What it costs to run a truck in 2026
The industry’s own numbers, line by line, and a calculator to put yours beside them.
Figures from the 2026 update, published July 15, 2026, for 2025.
The most it has ever cost to run a truck a mile. Without fuel, $1.854.
An hour, all in: $106.69.
Line by line
Where the $2.336 a mile went, for the fleets ATRI surveyed. The nine lines add to the total.
| Line | Cost a mile |
|---|---|
| Fuel | |
| Truck and trailer payments | |
| Repair and maintenance | |
| Insurance premiums | |
| Permits and licenses | |
| Tires | |
| Tolls | |
| Driver wages | |
| Driver benefits | |
| All in | $2.336 a mile |
The report is free from ATRI; earlier years are on ATRI’s Operational Costs of Trucking page.
Your own cost a mile
Type a year of your costs and the miles you ran. Leave out what you don’t know — each line is held against the same line of the industry’s, and the total only counts the lines you typed. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Every gallon, the carrier’s card included.
The note, a lease, or rent on the truck.
Shop bills, parts, oil changes.
Liability, cargo, physical damage, occupational accident.
Plates, IRP, the 2290, permits.
Tires and mounting.
Tolls and scales.
Your driver’s pay, or what you pay yourself.
Health cover, retirement. Often none for an owner-operator.
Loaded and empty — every mile the truck turned.
Type the miles, and your costs a mile show here and on the chart above.
ATRI surveys fleets, most of them with hired drivers and their own trailers. An owner-operator leased on often pulls the carrier’s trailer and pays no benefits, so some of your lines should read lower for a real reason.
Driver pay a mile
The biggest line. It cost $1.028 a mile to employ a driver in 2025: 81.8¢ in wages and 21¢ in benefits.
If you drive your own truck, that dollar a mile is yours: it is the part of the rate that pays you. A load that only covers the other lines is a load you drove for nothing.
What an owner-operator is paid
In 2025, carriers paid a contracted owner-operator $2.08 a mile on average — the same as in 2022 — while a mile cost truckload fleets $2.21 to run.
ATRI sets the two side by side each year. The rate ran over the cost in 2020 and 2021, and has run under it every year since.
| Year | Paid and cost a mile |
|---|---|
| 2019 19¢ short | |
| 2020 9¢ over | |
| 2021 7¢ over | |
| 2022 7¢ short | |
| 2023 1¢ short | |
| 2024 4¢ short | |
| 2025 13¢ short |
The cost is a fleet’s, its hired driver in it; the rate is what the carrier hands the owner-operator, who runs the truck out of it. A mile paid under what a mile costs is a mile the truck has to make up somewhere else.
By region
What a mile cost to run, all in, by where the miles were driven.
| Region | Cost a mile |
|---|---|
| Northeast | |
| West | |
| Southeast | |
| Midwest | |
| South Central |
The Northeast costs most: the country’s highest driver wages, insurance and tolls.
Detention: the hours nobody pays for
A truck waiting at a dock burns no fuel and wears no tires, but the payments, the insurance and the driver’s pay keep running. Take those lines from ATRI’s cost an hour and you have what an hour standing still costs:
Left out, since they come with the miles: fuel $22.01, repair and maintenance $9.82, tires $2.28, tolls $1.96.
The lines are ATRI’s; the sum is LoadTally’s. ATRI, 2026.
So detention that pays less than $70.61 an hour pays the truck to wait at a loss.
- A driver spent 1 hour 49 minutes at each stop in 2025 on average — 11 minutes short of the two hours where detention usually starts. ATRI, 2026
- After what detention pay they got, drivers lost $962 each to detention in 2025, and truckload carriers $5,392 a truck — ATRI’s 2024 detention study, brought up to 2025 for inflation and the longer waits. ATRI, 2026
- Drivers were held past the free time at 39.3% of stops in 2023. ATRI, 2024
- 94.5% of fleets charge for detention, and fewer than half of those invoices get paid. ATRI, 2024
Using these numbers
LoadTally grades every load against them. The rate a loaded mile is held against what a mile cost the sector to run, fuel in, since the rate is all-in too: $2.21 for a dry van (truckload fleets) and $2.39 for a flatbed (specialized fleets). A reefer gets the van floor and 40¢ more — that 40¢ is LoadTally’s, not ATRI’s. Detention on a rate con is held against $70.61, the hour standing still. Each finding that leans on one says so, with its source beside it. How it works is in rate con review.
LoadTally keeps your own cost a mile from the settlements and the receipts, and sets it beside these every month. $20 a month per driver, first 30 days free.
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