Nobody books empty miles on purpose. They accumulate — a delivery in the wrong place, a load booked too late, a lane that pays well outbound and has nothing coming back.
What it costs
At $1.14 a mile in running cost, 150 empty miles cost about $171 before the load has earned anything. Over a month at twelve percent deadhead on 10,000 miles, that is 1,200 empty miles and roughly $1,370 of cost carried by loads that did not generate it.
The fuel surcharge does not help, because it is almost always paid on loaded miles only. Your truck burns diesel on the empty ones and nothing reimburses it.
Measuring it properly
- 01Record total miles and loaded miles for every load, not just the paid ones.
- 02Compute deadhead as empty miles divided by total miles, across a month rather than a load.
- 03Watch the trend, not the absolute figure — your geography sets your floor, and comparing yourself to an industry average tells you nothing.
What actually reduces it
Booking the next load before delivering the current one
This is the single biggest lever and it is the hardest one to pull from behind a wheel. A driver checking a board at 8pm after a full day is competing against people who did it from a desk at 10am.
Building repeatable pairs rather than chasing single loads
Lanes are rarely balanced. Finding a headhaul and backhaul that work together, and running them repeatedly, beats optimising each load in isolation.
Pricing the deadhead into the decision
A backhaul at a lower rate is not a bad load if the alternative is running the same miles empty. Judge it against zero, not against your headhaul rate.
None of this requires new technology. It requires knowing your empty-mile percentage, which most carriers do not, because nothing they use records it.