Owner-operator cost per mile: the real numbers

Start with the industry yardstick. ATRI's 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking measured an average marginal cost of $2.336 per mile in 2025, the highest figure in the report's history and up 3.4 percent from the year before. That is what it cost an average fleet to move a truck one mile, before any profit.

The average is a useful sanity check and a poor personal target. Your cost per mile rides on your truck payment, your insurance quote, and how many miles you actually run in a year. This guide breaks down where the money goes and builds a realistic owner-operator number line by line.

What the 2026 ATRI data shows

ATRI's number splits into fuel and everything else. Excluding fuel, 2025 costs came to $1.854 per mile, up 4.2 percent — meaning almost 80 percent of the cost of a mile has nothing to do with the price of diesel.

Costs rose in every major line item ATRI tracks. The steepest 2025 increases were tolls at 13.2 percent, repair and maintenance at 8.6 percent, driver benefits at 6.6 percent, and tires at 6.4 percent. A cost sheet built two years ago is quietly out of date.

Fixed costs: the bills that never pause

Fixed costs land on the calendar, not the odometer. The truck payment, liability and physical damage insurance, plates, permits, ELD service, and monthly parking all clear on schedule, even during a week spent waiting on a reload.

Put real numbers on it. A $2,600 truck payment, $1,200 a month in insurance, and $350 for plates, permits, ELD, and parking comes to $4,150 a month, or $49,800 a year. Run 105,000 miles in that year and fixed cost alone is about $0.47 per mile.

Variable costs: what every mile burns

Fuel is the biggest variable line. EIA's weekly survey put the national average for on-highway diesel near $4.80 a gallon as of mid-July 2026. At 6.8 MPG, that is roughly $0.71 for every mile — loaded, empty, or deadheading to the next pickup.

Maintenance and tires are per-mile costs even in months when nothing breaks. A steer tire wears the same on cheap freight as on good freight. Set a reserve from your own last 12 months of receipts, and remember ATRI's finding that repair and maintenance rose 8.6 percent in 2025: last year's reserve is probably light.

Your own pay belongs in the stack too. If you only pay yourself from leftovers, a load that covers the truck but not the driver still looks profitable on paper.

Why the fleet average is not your number

Fixed cost per mile moves with your annual miles, which is why two trucks with identical bills can have very different break-evens. Spread that same $49,800 over 85,000 miles and fixed cost jumps to $0.59 per mile; over 115,000 miles it falls to $0.43. A slow quarter raises your real cost per mile even though no bill changed.

ATRI's average also blends large fleets that buy fuel and tires at volume discounts an owner-operator never sees, plus drop-and-hook networks that keep deadhead low. Some of your line items will beat the average and some will not. The only way to know is to compute your own.

Build your number, then test every load against it

LoadMerit's free cost-per-mile tool walks this same math: enter your fixed bills, monthly miles, MPG, and reserves, and it returns your all-in figure. The true cost per mile guide covers the method in more depth, including how to handle deadhead miles.

Once the number exists, every rate con gets a fast test: total miles including deadhead, times your cost per mile, is the floor. A load priced under that floor pays you to lose money, no matter how good the rate per mile sounds. From there, your minimum acceptable rate adds a profit target on top of the floor.

Recheck the inputs on a schedule. Fuel moves weekly, insurance renews yearly, and ATRI's data shows the non-fuel lines climbing every year. A cost figure is only as good as its most recent update.