How a load gets priced.

A verdict is worth exactly as much as the arithmetic behind it, so here is all of it. Nothing on this page is proprietary. You can do it on paper, and you should, at least once, so you know what the app is telling you.

Last updated 20 September 2026

Step 1. What the truck costs in a month

Everything the truck costs, whether it turns a wheel or not, goes in one monthly pile. Fuel is the only line that moves with the miles, and it is worked out from your own MPG and the diesel price you actually paid, not a national average.

A yearly bill is divided by twelve rather than charged in the month it lands, or every load in March would look like a loser.

Step 2. Divide by the miles you actually run

$6,600 across 6,000 miles is $1.10 a mile. That is the line every load has to clear before a single cent of it is profit.

Step 3. Add the deadhead before you work out the rate, not after

The empty miles to reach the pickup are miles you burn diesel on and miles the truck depreciates over. They belong in the run. Adding them afterwards, as a separate worry, is how a load that does not pay gets accepted.

Take a run of 250 loaded miles with 50 miles of deadhead to reach it, and a broker offering $750:

Fifty cents a mile, gone, before anybody has talked about cost. This is the single most common way a load lies to you.

Step 4. Subtract cost from the real rate

Across all 300 miles, loaded and empty, that is $420.00 on the load before the tax set-aside.

Step 5. Take off the tax set-aside

Money you owe the government at the end of the year is not profit, so a share of what is left gets put aside before the app calls anything yours. The set-aside is a percentage of profit, never of gross, and a losing load is never shrunk by it because there is no tax on a loss.

Step 6. The verdict

The colour on the screen reads profit per mile after the set-aside, against one bar:

• 30 cents a mile or more: take it. The truck has paid for itself and the run is worth making.
• Between zero and 30 cents: your call. It is not losing money, but it is not paying for your time either. Worth a phone call before you say yes.
• Below zero: walk away. The load costs you money to run, however good the rate per mile looked on the board.

Thirty cents is not an industry standard we found in a report. It is the bar the carrier that built this app already used, and the app was changed to match the spreadsheet rather than the other way round.

Two corrections the arithmetic makes that a spreadsheet usually does not

The dispatcher's cut follows the actual booker

Cost per mile bakes in a default dispatcher percentage, because it is built from a whole month rather than from any one load. That is right for planning and wrong for the load in front of you. A load you booked direct owes nobody a percentage, and a booker on 6% does not cost what a booker on 12% costs, so the difference is handed back on the individual load. Profit and cost per mile always agree about it.

A load is priced at the numbers that were true on its pickup date

Change your diesel price today and last month does not quietly rewrite itself. Every load carries the costs that were in force when it ran, so your history stays the history and your margins stay comparable.

Read next

• Who builds this, and why the bar is 30 cents
• The same load at three different rates, in the real app
• The questions people ask before they sign up

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