A mile costs $2.336 to turn. The paperwork is charged on top of that.
Every figure on this page is published by somebody other than us, with a link to where it came from and the year it covers. Read it before you decide whether a dispatch service and a back office are worth what they cost.
The American Transportation Research Institute surveys carriers every year and publishes the average marginal cost of running a truck, broken into line items. The 2025 figure is the highest it has recorded.
Cost per loaded mile is higher than cost per mile, because a share of every mile is run empty.
Two dollars and thirty four cents before you have earned anything.
Average marginal cost of trucking operations reached $2.336 per mile in 2025, a record, up 3.4 percent over the prior year. Strip fuel out and the rest of the truck still costs $1.854 per mile.
Total and the fuel and permits line items: ATRI, Operational Costs of Trucking, released 15 July 2026 and FleetOwner's line item table. Wages, benefits, tires, and tolls: Transport Topics. Equipment, repair, and insurance: FreightWaves reporting of the same ATRI release. Data year 2025.
Empty miles change the real number. Excluding tankers, empty miles ran 16.5 percent of all miles in 2025 (ATRI figures as reported by Summar). At 16.5 percent deadhead, $2.336 per total mile works out to roughly $2.80 per loaded mile. That is our arithmetic on their numbers, not a published figure.
The smallest carriers pay the most for the same mile.
The line items are not the same for everyone. In ATRI's 2025 data, truckload fleets with fewer than five trucks paid more per mile for both fuel and repairs than fleets with a thousand trucks. You are buying the same diesel and the same brake job with none of the volume.
In August 2026 the dry van spot linehaul sat below the industry cost per mile.
For the week ending 14 August 2026, dry van spot linehaul averaged $2.25 per mile. ATRI's marginal cost figure for 2025 was $2.336 per mile. A carrier taking market spot freight at the average, without a fuel surcharge collected properly and without accessorials billed, is running below cost.
Reefer spot ran about 13 cents above contract and flatbed contract ran about 19 cents above spot in the same July 2026 DAT release. Equipment choice moves the number as much as lane choice does.
What a booked load has to cover
The gap is arithmetic on the sourced figures above, not a published statistic, and the two figures sit on different bases: the cost is per loaded mile and the rate is quoted per total mile. It is shown for scale. It is the reason a fuel surcharge that is actually collected and detention that is actually billed decide whether the week works.
Work out your surcharge per mileYou are paid for driving. Most of the clock is spent on everything else.
Booking a load yourself
- ·55 percent of carriers say a load board load takes about 20 minutes to book
- ·21 percent say it takes 31 minutes to over an hour
- ·Both figures are from a 2021 carrier survey, the most recent we could source
- ·The calls happen while you are driving, loading, or supposed to be off duty
When somebody else is booking
- ·52 percent of carriers using instant book complete a booking in 10 minutes or less
- ·32 percent report fewer calls per load
- ·Search time is somebody's job instead of an unpaid second shift
We are not claiming those survey figures measure our service. They measure how long the work takes when a carrier does it alone versus when the search is handled somewhere else. We have no controlled study of dispatch service productivity to show you, and we will not invent one.
Detention is the clearest case of money that exists on paper and never lands in the account. It is billed by almost everyone and paid to almost no one.
Nearly every fleet bills detention. Fewer than half of those invoices get paid.
Why this is a paperwork problem. Detention gets paid when arrival and departure are documented at the time they happen, the delay is reported to the broker while the truck is still on the dock, the rate confirmation actually contains a detention term, and the invoice goes out with the proof attached. Every one of those four steps is clerical. None of them can be done from behind the wheel.
Forty days is the industry average wait, and every shortcut has a price.
40 days
Industry average time to get paid on a freight invoice, with some payers reaching 90 days.
Truckstop. Brokers commonly model 30 days out to carriers against 40 days in from shippers (FreightWaves).
The quick pay ladder
Truckstop quick pay schedule. On a $2,000 load, next day money costs $100.
Factoring
FreightWaves Checkpoint. Aging structures often start near 2 percent for 30 days and add 0.5 percent per 10 to 15 days after.
Sam Barret does not factor invoices, does not advance money, and never receives freight proceeds. Brokers pay the carrier directly. We prepare and send the invoice with the paperwork attached so the clock starts the day the load delivers instead of the week you get around to it.
Almost half of new transportation businesses are gone by year three.
This is the part of the industry nobody puts on a billboard. The federal survival data and FMCSA's own program numbers say the same thing from two directions.
In 2023, 56 percent of new entrants exited as inactive, changed status, no show for the safety audit, or no contact, and 1 percent were revoked for failing the audit (FMCSA, 2024). Most carriers do not get shut down. They stop answering.
The safety audit is not the thing that ends most carriers
Pass rates on the new entrant safety audit run about 91 percent (FMCSA progress report, data as of 25 April 2025). What ends carriers is quieter: an insurance lapse, a biennial update never filed, a quarter of fuel tax never reported, a truck that keeps rolling with a deferred repair. Those are calendar failures, and a calendar is something you can hand to somebody else.
See the whole calendarPrice the back office you are already running for free.
Put in the hours you actually spend on searching, calls, invoicing, filing, and compliance in a normal week, and what an hour of your time is worth. Fifty working weeks a year. This runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Set that against a dispatch tier of 8, 10, or 12 percent plus the back office monthly. The comparison is not fee against zero. It is fee against those hours, the detention you did not bill, the invoice that sat, and the filing you forgot.
Pricing, in fullThe numbers are the same for everyone. The response is not.
Cost per mile, spot rates, and payment terms are set by a market you do not control. Detention you never billed, a surcharge you never checked, an invoice that sat four days, a filing that went late: those are yours, and they are the whole margin.
Bring one month of settlement statements to the call. Twenty minutes and you will know which of those four is costing you the most.
What the fee buys
Full scope and the worked example on the pricing page.
One number, one deadline, one thing worth changing.
Diesel and the surcharge, what closes this month, and one idea about how the week runs. Never on stale data.
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