What does your truck actually cost per mile?
Most cost-per-mile calculators give you one number and leave you guessing which one it is. This gives you three, because they answer three different questions and confusing them is how owner-operators end up hauling at a loss while the spreadsheet says they're fine.
Nothing is stored and nothing is emailed. Type your numbers, get your figures, close the tab.
No signup. No email. Nothing saved.Fixed costs, per month
These bill whether the truck turns a wheel or not.
Variable costs
Charged on every mile you turn, loaded or empty.
Two more that move the answer
Skip these and you'll get a number that only works on paper.
The reference truck is a financed 2019 Cascadia running 2,125 miles a week — every input published at truerpm.app/method. ATRI's figure is a fleet-wide average including driver wages; verify the current release before quoting it.
Why three numbers instead of one
Ask ten owner-operators what their cost per mile is and you'll get answers a dollar apart — not because their trucks differ that much, but because they're answering different questions and nobody says which.
| Number | What it answers | When it misleads you |
|---|---|---|
| Operating CPM | What does the truck cost to run? | It leaves your pay out. A load that clears this number pays the truck and pays you nothing. |
| All-in CPM | What does the truck cost including my wage? | It spreads cost across empty miles too, so it always reads lower than what a paying mile has to carry. |
| Breakeven per loaded mile | What rate do I have to hold? | Nothing — this is the number to say out loud to a broker. It's also the one almost nobody calculates. |
The gap between the second and the third is deadhead. At 12% empty miles, a $2.05 all-in cost needs $2.33 per loaded mile before factoring. At 28% it needs $2.84. Same truck, same week of work, fifty-one cents of difference — and that difference is invisible if you only track one number.
How to calculate cost per mile, if you'd rather do it by hand
Pull your last three months. Every dollar, no exceptions — the ones people leave out are exactly the ones that sink the number.
- Add every fixed cost for the period. Truck and trailer payment, insurance, IRP plates, IFTA admin, HVUT, ELD and load board subscriptions, accounting, UCR, drug consortium, parking, phone.
- Add every variable cost. Fuel, DEF, maintenance, tires, washes. Tires and major repairs are lumpy, so set a per-mile reserve rather than using what you happened to spend.
- Add your own pay. If you skip this, your CPM is the cost of a truck with nobody driving it. That omission is the single most common reason a profitable-looking year ends with an empty account.
- Divide by total miles — deadhead included. Not loaded miles. Every mile burns fuel and wears tires whether or not a broker is paying for it.
Leave tolls out of CPM. Charge them per load instead. An I-95 run and a Kansas run are not the same trip, and folding tolls into a per-mile average makes both of them wrong.
Then, and only then, adjust for deadhead to get the rate a loaded mile has to hold. That's the arithmetic the calculator above is doing.
Questions people actually search
Is $2.50 a mile good?
It depends entirely on your cost and your deadhead, which is why the question can't be answered honestly without your numbers. Run the reference truck: $2.05 all-in, 12% deadhead, 2.5% factoring — breakeven is $2.39 per loaded mile. At $2.50 that truck clears about eleven cents a mile, roughly $200 on a 1,870-mile week. Real, but thin.
Push deadhead to 20% and breakeven climbs to $2.62. Now $2.50 is a losing load, at a rate most drivers would call decent. Nothing about the truck changed except the empty miles.
How much should an owner-operator make per mile?
Wrong unit. Per-mile pay says nothing about how long the load ties you up, and a week is made of days, not miles. Two loads at the same rate per mile are not the same load if one of them costs you an extra day sitting on a live unload.
Set a daily net target instead — what you need to clear after every expense including your own pay — then work backwards to the rate that gets you there on the specific load in front of you. That's what the load audit does.
Should my own pay be inside cost per mile or on top of it?
Either works as long as you're consistent and you know which one you're holding. Most online calculators leave your pay out, so their number looks lower and your profit is whatever's left above it.
TrueRPM puts it in, because a load that pays the truck and not the driver is not a load worth taking, and burying that in "profit" makes it too easy to accept. The calculator above shows both so you can compare against any other tool without getting confused about which number you're looking at.
What's the average cost per mile for an owner-operator?
There's an industry figure — ATRI publishes a fleet-wide operational cost per mile each year — but an average is close to useless for a single truck. A paid-off truck and a financed one differ by thirty cents before anything else is counted. Your insurance depends on your loss history and your state. Your MPG depends on your right foot and your terrain.
Use an average as a sanity check on your own arithmetic, not as an input. If your number comes out wildly below the average, you've probably forgotten a line item.
Does this calculator save what I type?
No. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored, and there's no account. Refresh the page and it's gone.
If you want the numbers to persist and follow you into load decisions, that's what the app is for — but you don't have to install anything to use this.
Who's behind this?
Haulmoore LLC, a one-person company in Newark, Delaware, built by a fully endorsed CDL-A holder with 18 years in freight operations. Worth knowing because most free cost-per-mile calculators are published by load boards, factoring companies, or dispatch services — outfits whose business improves when you haul more, not when you haul better.
TrueRPM has no load board, no factoring arm, and no data business. The only thing it sells is a $19.99 subscription to the app, and the calculator on this page works whether or not you ever buy it.
The full cost model, as a spreadsheet
Every line item above, plus deadhead sensitivity, hours-of-service capacity, and the load-selection rules — the same workbook the reference truck is built from. Formulas already in place, sources named.
Download the spreadsheetKit sends a confirmation email first — click the link in it and the download starts. You'll also get the note the day the iPhone version lands. Unsubscribe any time.
Once you know your number
A cost per mile is a fact about your truck. It isn't a decision. The decision is whether the load in front of you clears it after deadhead, tolls, and the days it eats — and that's arithmetic you don't want to be doing in your head with a broker on the line.
Run a load through the audit with the figure above, or get the app — five free load checks a day, no card.
Last reviewed August 2026. Diesel default is the EIA weekly national on-highway average for the week ending 3 August 2026 and will drift — override it with what you actually paid. Outputs are estimates based on the figures you enter and are not financial, tax, or business advice.