Cost per mile is not a market figure you look up. It is your truck, your payment, your insurance, your fuel, your miles. Two operators sitting side by side at the same truck stop can have costs forty cents apart.
Start with fixed costs — the money that leaves your account whether the truck moves or not. Truck and trailer payment, insurance, permits, plates, ELD subscription, accounting, parking. Add them for one month.
Then variable costs — money that only happens because you drove. Fuel is the big one: divide your miles by your real MPG, not the brochure MPG, and multiply by the price you actually pay. Add maintenance and tires as a per-mile figure; a common approach is to track a year of repair spending and divide by the miles you ran in that year.
Then driver pay. If you pay yourself per mile, use that number. If you pay per week, divide the weekly figure by the miles you typically run in a week so it lands in the same units as everything else.
Now the arithmetic. Fixed cost per mile is your monthly fixed total divided by the miles you drive in a month. Variable cost per mile is fuel per mile plus maintenance per mile plus driver pay per mile. Add the two together and you have your total cost per mile.
That total is your break-even rate: at exactly that rate per mile, across all miles including empty ones, you finish the month even. Anything you want to keep has to come from above it.
One warning that catches people. Your break-even is stated in total miles, but rates are quoted in loaded miles. If a quarter of your miles are empty, a $2.00 all-in rate on loaded miles is not $2.00 against your break-even — it is closer to $1.50. That is why deadhead belongs in every load decision, and why our calculator asks for it.
Run the number once, write it on the visor, and redo it whenever your insurance, payment, or fuel price changes. Our free Cost Per Mile Calculator does the arithmetic for you, and it respects both dollars and miles or kilometres.
— Vincent Scott, TeamScott LLC · Memphis, TN