The Loaded Mile: Owner-Operator Cost Per Mile & Rate Floor

Your truck payment is not your cost per mile. Your cost per mile is every bill you have — truck, trailer, insurance, permits, fuel, tires, and your own pay — divided by the miles that actually get paid.

Most owner-operators know the first number and guess the second. This workbook calculates it, then tells you the rate below which you are paying to haul someone else's freight.

It divides by loaded miles. The empty miles to the pickup are paid for by the loaded ones, so every cost is spread over the miles a shipper pays for. The sample truck: 9,800 miles a month, 14% empty, $2.40 per loaded mile with the driver paid. Deadhead alone is fourteen cents of it.

It counts you. Your pay is the biggest line — 77 cents of every loaded mile — and it is the line most cost-per-mile sheets skip. Leave it out and every load looks profitable, right up until you cannot pay yourself.

It gives you the rate floor. After the factoring fee, the sample must average $2.48 per loaded mile to break even and $2.66 to keep $1,500 a month in the business. Then it tells you the loaded miles you must run at the rate you are actually averaging, and what this month leaves you.

It checks any load. Type the rate and the distance. A $2.15 load for 640 miles grosses $1,376 and loses $209 once it carries fuel for the deadhead and its share of the month's bills. It needed $2.49 a mile. Counter with that number, or let it go.

The dashboard grades nine measures — rate against floor, rate against target, profit after your pay, loaded miles against break-even, deadhead share, fuel share, downtime — HEALTHY, WATCH or ALERT in color, with two charts: what each loaded mile is made of, and how the rate floor falls as the truck runs more miles. One portrait page.

Built for

Owner-operators with their own authority or leased on · hotshot and box-truck operators · anyone about to buy a truck who wants the real number first.

What you get

One .xlsx file, six tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. A realistic sample truck is loaded so you see every color of the grading before you type over it.