Know Your Number, Know Your Floor, and Quit Hauling Freight That Is Putting You Out of Business

Ok folks, your Camp Soapbox counselor here.

I have been sitting here looking at load boards for the last few days, and I keep coming back to the same question. Why do carriers continue helping brokers race to the bottom?

We complain about cheap freight every day. We take screenshots of ridiculous rates. We complain about brokers offering two dollars a mile or less while fuel, insurance, maintenance, tires, equipment and everything else involved in running a truck keeps getting more expensive. Then somebody picks up the phone and takes the load anyway.

That is the part nobody wants to talk about.

A broker can post a load for whatever they want. They can offer $2.00 a mile, $1.75 or $1.50 if they feel like it. They can tell you they only have another hundred dollars in it. But until a carrier agrees to haul it, that freight is still sitting there.

The broker did not hook your trailer to it. You did.

I have said this before and I will probably keep saying it until I am blue in the face: you have to know your cost per mile. Not mine. Not the guy parked next to you. Not some number somebody threw on Facebook. You need to know exactly what it costs to operate your truck, and then you need to establish a minimum rate that makes operating that truck worthwhile.

And once you establish it, stick to it.

Right now the EIA national average for on-highway diesel is $6.285 a gallon. Take a truck that actually averages 6 miles per gallon. Not the number somebody claims while running empty downhill with a tailwind. Six miles per gallon in the real world, loaded and working.

Run that truck 100,000 miles a year and it will burn about 16,667 gallons of diesel. At $6.285 a gallon, you are looking at roughly $104,750 a year just in fuel.

Now let’s bring that down to one trip.

Run 1,000 actual truck miles at 6 MPG and you burn about 166.7 gallons. At today’s national average, that is approximately $1,047.50 worth of diesel.

We have not paid anybody yet.

Now say your truck and trailer payment together are $3,000 a month. That is $36,000 a year. Spread over 100,000 miles, that equipment payment costs you another 36 cents every mile that truck moves. Run 1,000 miles and there is another $360.

So fuel and the truck and trailer payment alone have already eaten $1,407.50 out of those 1,000 miles.

We still have not paid the driver. We have not paid insurance. We have not bought tires. We have not changed the oil. We have not paid plates, permits, tolls, ELD expenses, accounting, office expenses or taxes. We have not put anything away for the day that engine, transmission, rear end or emissions system decides it wants some attention.

And sooner or later, something will.

The latest ATRI numbers put the industry-average cost of operating a truck in 2025 at $2.336 per mile, the highest in the history of its report. More importantly for what is happening right now, ATRI says the average non-fuel cost was already $1.854 per mile. Repair and maintenance costs increased 8.6 percent and tire costs rose 6.4 percent in 2025.

Now take that $1.854 non-fuel average and put today’s fuel into it for a truck getting 6 MPG. Fuel alone is roughly $1.05 per mile today. That puts you around $2.90 per actual truck mile as a rough benchmark before you ever talk about making a profit. That is not everybody’s exact number. Your operation may be lower or it may be considerably higher. That is why I keep saying you have to know your own number.

Then reality happens.

You need a tire. A decent truck tire can easily put you around $600, and by the time somebody comes out or mounts it, another hundred bucks disappearing is nothing unusual. There went $700.

Something breaks and the truck goes into a dealer, specialty shop or roadside repair situation charging $225 to $275 an hour. Four hours of labor can put $900 to $1,100 on the bill before they install the first part. An eight-hour repair can mean $1,800 to $2,200 in labor alone.

Parts are not getting cheaper either.

Then your insurance renewal comes in. Take a carrier whose premium jumps 45 percent. Where does that additional money come from? The insurance company does not care that freight rates are cheap. The shop does not care. The tire dealer does not care. The bank does not care.

That money has to come out of the rate you charge for moving freight.

So now I want to ask a serious question.

How are you taking freight for less than $3.50 a mile and actually making money?

