Trucking cost per mile: how to work out your real number

Why the number matters more this year

Trucking cost per mile reached a record in 2025: $2.336 on average, up 3.4% from 2024, the highest in any year ATRI has measured.¹ Diesel then passed $6 a gallon in 2026. Margins were already thin, with truckload carriers at 0.4% and reefer carriers at 0.6% in 2025.²

At margins like that, a load booked a few cents under your cost loses money even when the truck is full. In one 30-day stretch from late August into September, 16 trucking companies filed for bankruptcy as diesel climbed.³ Knowing your number also seems to pay. In a 2022 survey by the OOIDA Foundation, owner-operators who knew their cost of operations earned $1.15 more per mile than those who didn’t.⁴

What goes into trucking cost per mile

ATRI surveys carriers every year and breaks their costs down per mile. Here is what the average looked like in 2025.^{1, 5, 6}

Some of these costs come with the miles, like fuel, tires, and most repairs. Others arrive every month whether the truck moves or not, like truck payments, insurance, and permits. DAT calls these variable and fixed costs.⁷ The split matters, because a truck that sits still keeps running up its fixed costs while it earns nothing.

ATRI’s 2025 figures were set before this year’s diesel prices. Diesel averaged $6.179 a gallon in the week of October 12, 2026, after a record $6.529 in the week of September 21.⁸ The average combination truck got 7.1 miles per gallon in 2024,⁹ so fuel now costs about 87 cents a mile instead of 48. Put that into ATRI’s 2025 costs without fuel and you get about $2.72 a mile. At those prices, every gallon that goes missing matters, which is why it pays to check your fuel card data for fraud.

Work out your own number

Use the averages as a benchmark and book loads against your own number. You need a month of costs and a month of miles.

1. Pick a full month. A week is too noisy, because one repair bill or one insurance payment can swing it. Use a quarter if you can.
2. Add up every cost for that month. Fuel, driver pay and benefits, truck and trailer payments, insurance, repairs, tires, tolls, permits, and the overhead people forget: dispatch, office staff, software, phones, parking, and accounting.
3. Count every mile. Take total miles from your ELD or IFTA records, loaded and empty together.
4. Divide costs by miles. That is your cost per mile.
5. Do it per truck too. A fleet average can hide one truck that loses money every week.

Turn it into a break-even rate

Brokers and shippers pay for loaded miles, but your costs build up over all of them, and over every hour a truck waits at a dock, which is why collecting detention pay matters too. To get the rate you need per loaded mile, divide your cost per mile by the share of miles that were loaded. DAT makes the same point: empty miles have to be paid for by the loaded ones.⁷

Here is an example with a fleet at ATRI’s average costs and today’s diesel. Say 15% of its miles are empty. Its cost is about $2.72 a mile, so the break-even is $2.72 ÷ 0.85, or about $3.20 per loaded mile. DAT’s national dry van spot average for October 4 to 10, 2026 was $3.12 a mile including fuel surcharge.¹⁰ On those numbers, the average van load on the spot market loses that fleet about 8 cents a mile.

Trucking cost per mile calculator

Put in one month of your own numbers. The defaults are the example above: a fleet at ATRI’s average costs with today’s diesel. The math runs in your browser.

Compare rates and costs the same way

Rates come quoted two ways, and it is easy to compare the wrong pair. An all-in rate includes the fuel surcharge. A linehaul rate leaves it out. Compare all-in rates with your full cost per mile, and linehaul rates with your cost without fuel.

DAT estimates the fuel surcharge as the diesel price minus a $1.25 base, divided by miles per gallon. For vans it uses 6 miles per gallon, a low figure chosen to cover empty miles.¹¹ At $6.179 diesel, that comes to about 82 cents a mile. In September, DAT’s van spot average was $3.01 all-in and $2.17 linehaul.¹²

Now hold that linehaul against ATRI’s 2025 cost without fuel, $1.854 a mile. With 15% empty miles, that cost works out to about $2.18 per loaded mile. That is the September van linehaul almost to the cent, so on those numbers an average van spot load covered the costs besides fuel and left nothing over. If your quotes come linehaul only, check how the surcharge is worked out, because it pays for most of the fuel.

Look at it truck by truck

Your fleet’s trucking cost per mile is an average, and averages hide the trucks that pull it down. In 2025 the average truck ran 85,991 miles.⁶ At ATRI’s per-mile averages, truck and trailer payments plus insurance come to about $44,000 a year for that truck. A truck parked without a driver still owes most of that.

ATRI found that carriers left 10% of their trucks unseated on average in 2025.⁵ When that happens, the fixed costs of the parked trucks spread over the miles of the ones still running, and the fleet’s cost per mile goes up. Repair and maintenance also rose faster than most other costs in 2025, up 8.6%.¹ Run the calculation per truck every month and the ones that cost the most will stand out.

Keep the number current

Cost per mile is only useful if it is recent. Fuel moves every week, and insurance renewals and repair bills arrive when they arrive. ATRI’s early 2026 figures already showed insurance premiums up 6.4% and fuel up 5.9% in the first quarter.⁵ Recalculate every month, and again whenever diesel moves sharply.

The hard part is usually gathering the numbers. Fuel sits in the fuel card portal, miles in the ELD, pay in payroll, and repairs in a stack of invoices. Moonin keeps gross, payments, and financial exposure in your daily brief, and every number links back to the record it came from. If you want to see what that looks like with your own trucks, book a call.