Every mile your truck runs empty is a mile that costs money without earning any. These deadhead miles silently drain profits from carriers who do not track or actively manage them. For most fleets, empty miles represent one of the largest controllable expenses in their operation.

Understanding what causes deadhead and how to reduce it separates carriers who struggle from those who scale profitably.

What Are Deadhead Miles?

Deadhead miles are the distance a truck travels without cargo. This includes driving to pick up a load, repositioning after delivery, and returning home at the end of a trip. The truck burns fuel, accumulates wear, and requires a driver, but generates zero revenue.

Common deadhead scenarios include:

• Driving 150 miles to reach a shipper for pickup

• Repositioning 200 miles after delivering to a remote location

• Running empty back to your home terminal

• Moving to a different market for better freight opportunities

Some deadhead is unavoidable. The goal is not zero empty miles but minimizing them while maintaining profitable load selection.

The True Cost of Empty Miles

Deadhead costs more than just fuel. Every empty mile carries the full weight of your cost per mile with none of the revenue to offset it.

Here is what you pay for on every deadhead mile:

• Fuel (typically $0.40 - $0.70 per mile)

• Driver wages (still on the clock)

• Equipment depreciation and wear

• Insurance exposure

• Opportunity cost of not hauling freight

A carrier running 15% deadhead on 100,000 monthly miles wastes 15,000 miles. At $1.80 CPM, that equals $27,000 in monthly costs generating nothing. Over a year, empty miles can easily exceed $300,000 in pure loss for a mid-sized fleet.

What is a Good Deadhead Percentage?

Industry benchmarks vary by operation type, but these ranges provide useful targets:

Calculate your deadhead percentage with this formula:

Deadhead % = (Empty Miles ÷ Total Miles) × 100

If your trucks ran 50,000 total miles last month with 8,000 empty miles, your deadhead percentage is 16%. Knowing this number is the first step toward improving it.

Why Deadhead Happens

Empty miles come from multiple sources. Understanding the root causes helps you address the right problems:

Operational causes:

• Accepting loads without considering repositioning needs

• Delivering to areas with limited outbound freight

• Poor communication between dispatch and drivers

• Lack of visibility into available backhauls

Market causes:

• Freight imbalances between regions

• Seasonal demand fluctuations

• Limited shipper relationships in certain areas

• Rate pressure forcing acceptance of one-way loads

Some causes are within your control. Others require strategic adjustments to how you select freight and plan routes.

Seven Strategies to Reduce Deadhead Miles

1. Evaluate Loads as Round Trips

Stop looking at loads in isolation. Before accepting any freight, consider what happens after delivery. A high-paying load that strands your truck 300 miles from available freight may cost more than it earns.

2. Build Consistent Lanes

Develop relationships with shippers on complementary routes. If you regularly haul from Dallas to Atlanta, find shippers who need freight moved from Atlanta back toward Texas. Consistent lanes reduce the scramble for backhauls.

3. Search Multiple Load Boards Simultaneously

Checking one load board at a time wastes hours and misses opportunities. Tools that aggregate results from DAT, Truckstop, 123LoadBoard, and other sources surface backhauls faster. The AI Dispatcher approach searches multiple boards in seconds instead of hours.

4. Plan Delivery Timing Strategically

Delivering Friday afternoon in a market that dies over the weekend guarantees deadhead. When possible, time deliveries to maximize outbound options. Early morning arrivals often leave more time to secure next loads.

5. Know Your Profitable Markets

Track which delivery destinations consistently offer strong outbound freight and which ones trap your trucks. Monitoring the right metrics reveals patterns that inform better load acceptance decisions.

6. Use Real-Time Visibility

Dispatch needs to know exactly where trucks are and when they will be available. ELD and telematics integrations provide this visibility, allowing dispatchers to book backhauls before drivers even complete current deliveries.

7. Empower Drivers with Information

Drivers sitting at delivery docks often spot opportunities. Give them access to load information through mobile apps so they can flag potential backhauls or communicate availability instantly.

How Deadhead Impacts Your Revenue Per Mile

Empty miles destroy your effective revenue per mile even when individual load rates look strong.

Consider this example:

The same $3,000 load drops from $2.73 to $2.14 per mile depending on deadhead. That difference can mean the gap between profit and loss when measured against your cost per mile.

Why Spreadsheets Cannot Solve This Problem

Reducing deadhead requires real-time decisions. By the time you calculate last week's empty mile percentage in a spreadsheet, you have already made dozens of load decisions without that insight.

Carriers who successfully cut empty miles use systems that:

• Track deadhead percentage by truck, driver, and lane automatically

• Score loads based on total trip profitability including repositioning

• Search multiple load boards simultaneously for backhauls

• Alert dispatchers to trucks nearing delivery with no next load booked

Fleets like Ray Cargo scaled from 50 to 350+ trucks by building exactly this kind of operational discipline into their daily workflow.

Turn Empty Miles Into Loaded Profit

Deadhead will never reach zero. But the difference between 20% empty miles and 12% empty miles is often the difference between a carrier that struggles and one that thrives. Every percentage point you cut adds directly to your bottom line.

Datatruck is the carrier-first TMS built to minimize empty miles and maximize load profitability. Our AI-native platform searches multiple load boards in seconds, scores opportunities based on total trip economics, and gives dispatchers the visibility they need to keep trucks loaded.

Book a free demo and see how much your empty miles are really costing you.