I am not saying nobody can. Maybe your truck is paid for. Maybe your trailer is paid for. Maybe your insurance is unusually cheap. Maybe you get outstanding fuel mileage. Maybe you do all your own maintenance. Maybe your situation really does allow you to operate cheaper.

Fine.

But do the math before you tell yourself you are profitable.

Let’s use $3.50 per loaded mile. A 1,000-mile load grosses $3,500. Sounds pretty good until you remember that your truck is not magically sitting at the shipper.

Suppose you have 150 miles of deadhead getting there. You are actually running 1,150 miles to earn that $3,500. Your real revenue is only about $3.04 for every mile that truck turns.

Using ATRI’s average non-fuel cost and today’s fuel at 6 MPG as a rough comparison, those 1,150 truck miles cost about $3,337. That leaves roughly $163.

On a $3.50-a-loaded-mile load.

Now maybe your individual costs are different. Hopefully they are. But that ought to tell you how thin this can get once you quit pretending deadhead does not exist.

Drop that same load to $3.00 a loaded mile and you gross $3,000. Using the same rough cost comparison, you are already underwater.

And yet we have freight sitting on the boards well below that.

Let’s look at some real freight I was staring at today. These are actual full truckload postings in my Texas search area. I am deliberately leaving out anything marked LTL or partial because comparing partial freight to a full truckload would not be fair.

Lewisville, Texas to Oak Park, Michigan is posted at $3,000 for 1,178 loaded miles. The board shows another 137 miles getting to it. Most people glance at that and say it is about $2.55 a mile.

It isn’t.

The truck has to run about 1,315 miles to earn that $3,000. That works out to roughly $2.28 per actual mile.

At 6 MPG and $6.285 diesel, fuel alone is approximately $1,377. Spread that $3,000 monthly truck and trailer payment across those miles and you have another roughly $473 tied up in equipment cost. Fuel and the equipment payment alone have eaten around $1,851.

That leaves about $1,149 from the original $3,000.

Now pay the driver. Pay insurance. Put money toward maintenance. Pay plates, permits and everything else. Put something aside for the next breakdown. Then tell me what the company made.

Here is another one. Hutchins, Texas to Warren, Indiana. The board shows $2,400 for 1,006 loaded miles and 127 miles of deadhead.

That truck needs to travel approximately 1,133 miles to earn $2,400. The actual rate is about $2.12 per truck mile.

Fuel is roughly $1,187. The equipment payment allocation is another $408. Now about $1,595 of your $2,400 is gone before anybody gets paid to drive the truck.

You have approximately $805 left.

Eight hundred and five dollars to cover the driver, insurance, maintenance, tires, plates, permits, overhead and profit on more than 1,100 miles of truck operation.

Explain to me how that works.

Denton, Texas to Spiceland, Indiana is posted at $2,900 for 912 loaded miles with 133 miles of deadhead. That is about 1,045 actual truck miles, meaning the rate is really around $2.78 per mile. Better than the Warren load, but start subtracting approximately $1,094 in fuel and another $376 in equipment cost and watch how quickly that $2,900 disappears.

Then there is Sumner, Texas to Humboldt, South Dakota. That one is $3,000 for 803 loaded miles with about 67 miles of deadhead. Now we are at roughly $3.45 per actual truck mile.

That one at least deserves a calculator.

Notice I did not call every load on the board garbage. I am not looking for some fantasy rate where every load has to pay five or six dollars a mile. I am looking at each load based on what it actually costs to operate the truck.

And if my floor is $3.50 on every mile that truck travels, even that $3.45 load still does not quite reach my number.

That is what knowing your rate means.

You do not suddenly forget your operating costs because the truck has been sitting since yesterday. Your insurance company does not lower your premium because you really wanted to get home. Your fuel card does not give you free diesel because you needed to reposition the truck.

And please quit telling yourself you will take this one cheap and make it up on the next load.

You might.

You might also get to the other end and find another board full of cheap freight.

That is not a business plan. That is gambling.

