Empty miles to the shipper
A rate looks fine at $2.30 a loaded mile until you count the 118 miles you drive to get under it. Those miles burn the same fuel and the same tires as the paid ones.
$80 gone 118 empty miles at 68 centsLoad math for owner operators
Price the load on total miles, not the miles the broker pays you for.
DeadheadMath takes the offer, adds the empty miles to the shipper, prices the fuel at what your card actually charges and subtracts the fixed cost of the days the trip will burn. You get one net number, in dollars per total mile, before you call the broker back.
Fuel island, 11:40 pm
1,180 trucks
Running offers through DeadheadMath every week
44 states
With active lanes in the shared rate history
17 minutes
Median time from sign up to the first scored load
The hole in the rate
The load board pays by the loaded mile. Your truck bills you for all of them.
Every cost below is one an owner operator absorbs quietly, usually after the trailer is already hooked. Four of them, on four loads a week, is the difference between a good year and a year you would rather not talk about.
Fuel priced from memory
Diesel moved 19 cents a gallon in three weeks this spring and nobody sent you a memo. Booking a long run on last month's number quietly eats the margin you thought you had.
$209 short 1,100 miles at 6.2 mpg, 19 cent swingFixed cost that runs while you sit
The note, the insurance, the plate, the permits and the parking spot do not care whether the truck rolled today. Two dead days a month is real money out of the same account.
$634 a month Two idle days at a $317 daily fixed costSettlement line items nobody billed
Detention you sat for and never claimed, a lumper receipt in the door pocket, a fuel surcharge that came back light. Three of those a week never make it onto an invoice.
$8,400 a year Average unbilled accessorials per truckHow it runs
Four stops between the offer and the answer.
You set the truck up once. After that every load takes about forty seconds, most of which is typing the two city names.
Build the truck's cost sheet
Enter the truck note, the physical damage and liability premiums, the plate and permits, the maintenance reserve, the tire fund and what you pay yourself. DeadheadMath turns that into a cost per day and a cost per mile that follow the truck everywhere it goes.
Drop the offer in
Origin, destination, the rate the broker quoted and the pickup window. It measures the deadhead from wherever you are sitting or wherever you plan to drop, then routes the loaded leg and counts the tolls on it.
Read the net, then answer the broker
One screen: revenue, fuel at your mpg and your discounted price per gallon, tolls, deadhead, and the fixed cost of every day the trip holds the truck. The number at the bottom is dollars per total mile, and it is either above your floor or it is not.
Close it out against the settlement
When the check comes in, drop the settlement in and DeadheadMath lines it up against what the load was supposed to pay. Anything missing gets flagged, and the lane keeps the real result for the next time that broker calls.
Inside the calculator
Everything the net number is built from.
No dashboards you will never open. Six working parts, each one aimed at a place where small carriers lose money without noticing.
Rate per total mile
Every offer is scored on loaded miles plus deadhead miles, so a $2.40 run with 140 empty miles in front of it shows up as what it really is. The loaded mile figure is still there, sitting next to the honest one.
Fixed cost that follows the truck
Note, insurance, plates, permits, parking, maintenance reserve and your own pay become one daily and one per mile figure. Change the insurance renewal in one place and every future quote uses the new number.
Fuel at your pump price
Set the mpg each truck actually turns and the cash price you get on your fuel network, and the calculator burns fuel at that rate for the whole trip. Update the price weekly and old quotes keep the price they were booked at.
Lane memory
Every scored load is filed by origin and destination market, so the next time Fort Worth to Nashville comes up you can see what it paid you in March and what it paid in July. Rate softening shows up as a slope, not as a surprise.
Settlement reconciliation
Enter the settlement and DeadheadMath compares it line by line against the load you booked, then flags detention, lumper receipts and fuel surcharge gaps that came back short. Nothing quietly disappears between the delivery and the deposit.
Clock check before you commit
The trip is measured against your remaining drive time and your fourteen hour window, including the deadhead leg and the appointment time. If a load only works by cheating the log, it says so before you answer the broker.
After a quarter on it
What carriers report once the numbers stop being guesses.
These come from the carriers who log settlements as well as offers, so the before and after is measured against real deposits rather than intentions.
Plus 34 cents per total mile
Better freight, same truck
Carriers in their second quarter turn down roughly one offer in eight and fill the slot from the same board an hour later. The lift is not a rate increase, it is the loads they stopped taking.
6.2 hours hours a month
Off the notepad
The spreadsheet, the phone calculator and the notebook in the door pocket all get replaced by one entry screen. Most of the time saved comes out of the evening, not out of driving hours.
2,180 dollars per truck, per year
Accessorials that get billed
Detention, layover, TONU and lumper reimbursements that used to die in the door pocket now sit on a list until they are invoiced. The reconciliation screen is what makes the list impossible to ignore.
11 days days earlier
You see a lane going soft
Lane history plots what each market pair actually netted, week by week, so a slide shows up before the third bad settlement lands. Carriers use it to move the truck to a different corner of the map while the rates still hold.
From the driver seat
Three carriers, three different ways it paid for itself.
One truck, two trucks and a five truck operation. All three log settlements, which is why their numbers are worth quoting.
I used to do this math on a legal pad at the fuel island and I still got it wrong. It flagged a Laredo to Memphis load at $2.31 a loaded mile that came out to $1.74 once the 118 miles of deadhead to the shipper went in. I passed on it, took a Dallas run instead, and finished the week $410 better off.
The fixed cost page is what stung. Three hundred seventeen dollars a day before either truck turned a wheel, sitting there in green and white. We stopped hauling cheap freight home on Fridays and started taking the reload, and my husband quit arguing with me about it after the second settlement.
