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What deadhead really costs your truck
Deadhead is the most commonly under-counted cost in trucking, because the mileage is visible and the money is not. The arithmetic is simple once you do it once.
Owner-operator basicsBy BSG Carriers·Published ·3 min read
Deadhead is a cost that hides in plain sight
Deadhead is any mile you drive without freight on the truck — running to a pickup, repositioning after a delivery, or heading home. The truck burns fuel, wears tyres, accrues maintenance and uses up hours exactly as it does loaded. The only difference is that nobody is paying for it.
That is why it hides. The miles show up on the odometer but not on the settlement, so it is easy to treat them as part of the job rather than as a number. They are a number, and for many single-truck operations they are the difference between a good year and a flat one.
The arithmetic
Do this once and you will never look at a rate the same way again.
- Take your total miles for the month and your loaded miles. The difference is deadhead.
- Deadhead percentage = deadhead miles divided by loaded miles. Under 10% is tight. Around 15% is common. Over 20% is worth acting on.
- Every cost you have is spread across TOTAL miles, but only LOADED miles earn — so the loaded ones must carry the empty ones.
- Effective cost per loaded mile = total monthly cost divided by loaded miles, not by total miles. That single change is what most people get wrong.
- Worked example: 8,000 loaded miles, 1,200 deadhead, $9,200 of total cost. Cost per total mile looks like $1.00. Cost per LOADED mile is $1.15 — and $1.15 is the number a rate has to beat.
Why a high rate into a dead market loses
This is where deadhead changes decisions rather than just describing them. A load paying well into a market with nothing coming out of it means the next move is either a long empty run or a cheap load taken out of necessity. Either way, the second leg eats the first leg’s margin.
A moderate rate into a market that reloads the same day frequently nets more across the week. The right way to judge an offer is over the round trip, not the single leg — and that is a judgement about where the freight is, which is the part a dispatcher is actually being paid for.
It is also why a lane you run repeatedly beats a series of unrelated good rates. A known lane has a known reload, so the empty miles become predictable and small.
Three ways to cut it
01
Book the next load before you deliver this one
The single biggest lever. An empty truck deciding where to go has already lost; a truck that knows its next pickup runs a short reposition instead of a long one.
02
Learn which markets reload
Some destinations are reliably easy to leave and some are not. This is local knowledge more than data, and it is worth writing down as you learn it.
03
Widen the radius you will accept for a pickup, selectively
Refusing anything over 50 miles sounds disciplined but can leave you sitting. A 120-mile reposition into a strong market often beats a 30-mile one into a soft one.
Work out your own number
The cost per mile calculator on this site includes a deadhead field precisely because leaving it out is the most common mistake in a naive cost-per-mile sum. Put in your real figures, set deadhead to what you actually run, and the break-even rate it gives you is the one worth holding out for.
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