The latest DAT numbers make another point worth understanding. DAT reported national flatbed spot linehaul averaging $2.62 per mile last week, but that number is linehaul only. It excludes fuel costs and fuel surcharges. In its ten flatbed bellwether states, outbound linehaul averaged $3.17 per mile, again before fuel.

That matters.

When you see somebody say the market is $2.62, make sure you know what number you are looking at. A $2.62 linehaul rate plus fuel is not the same thing as somebody posting an all-in $2.62 rate and expecting you to buy six-dollar diesel out of it.

Words matter. Numbers matter even more.

Then we get to the excuse I hear constantly: something is better than nothing.

No. It is not.

Sometimes nothing is better than something.

A truck sitting for a day costs money. I know that. But hauling a load that does not cover the cost of operating the truck costs money too, and now you are wearing out equipment while losing it.

That is worse.

Another favorite is, I need to get to a better market.

With diesel at $6.285 a gallon, you had better get your calculator out before you make that decision too. Sometimes deadheading to the next market costs less than putting cheap freight on your trailer, spending hours loading and unloading it, taking on the cargo liability, dealing with detention and adding wear to the equipment just so you can say you did not run empty.

Truckers hate seeing an empty trailer.

I understand.

But pride does not pay the bills.

A moving truck is not necessarily a profitable truck.

That is probably the single biggest thing I wish small carriers and owner-operators would understand right now. You can keep your truck moving every day of the year and still go broke.

Revenue is not profit.

Gross revenue sure looks pretty when somebody posts it on social media. I grossed $10,000 this week. Great.

What did you keep?

If you spent $9,700 earning it, you did not have a $10,000 week. You had a $300 week with a whole lot of risk attached to it.

And every time we accept freight below what it actually costs us to operate, we teach the broker something.

We teach them that somebody will take it.

Why would a broker offer $3,500 tomorrow if somebody hauled the same lane today for $2,600?

They would be stupid to pay more than they have to.

This is business.

That does not excuse brokers who intentionally beat carriers down or play games with rates. I have no patience for that either. But carriers need to accept our part in this.

They cannot race to the bottom by themselves.

We have to follow them there.

Every time one carrier says no to a ridiculous rate, the freight stays on the board. Every time another carrier calls five minutes later and says yes, the market just got another lesson about how cheap somebody is willing to work.

That hurts all of us.

Especially the small carrier.

A huge fleet may be able to spread a bad load across hundreds or thousands of trucks. A one-truck owner-operator cannot. A three-truck carrier cannot. One major repair can wipe out months of whatever little margin you thought you were making.

You can work your tail off right up until the day the bank account says you are finished.

So figure out your number.

Fuel. Driver pay. Insurance. Truck payment. Trailer payment. Tires. Maintenance. Repairs. Plates. Permits. Tolls. ELD. Accounting. Factoring if you use it. Office expenses. Deadhead. Downtime. And money set aside for the things that are going to break whether you want them to or not.

Then add profit.

Yes, I said profit.

There is nothing wrong with making money.

That is why you are in business.

Once you have your number, establish your floor and quit crossing it because somebody tells you this is all they have in the load.

Maybe it is.

Then it is not your load.

Will somebody else take it?

Probably.

Let them.

Because the goal is not to haul the most freight. The goal is not to have the truck moving every minute of every day. The goal is not to brag that you never deadhead.

The goal is to still be in business next year.

Brokers offering unsustainable rates have no reason to change as long as carriers keep saying yes. If enough trucks stop accepting freight that does not pay the bills, one of two things happens.

The rate goes up or the freight sits.

Until then, we can complain about brokers all we want, but we need to look in the mirror too.

They cannot make us haul it.

Know your number. Know your floor. Stick to it.

Because sometimes the most profitable load you haul all week is the one you refused to put on your truck.

End of transmission.

JR Elrod
President, BAR Transportation LLC
Camp Soapbox Counselor

Sources

• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update, national on-highway diesel price for September 14, 2026: eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel
• American Transportation Research Institute, 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: truckingresearch.org
• DAT Freight & Analytics, Flatbed Report, September 15, 2026: dat.com