Most owner-operators can tell you what a truck payment costs. Fewer can tell you what a truck actually costs — the full number, fixed and variable, that has to be cleared before a single mile is profit. Without that number, every rate you accept is a guess. Here's how to build it for real.
Fixed costs: what you pay whether the truck moves or not
Add these up for a month, then divide by the miles you expect to run that month to get a fixed cost per mile:
- —Truck payment (or the depreciation-equivalent if it's paid off)
- —Insurance — liability, cargo, physical damage
- —Permits, plates, and authority fees, averaged across the year
- —Software, ELD, and any other fixed monthly tools
These don't change whether you run 8,000 miles this month or 12,000 — which is exactly why they need to be spread across expected miles to become a meaningful per-mile number.
Variable costs: what scales with miles
- —Fuel — the single biggest variable cost, and the one most worth tracking precisely (more on that below)
- —Maintenance and tires — budgeted as a per-mile reserve, not just what you happen to spend the week something breaks
- —Driver pay, if you're not driving it yourself
- —Tolls specific to the lanes you actually run
The maintenance reserve is the one people most often shortchange. A truck that hasn't needed a major repair in six months isn't cheap to run — it's a repair bill that hasn't landed yet. Budget for it every month, not just the month it happens.
Add them together, honestly
Fixed cost per mile plus variable cost per mile is your true operating cost per mile — the floor a rate has to clear before you've made anything at all. Most carriers who run this math for the first time are surprised the number is higher than they assumed. Insurance and the maintenance reserve are almost always the two most underestimated line items.
This number is also the one thing every rate decision should be measured against — see how to price a truckload for how to actually use it.
Track it per truck, not just company-wide
If you run more than one truck, a single blended cost-per-mile number hides which trucks are actually profitable and which ones are quietly dragging the average down — an older truck with a climbing maintenance reserve, for instance, or one running lanes with worse deadhead. Once you know each truck's real cost, it's obvious where to actually focus.
Haulstats tracks fuel, maintenance, and revenue per truck automatically, so this comparison is a report you check, not a spreadsheet you maintain. See the dispatch guide for how trip-level profitability comes together.