Empty miles get treated as weather — something that happens to you, to be absorbed and complained about. They are not. Nearly every empty mile you run was committed one load earlier, at the moment you accepted a load that ended somewhere with nothing going out.
That is the useful reframing, because it moves the decision to a point where you still have options. Once you are sitting empty in a thin market, every remaining choice is bad.
Price the rate over total miles, not loaded miles
A rate quoted per loaded mile tells you what the broker is paying. It does not tell you what you are earning, because your costs run on every mile the truck turns.
Take the total revenue for the load and divide it by loaded miles plus the deadhead required to get to the pickup. That is the figure to compare against your cost per mile. A strong rate with a long empty approach and a weak rate with a live reload can easily land the wrong way round from how they look on the board.
Think in pairs, not loads
A load evaluated alone will always look better than it is. The question is not whether this rate is good, it is what the truck is likely to be worth the day after it delivers.
Before accepting, three questions cover most of it:
- What comes out of the delivery area, and how consistently? A market you can reliably reload from is worth accepting less to reach.
- How far is the nearest area that does reload well? That distance is the deadhead you are probably committing to, whether or not you count it now.
- What day of the week does it deliver? Delivering into a slow market on a Friday afternoon is a materially different decision than the same load on a Tuesday.
None of this requires a data subscription. Running the same lanes for a few months tells you which destinations reload and which strand you, and that knowledge is worth more than a market average because it is about the freight you actually haul.
When running empty is correct
Deadhead is not always a mistake. Repositioning empty into a stronger market is sometimes the highest-value use of the next four hours, and refusing on principle keeps trucks in thin markets taking bad rates.
The test is straightforward. Compare the cost of the empty miles against the difference in what the truck can earn once it arrives, over the next load or two. If repositioning costs you a hundred and fifty miles of running and moves you from a market where you are scraping to one where you are not, that is a good trade made deliberately.
The distinction that matters is deliberate versus accidental. Choosing to reposition is planning. Discovering you have to is the previous decision arriving late.
What to measure
- Deadhead as a percentage of total miles, monthly. One number, tracked over time, and the trend matters more than the value.
- Deadhead by delivery area. This is where the pattern lives — a handful of destinations usually account for most of the empty running.
- Revenue per total mile alongside revenue per loaded mile. The gap between them is what deadhead is costing you, stated in the only unit that matters.
Once you can name the three destinations that strand you, you can price them properly or stop going. Until then it stays weather.