Deadhead miles calculator
Deadhead is any distance driven with an empty trailer, and it costs fuel and hours while earning nothing. This calculator restates an advertised rate as what the load pays across every mile the truck actually turns.
Last reviewed · by the fleetchart dispatch desk
Rate per mile you actually turn
$2.40
Advertised as $2.82 per loaded mile. Deadhead costs you $0.42 of that.
- Total miles
- 1,000
- Cost of the empty miles
- $173
- Total running cost
- $1,150
- Net on the trip
- $1,250
- Break-even rate
- $1,150
15% empty
What this load must pay to clear cost
How to read this
Deadhead is unavoidable in truckload freight — you rarely deliver where the next load starts — but the difference between a well-planned operation and a poorly-planned one shows up almost entirely in this number.
The single biggest lever is booking the next load before the current one delivers. That is hard to do from behind a wheel and easy to do from a desk, which is the whole argument for a dispatch service.
Watch deadhead percentage across a month rather than per load. A figure trending upward almost always means loads are being booked too late.
Questions
- What is a good deadhead percentage?
- Lower is better and zero is impossible. Rather than chasing an industry benchmark, track your own figure month over month — the trend tells you whether your planning is improving, which an average never will.
- Does the fuel surcharge cover deadhead miles?
- Usually not. Fuel surcharge is typically paid on loaded miles only, while the truck burns diesel on the empty ones too. That gap is one of the more reliable sources of quiet margin loss.
- Should I refuse loads with long deadhead?
- Not automatically. A load with 150 empty miles can still beat a nearer one if the rate is strong enough. Restate both as rate per mile turned and compare those figures rather than the advertised ones.
Terms used here
Stop re-typing these numbers.
A calculator answers the question once. fleetchart reads your rate confirmations and holds your expenses against the loads that caused them, so the answer stays current every week.