Profit per Load, Calculated: Deadhead, Dwell, Fuel and the Days Until the Money Arrives

Rate per loaded mile vs rate per total mile — and what deadhead miles cost

Rate per loaded mile is the rate divided by the miles on the rate confirmation. Rate per total mile divides the same rate by loaded plus deadhead miles. Compare like with like: rate per total mile against cost per total mile, because the truck burns fuel and wears tires on every mile, paid or not, or rate per loaded mile against a cost per loaded mile that carries the empty miles inside it, as the cost-per-mile guide works out. A load board sorts by rate per loaded mile, so the second comparison is the one dispatch can make at a glance; the settlement is written in total miles.

Deadhead miles cost two things. The first is variable cost: fuel, maintenance and tires per mile, plus driver pay where the pay plan pays empty miles — a company driver paid on all dispatched miles, for example. The second is time: empty miles use hours on the driver’s clock that a loaded mile would have paid for. Price the variable part from the fleet’s own books — last quarter’s fuel, repair and tire spend divided by total miles — rather than from a published average, which describes someone else’s trucks, lanes and pay plan.

Count the deadhead at the far end, too. A load that delivers into a market with little outbound freight carries a second empty leg, or a cheap reload, and that belongs to its cost. The weekly review below checks that estimate.

Dwell and detention: what an hour at the dock costs

Dwell is the time at the shipper or receiver; detention is the part of it the rate confirmation pays for, after the free time. Both run on the hours-of-service clock. Under 49 CFR 395.3, a property-carrying driver may not drive after 14 consecutive hours from coming on duty following 10 consecutive hours off, may drive a total of 11 hours inside that window, needs a 30-minute break after 8 hours of driving, and stops driving after 60 hours on duty in 7 days, or 70 in 8. Five hours at a dock come out of the 14, and the miles they would have bought are gone.

Price an hour of dwell from the truck’s own day: its fixed cost per day, plus the contribution a running truck earns in a day — revenue minus fuel, driver pay and maintenance — divided by the 14 hours of the driving window. Illustrative example: a truck with $250 a day of fixed cost and $300 a day of contribution costs about $39 for every hour it waits inside that window. Detention pay offsets this only when it is collected, so count it in the estimate at what this broker has actually paid on past claims, not at the rate printed on the rate confirmation.

Dwell lands on the driver as well. A driver paid by the mile earns nothing at the dock unless detention pay is passed through, and unpaid waiting is something a per-mile driver feels on the next settlement. Track dwell by facility, so the next quote to that dock has the hours built in.

Fuel, the fuel surcharge, tolls, driver pay and days to pay

Fuel is total miles divided by the truck’s real miles per gallon, times the price per gallon. Use the truck’s own fuel economy from the fuel card and the ELD, and a current price for the fuel stops on the route. The U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes a weekly retail diesel price and states plainly that it does not calculate, assess or regulate fuel surcharges: they are negotiated privately, and, according to EIA, shippers, transportation firms and truckers use its weekly price in their fuel formulas.

Then read the surcharge on the rate confirmation. If the rate is all-in, the surcharge is already inside it. If it is listed separately, add it to revenue, and note which miles it pays on: a surcharge paid per loaded mile leaves the fuel for the deadhead unrecovered.

Tolls depend on the route the driver will actually run, not the shortest one; add them per load. Driver pay depends on the pay plan. Per mile: multiply by the miles the plan counts, loaded only or all dispatched miles. Percentage of the load: a share of the revenue line, so deadhead and dwell come out of the fleet’s share. Hourly or by the day: the hours at the dock are paid directly. For a leased owner-operator, the load’s money splits two ways, and the owner-operator runs the same arithmetic on their own costs — showing them the estimate before they accept is part of keeping them.

Last, the money itself. A factored load costs the factoring fee in the agreement, a share of the invoice. A load that is not factored costs the days the cash is out while fuel and payroll are paid now. A broker who pays in 45 days and one who pays in 15 are not offering the same rate. The Cash Gap Calculator shows what those days cost the fleet in cash.

