Trucking Profit: Per Truck and Per Route, Not Per Trip

Most haulage businesses count money per trip: the rate agreed with the customer, minus fuel, minus the driver. What is left feels like profit, and if it is positive the trip was worth taking.

It is the right instinct and the wrong arithmetic. Fuel and the driver are the costs that are easy to see because they are paid at the time. The costs that decide whether the company earns anything are the ones that keep running when the truck is parked.

The costs that do not stop

A truck costs money on the days it does not move. Leasing or the loan payment, insurance, road tax, the parking yard, the mechanic on retainer, the dispatcher's salary and the office — none of them pause between orders.

Then there is depreciation, which almost never appears in a trip calculation because nobody writes a cheque for it. A truck bought for 2,400,000 and sold five years later for 900,000 has consumed 1,500,000 — about 25,000 a month, every month, whether it drove or not. A company that does not put that number into its rates is slowly financing its own replacement fleet out of nothing.

Start with the cost of a truck-day

Add up everything a single truck costs per month regardless of mileage: lease, insurance, taxes, parking, depreciation, and its share of dispatch and office. Say 78,000 a month.

Then count the days that truck is actually available — subtract maintenance, repairs and the days it sits without a load. If it is genuinely working 18 days out of 30, the cost of a working truck-day is 78,000 ÷ 18 ≈ 4,330. Every trip has to cover that for the days it occupies, on top of fuel and the driver.

The number is uncomfortable, and that is its value: it turns «the truck was idle for four days» from an operational annoyance into 17,000 that some other trip has to earn.

Count the route, not the leg

A single loaded leg is not a route. The truck has to come back, and what it does on the way back decides whether the direction is worth serving.

Two directions. Route A: 600 km loaded at 26,000, return empty. Fuel both ways 9,800, driver 4,500, two truck-days 8,660. That leaves 26,000 − 9,800 − 4,500 − 8,660 = 3,040.

Route B: 420 km loaded at 17,500 with a return load at 11,000. Fuel 7,200, driver 4,500, two truck-days 8,660. That leaves 28,500 − 7,200 − 4,500 − 8,660 = 8,140.

The bigger, longer, better-paying contract earns less than a third of the modest one, because the return leg was empty. Rate per kilometre says A is the better job; profit per truck-day says the opposite.

Empty running is the real margin

Once routes are compared this way, the biggest lever in the business is rarely the rate — it is the share of kilometres driven empty. Cutting empty running from 40% to 25% usually does more for the year than a 5% rate increase, and it does not require a single difficult conversation with a customer.

It also changes which customers matter. A customer who pays slightly less but sits on a direction where you can always find a return load is worth more than a premium one-way client, even though the invoice says otherwise.

Look at each truck separately

Fleet averages hide the trucks that are losing money. An older vehicle with rising repair bills and lower availability can run all month and still return less than the cost of its truck-days, while a newer one carries the fleet.

Per-truck numbers answer questions that averages cannot: which vehicle to replace, which to sell, and whether the fifth truck is adding profit or just adding revenue. The same reasoning applies whenever capacity is the product — see profit per unit and utilisation in equipment rental.

Cash timing is a separate problem

Fuel and drivers are paid within days; customers often pay in 30 to 45. A profitable month can still leave the account empty, and in haulage the gap grows exactly when business is good, because more trips mean more fuel paid up front. That is a planning problem, not a pricing one — see the cash gap in transport.

Where to start

Take one truck and one month. Work out its cost per working day including depreciation. Then take its last ten routes and calculate what each left after fuel, driver and truck-days — counting the return leg. You will usually find one direction you have been serving out of habit that has not covered its own truck-days for a long time.

In Finmap you see income and costs by vehicle and by route, so the difference between a busy fleet and a profitable one becomes visible. Try it free for 7 days.