Updated October 2026
Every empty mile costs the same as a loaded one, and pays nothing.
ATRI’s 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking puts the stakes in plain numbers. The industry-average cost to operate a truck in 2025 was $2.336 per mile, the highest in the report’s history. The report calls deadhead mileage potentially the single biggest drain on operating costs, and puts non-tank deadhead at 16.5% of miles in 2025.
Run the math on a truck that drives 100,000 miles a year. At 16.5% deadhead, that’s 16,500 miles of cost with no revenue behind it, or roughly $38,500 per truck per year. Across a 100-truck fleet, cutting deadhead by a single percentage point is worth more than $230,000.
This guide covers what drives empty miles, how to measure yours, and seven ways technology helps carriers cut them.
What Are Empty Miles?
Empty miles, also called deadhead miles, are miles a truck drives without a revenue-generating load. They happen when a truck runs empty to its next pickup, returns home after a delivery, or repositions to a better freight market.
How to calculate your deadhead percentage:
Deadhead % = Empty miles ÷ Total miles × 100A truck that drives 2,000 total miles in a week, 300 of them empty, runs 15% deadhead. Track it by truck, driver, lane, and customer. A fleet-wide average can hide the specific lanes and accounts that drive most of your empty miles.
Why Empty Miles Happen
Some empty miles are unavoidable. Most come from a handful of predictable causes:
- Freight imbalance. Some markets ship far more freight than they receive, so trucks that deliver into them struggle to find outbound loads.
- One-load-at-a-time planning. When each load is matched on its own, a good decision for one truck can leave another truck badly positioned.
- Hours of service and home time. A driver who has to get home or reset hours can’t always take the best next load.
- Appointment timing. A great backhaul doesn’t help if the driver can’t make the pickup window.
- Customer and lane mix. Some accounts consistently pull trucks into places that are hard to leave.
- Slow load sourcing. By the time a truck is empty, the best nearby freight is already covered.
7 Ways Technology Helps Reduce Empty Miles
1. Plan the whole fleet, not one truck at a time
This is the biggest lever. Fleet optimization looks at every available load and every available driver together and recommends the combination that produces the most margin across the whole fleet, with deadhead built into every score. Instead of asking “what’s the best next load for this truck?”, it asks “what’s the best plan for every truck?”
Dispatchers review the recommendations, adjust them, and approve them. They stay in control, but they plan at a scale that isn’t realistic one load at a time.
2. Chain loads together
The best way to avoid an empty return is to plan the next load before the current one delivers. Load chaining links several loads in sequence so each pickup is close to the last drop. Look for a system that shows the deadhead between each leg, so you can see exactly where the empty miles are.
3. Find backhauls before the truck is empty
Backhaul tools search for return loads near a truck’s delivery point and along its route home. Searching while the truck is still loaded, not after it’s empty, gives you first pick of the freight.
4. Judge every load on true margin
A high-paying load 250 miles away isn’t always better than a lower-paying one around the corner. Load evaluation tools should factor in the empty miles to get there, so dispatchers compare loads on what they actually earn per mile driven, not just the posted rate.
5. Build hours of service and home time into the plan
Plans that ignore driver constraints break, and broken plans create empty miles. When hours of service, home time, and driver preferences are part of the plan from the start, trucks end up where they need to be without last-minute empty repositioning.
6. Use your data to fix lane imbalances
Some empty miles are a pricing or customer-mix problem, not a dispatch problem. Reporting tools that let you ask plain-English questions, like “Which lanes had the highest deadhead last quarter?”, show where to adjust rates, add customers, or walk away from freight that keeps stranding trucks.
7. Keep drivers and dispatch connected in real time
Plans change. When a load cancels or a pickup slips, a mobile app that pushes updates to drivers right away means the plan adjusts before the truck rolls the wrong direction.
The Payoff Goes Beyond Fuel
Cutting empty miles shows up across the business:
- More revenue per truck. Every mile you don’t drive empty is capacity you can sell.
- Better pay for drivers. For drivers paid by the loaded mile, empty miles are unpaid miles. Fewer of them means bigger paychecks and fewer reasons to leave.
- Less wear and tear. Fewer miles mean lower maintenance, tire, and fuel costs, the line items that rose fastest in ATRI’s latest report.
- Lower emissions. Shippers increasingly track carriers’ environmental performance, and empty miles are pure waste on that scorecard.
Empty Miles FAQs
ATRI reported a 16.5% industry average for non-tank carriers in 2025. A “good” number depends on your segment, lanes, and equipment. Regional, dedicated, and specialized fleets all run differently, so the most useful benchmark is your own trend over time.
The terms are generally used interchangeably. Both describe miles driven without a paying load.
Load boards help individual trucks find backhauls. For fleets, the bigger gains come from planning all trucks together, so a backhaul for one truck doesn’t create a bigger empty move for another.
AI can evaluate far more load and driver combinations than a person can in the time available, and recommend plans that minimize deadhead across the whole fleet. The best systems show the reasoning behind each recommendation so dispatchers can trust it and adjust it.
Run the Whole Fleet with PCS
PCS TMS with Cortex AI built in gives carriers fleet optimization inside the TMS, not bolted on through a separate tool.
- Dispatch powered by Cortex recommends driver and load assignments across your whole fleet, chaining loads and scoring deadhead on every leg. Dispatchers see why each recommendation was made, adjust it, and approve it.
- Backhaul Booster finds return loads to cut empty miles home.
- Load Opportunity Manager surfaces the most profitable freight for your available trucks.
- Dispatch Research answers questions like “Which lanes are driving our deadhead?” in plain English.
- PCS Mobile keeps drivers updated in real time when plans change.
Show its work. Tune it. Trust it on your terms. Request a demo to see fleet optimization on your own freight.