Illustrative example: two loads, one truck

Illustrative example: one truck, two offers for the same week. The costs are hypothetical and round: $0.60 a mile of fuel (diesel at $3.90 and 6.5 miles per gallon), a company driver paid $0.60 for every dispatched mile, and $0.20 a mile for maintenance and tires — $1.40 a mile in all — plus $250 a day of fixed cost. Both rates are all-in, and both loads are factored at a 3 percent fee.

Load A pays $3,000 for 1,000 loaded miles: $3.00 per loaded mile. The pickup is 200 miles empty, so the truck runs 1,200 miles, or $2.50 per total mile. Tolls are $90, the shipper holds the truck five hours against two hours of free time, and the trip ties up the truck for three days. Costs: $1,680 per-mile, $90 tolls, $750 fixed, $90 factoring. Profit: $390, or $130 a truck-day.

Load B pays $2,200 for 800 loaded miles: $2.75 per loaded mile. The pickup is 30 miles away, so 830 total miles at $2.65 per total mile, no tolls, an hour at the dock and two days. Costs: $1,162 per-mile, $500 fixed, $66 factoring. Profit: $472, or $236 a truck-day.

The load board ranks Load A first: the higher rate per mile and $800 more gross. The arithmetic ranks Load B first, by $82 a load and by more than $100 a truck-day, and the day Load B frees up can carry the next load. Even if Load A’s three hours of detention were billed at $50 an hour and collected, its profit would be $540, or $180 a truck-day — still behind. The numbers are hypothetical; the fleet’s own cost per mile and cost per day replace every one of them.

A weekly lane review in half an hour

An estimate is only as good as the last time someone checked it. Once a week, pull last week’s delivered loads, set each one’s estimate against what happened, and group them by lane — origin market to destination market — and by broker and facility:

• Revenue per total mile and the deadhead share, per lane.
• Profit per load and per truck-day, estimated against actual.
• Dwell hours per stop by facility, and detention billed against detention collected.
• Days to pay and short-pays, by broker.
• Fuel cost per mile against the estimate, by truck.
• Reloads out of each destination: how long the truck waited and how far it ran empty.

Then make three decisions, not thirty: one lane to price higher or drop, one facility to quote with dwell built in, one broker to talk to about pay terms. The operating ratio moves after the month closes; these numbers move every week.

What to automate — and when not to buy anything

The estimate is arithmetic, and arithmetic is what software does well. Before a load is accepted, a calculator can pull the truck’s location for the deadhead, the hours left on the driver’s clock, the fleet’s own cost per mile and fixed cost per day, a current fuel price, the facility’s dwell history and the broker’s days-to-pay and detention record, and show the estimated profit per load and per truck-day next to the rate. Owner-operators can see the same estimate before they say yes.

What stays human: the dispatcher confirms every booking, negotiates within limits the owner sets, and knows things no record holds — a driver’s home time, a shipper relationship worth one thin load, a lane about to turn. After delivery, each estimate is set against the settlement, so the calculator’s inputs get corrected rather than trusted.

When not to buy anything: if the owner dispatches, knows the fleet’s cost per mile, and runs this arithmetic on a spreadsheet before every booking, a tool adds little. If cost per mile is unknown, no calculator fixes that; start with last quarter’s books. For single-truck owner-operators and fleets under about 20 power units, the Revenue Review’s fee does not fit the arithmetic, and the free 20-minute call says so plainly.

For a larger fleet where nobody can say which lanes paid last month, the Revenue Review is two weeks of read-only access to dispatch, ELD, fuel card, settlement and factoring records, ending in a written report that prices each finding and a 90-day plan. Implementation is scoped and priced separately. The team behind the Review has run its own trucking company for seven years, and a client’s data never touches our own fleet.