Trucking cost per mile calculator

The one number every rate decision starts from

Your cost per mile is what it costs to run your truck for one mile, with everything counted: fuel, the truck payment, insurance, maintenance, tires, permits, your phone and ELD, and ideally your own pay. Every load you're offered gets measured against it. A load that pays less than your cost per mile on all the miles it makes you drive loses money, however good the posted rate looks.

Most carriers have a rough idea of their number. Few have worked it out from a real month. This trucking cost per mile calculator does it from your bills, shows where the cost comes from, and turns it into a break-even rate per mile and per load that you can use on the next call.

How truck cost per mile is calculated

There are three parts. Fuel per mile is your fuel price divided by your miles per gallon. Fixed costs per mile are your monthly fixed bills, the ones that arrive whether you drive or not, divided by your monthly miles. Running costs per mile, like maintenance, tires and tolls, are added as they are. The total is your cost per mile.

Use all your miles, loaded and empty, because costs run on both. Then the break-even rate is simply your cost per mile, and the target rate is that plus your margin. For a load, multiply by its total miles, including the empty miles to the pickup.

• EXAMPLE

  EXAMPLE MONTH

  One tractor, 10,000 miles

  Fuel at an EXAMPLE $4.00 a gallon and 6.5 mpg is about 62 cents a mile. $3,900 a month in payment, insurance and other fixed costs over 10,000 miles is 39 cents. Maintenance, tires and tolls add 25 cents. Cost per mile is about $1.26. A 500-mile load breaks even at $630, and with a 15% margin the target is $725, about $1.45 a mile.

Notice what the example leaves out: the owner's pay, set to zero. If you pay yourself from what's left, the margin is your pay. If you'd rather know the true cost of the business, enter a monthly amount for yourself, and the cost per mile goes up to match.

Reading your result

• +Fuel is the biggest line. Normal for most trucks. Speed, idling and routing are the levers, and the speed vs fuel savings calculator shows what a few miles an hour is worth.
• +Fixed costs per mile are high. Usually a miles problem, not a cost problem. Fixed bills spread over more miles cost less per mile, so slow weeks and long waits push this line up.
• +Running costs look low. Check that you've set money aside for tires, brakes and the repair you know is coming. A cost per mile that ignores them looks good until the shop bill arrives.

Rerun the calculator when something changes: a new truck payment, a new insurance renewal, a fuel price swing, or a month with very different miles. Your floor should move with your costs.

Owner-operator break-even cost per mile

Your break-even is personal. Two owner-operators on the same lane can have very different numbers, because one owns the truck outright and the other has a large payment, or because one runs 12,000 miles a month and the other 7,000. Industry averages can be a sanity check but never a substitute. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) publishes a yearly report on the operational costs of trucking, based on surveys of fleets. Use it to see which cost lines run higher or lower than typical, not as your number.

Once you have your break-even, save it. The result card can store your cost per mile and your target floor in My Numbers, in your browser only. Then the rate per mile calculator and the counter-offer calculator compare every load against it automatically. For the fuel line on a single trip, the trip fuel cost calculator works it out by route.

From break-even to booked loads

Knowing your cost per mile only pays if every load is checked against it. On our desk, it's the first thing we ask for. Our dispatchers work out the all-in rate on every posting, counter above your floor and pass on loads that don't clear it. You approve every load, and the broker sends the rate confirmation straight to you. See how we work with owner-operators.

Our guides on freight rates per mile and full truckload rates explain what moves market rates, so you can see where your floor sits against them.