The settlement side keeps me logged in. In one quarter I caught three fuel surcharge shortfalls and a detention claim a broker swore had already been paid, one thousand nine hundred forty dollars between them. Every load gets closed out the night the check clears now, five trucks, no exceptions.
94,600 loads
Loads scored in the last twelve months
18,400 offers
Offers turned down after the net came back short
3.9 million miles
Miles reconciled against paid settlements
Plans
Pay by the truck, never by the load.
Scoring an offer never costs extra, so nobody on your side hesitates before running the numbers. Pick the plan that matches the trucks you have on the road today.
One Truck
For the single truck owner operator who books their own freight.
$19per month, per account
- Unlimited load scoring on total miles
- One truck cost sheet with daily and per mile output
- Deadhead measured from your current drop
- Fuel priced on your mpg and your card rate
- Settlement reconciliation and accessorial flags
- Twelve months of lane history
- Email support answered within one business day
Two Trucks
For the husband and wife operation or the owner who put a driver in seat two.
$39per month, per account
- Everything in the One Truck plan
- Two separate truck cost sheets and mpg profiles
- Side by side comparison of two competing offers
- Driver pay modeled per mile or per percentage
- Weekly net summary by truck, sent Sunday night
- Three years of lane history
- Settlement import from a spreadsheet
Small Fleet
For carriers running three to ten trucks with a dispatcher in the office.
$89per month, per account
- Everything in the Two Trucks plan
- Up to ten trucks with individual cost sheets
- Dispatcher logins with their own scoring history
- Floor rate rules that warn before a load is accepted
- Broker scorecard built from paid settlements
- Quarterly cost review with a real person
- Phone support during business hours, Central time
All three plans bill monthly in US dollars. There is no term, no setup fee and no charge per scored load, and you can cancel from the account page in the same minute you decide to park the truck.
Answers
The questions we get asked at the fuel desk.
Plans run $19 a month for one truck, $39 for two trucks and $89 for a small fleet of up to ten. Every plan includes unlimited load scoring, so the number of offers you run has no effect on the bill. There is no setup fee and no annual contract, and the price you start at is the price you keep for as long as the account stays open.
The median new account scores its first load seventeen minutes after signing up. The only real work is the cost sheet: truck note, insurance premiums, plates and permits, maintenance reserve, tire fund and your own pay. Have your last settlement statement and your insurance declaration page in front of you and it goes faster than that. If you would rather not do it alone, we will get on a call and build the sheet with you at no charge.
Your rates, your settlements and your cost sheet are visible only to the logins on your own account. We do not sell rate data, and nothing you enter is republished as a market average or handed to a broker. The aggregate lane figures shown in the app come only from carriers who chose to contribute, and they carry no company identifier of any kind. You can export the whole account to a spreadsheet at any time and ask us to delete it after that.
Settlements import from a spreadsheet, which covers most factoring companies and every broker portal that offers a download. Scored loads export as CSV in a shape that QuickBooks and most bookkeepers accept without cleanup. Direct ELD connections are part of the Small Fleet plan, where the clock check reads remaining drive time instead of a figure you type by hand. Everything else stays deliberately manual, because a wrong automatic import costs more to untangle than a blank field.
Cancel from the account page and the plan stops at the end of the billing month you are in, with no exit fee and no retention call to sit through. Lane history and settlement records stay available for export for sixty days after the account closes. Seasonal carriers who park the truck in January do this every winter and switch the account back on in March. Nothing is erased until you ask us to erase it.
The part experienced operators get wrong is almost never the loaded rate, it is the deadhead and the days the trip eats. Mental math holds up on a lane you run every week, then a broker calls about a market you have not touched since 2023 and the shortcut quietly fails. The other half of the value sits on the settlement side, where three unbilled accessorials a week turn into four figures a year. Run it against a load you already hauled and compare the number to what actually landed in the account.
Mile Marker
The freight economics magazine we write between releases.
Mile Marker is where the arithmetic behind a rate gets written out in full: surcharge tables, empty miles, fixed cost per day and the paperwork that decides who absorbs a bad week. Three of the newest pieces are below.
Practical guide
How to Build a Fuel Surcharge Table From the EIA Diesel Index
The EIA posts a national and regional on-highway diesel price every Monday. Here is how carriers turn that number into a per mile surcharge, pick a base peg, and set the MPG assumption that decides who eats a price spike.
Comparison
Leased On or Your Own Authority: The Cost Math for One Truck
Running under a carrier's authority trades a percentage of the linehaul for insurance, plates, and back office work. Here is every line item on both sides, from the MC filing to the factoring fee.
Mistakes to avoid
Seven Deadhead Mistakes That Cut Your Real Rate Per Mile
Every empty mile is paid for out of the loaded ones. These are the habits that hide deadhead from the rate: quoting off loaded miles, forgetting the repositioning leg, and chasing a headhaul into a dead market.
Nine articles so far, written by Jimenez Julien and checked against public sources and real settlement statements before they go up.
Read Mile MarkerGet started
Send us the lane that keeps burning you.
Tell us the origin, the destination and roughly what it pays, and we will build your cost sheet on a screen share and score that load with you while you watch. Twenty minutes, no slide deck, and you keep the cost sheet either way.
- Replies come from a person, usually the same business day.
- Calls run early morning or after the drop, Central time, your pick.
- Nothing you send is passed to a broker, a factor or a load board.
One reply, written by a person who has read your lane. If you would rather skip the form, write straight to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and put the origin and destination in the subject line.