Deadhead Miles: Why Empty Miles Eat Your Profit (and How to Cut Them)
Empty miles cost the same fuel as loaded ones and pay nothing. How to measure your deadhead percentage and the habits that shrink it.
A deadhead mile costs you exactly as much as a loaded one — same fuel, same tire wear, same hours — and pays you nothing. If your cost per mile is $1.14, every 100 empty miles is $114 straight out of your pocket before the next load pays a cent.
Know your deadhead percentage
Deadhead % = empty miles ÷ total miles. Under 10% is strong; 15% is common; above 20% means your routing — not your rates — is the biggest leak in the business. You can't improve it if you don't track loaded and empty miles separately on every single load.
Habits that cut empty miles
- Book the next load before you deliver the current one — the worst deadhead decisions happen when you're already empty and burning hours.
- Price the deadhead into the rate: judge every offer against total miles (deadhead + loaded), not the loaded leg alone.
- Learn your dead zones. Certain markets pay well inbound and terribly outbound — a great rate into a bad market is often a bad round trip.
- Prefer triangles over out-and-backs: three decent legs that keep the trailer full usually beat one great leg with a long empty return.
- Review your own history monthly: which brokers, lanes and regions actually produced the empty miles?
Measure it, then manage it
Drivers who track deadhead on every load start seeing patterns in weeks: the same broker who shorts the reload, the same city that strands the truck. The fix isn't heroic negotiating — it's refusing round trips that were losers before you ever picked up.
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