How to work out your cost per mile
A rate is not high or low on its own. It is high or low against your truck. Until you know what a mile costs you, every load is a guess dressed up as a decision.
Three buckets, one number
Everything a truck costs falls into three piles, and they behave differently. Mixing them is how a home-made spreadsheet goes wrong.
- Fixed, per month. Truck payment, trailer, insurance, permits, ELD subscription, accounting. They arrive whether you run 6,000 miles or 12,000.
- Variable, per mile. Tires, repairs and maintenance, DEF, oil, tolls, lumpers. They accrue as the odometer turns.
- Fuel, per mile. Kept separate because it moves on its own: the same truck costs a different amount per mile this month than last.
The arithmetic is short:
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Add your fixed monthly costs, divide by the miles you actually run in a month. |
| 2 | Add up the per-mile items: tires, repairs, DEF, oil, tolls, anything else. |
| 3 | Fuel price divided by your real MPG — loaded, not the brochure figure. |
| = | Add the three. That is your break-even per mile. |
The line that is easy to leave out. Tires and the repair reserve are costs you are paying today for something that breaks later. Skip them and your break-even looks healthy right up until the day the bill arrives. A major mechanical failure can stop an owner-operator from operating — not only because it is expensive, but because nothing was set aside for it.
Break-even is not what you should charge
Your break-even is what the truck costs before you pay yourself anything. Run a load at exactly break-even and you have worked for free. What you charge has to cover the truck, your own wage, and something left over — otherwise the business is a job that owns you.
This is also why an industry average is not a target. For 2025, ATRI put the all-in average operating cost at $2.336 per mile, and $1.854 excluding fuel. Those figures include driver pay, so they are not the same kind of number as your break-even and comparing them directly will mislead you in both directions.
Recalculate when something changes, not once a year
- Fuel moved more than about twenty cents a gallon.
- Your monthly miles changed — fewer miles means the same fixed costs spread thinner, and your break-even rises without anything else changing.
- Insurance renewed, or the truck payment changed.
- You did a big repair. The reserve you were holding was either right or it was not, and now you know.
Do it once and two other things start working
Our calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is pre-filled with our numbers, and it will not show you a take-home figure until every cost line is yours — a partial cost understates the break-even, and an understated break-even is worse than none.
Save it and it stays on your device. After that the rate-con reader can tell you when a load pays less detention than the floor you set, and the rate check can say what a specific run actually leaves you. No account for any of it.
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