; fold them into your maintenance or admin figures if you want them reflected.

A floor is not a price

Break-even is the boundary where nothing is left over. Booking at exactly that figure for a year produces a business that survived and grew nothing: no cushion for a blown turbo, no reserve toward the next tractor, no margin for the stretches when freight thins out. Whatever profit you intend to earn has to be added on top of what this page produces, deliberately, as its own decision. The arithmetic draws the line. How far above it you choose to operate is a judgment about your market, your lanes, and your appetite for risk, and no calculator can make that call for you.

What this number cannot tell you

It is an annual average, so it cannot price one specific run — a tolled corridor in winter and a flat interstate haul of the same length do not cost the same. It says nothing about whether a rate is fair or whether a broker is dealing straight; it only shows you where your own floor sits. And it is not a compliance figure. It has no bearing on your hours, your logs, or your axle weights, and nothing here tells you that you are legal or clear to run. It tells you what your miles cost. What you do with that is your call.