Deadhead is any mile the truck runs with an empty trailer — from a delivery to the next pickup, out to a better market, home for the weekend. Bobtailing (no trailer at all) gets its own name but the economics are the same: the wheels are turning and nobody is paying for it. Except you. You're paying for it.
What counts as deadhead
Any distance between where freight stopped paying and where it starts paying again: the run from receiver to the next shipper, the reposition into a stronger market, the bobtail to the yard, the trip to the shop. Different causes, same accounting — miles with cost and no revenue.
Most owner-operators can quote their loaded miles from memory. Ask about last month's empty miles and the answer is a shrug — which is exactly why deadhead does its damage quietly.
What an empty mile costs
Almost exactly what a loaded mile costs. The truck burns marginally less fuel empty, but the insurance, the truck payment, the tires, the maintenance clock — none of them know the trailer is empty. If your all-miles cost is $1.43 to operate (the worked example from the cost-per-mile guide), a 100-mile deadhead is roughly $143 spent, before your time is worth anything.
Stop thinking of deadhead as "no money coming in" and start thinking of it as "money going out at your cost per mile." A 150-mile reposition isn't free positioning — it's a ~$215 purchase. Sometimes it's a good purchase. But you should know the price tag before you buy.
What deadhead does to the posted rate
The rate on the load board is per loaded mile. Deadhead dilutes it — fast:
| 400 loaded miles at $2.50 | Empty miles | Real rate, all miles |
|---|---|---|
| No deadhead | 0 | $2.50 |
| 10% of total miles empty | ~45 | $2.25 |
| 15% empty | ~70 | $2.13 |
| 20% empty | 100 | $2.00 |
| 30% empty | ~170 | $1.75 |
Same freight, same broker, same $1,000 — and depending on where the truck was sitting, the real rate moved 75 cents. This is why two drivers can haul the identical load and one makes money while the other doesn't: the deadhead was the difference.
Price the empty miles into every offer
The free load profit calculator takes rate, loaded miles and deadhead and shows what the load clears over every mile. The required-rate calculator runs it the other way: your floor for the whole trip, empty miles included.
Open the load calculatorThe part people miss: IFTA taxes empty miles
Deadhead isn't just an economics problem — it's a recordkeeping obligation. Under IFTA, every mile the truck runs is a taxable mile, loaded or not. Empty miles, bobtail miles, the run to the shop: they all belong in your distance records by jurisdiction, and unrecorded miles are one of the most common findings in a fuel-tax audit.
There's a silver lining: if you're logging every mile for the profit math anyway, your IFTA distance records are already done. One habit, two jobs. The IFTA guide covers what auditors actually ask for.
What percentage is normal
Plenty of owner-operators run somewhere around 10–20% empty; AxleVault's calculators default to 15% as a working assumption. But the useful number isn't the industry's — it's yours, measured. Total empty miles ÷ total miles, over a month or a quarter.
- Track it. You can't shrink a number you're not measuring.
- Watch the trend, not the trip. One long reposition means nothing; a percentage creeping up over months means your lanes or your booking habits changed.
- Blame geography before discipline. Some markets simply deliver into places nothing ships out of. The fix is lane choice, not willpower.
When deadhead is worth it
Never take "minimize deadhead" to mean "never deadhead." Sometimes the 150-mile empty run into a hot market buys you a load that pays $400 more — that's a $215 purchase returning $400. The test is always the same arithmetic:
If repositioning clears that bar — including the day it burns against your profit target — it's a good buy. If it doesn't, the "better market" is a story, not a strategy.
And that test needs your real cost per mile to work. Two minutes with the free calculator gets you the number.
Deadhead, tracked without trying
AxleVault's ten-second daily mileage log splits loaded and empty miles, keeps your deadhead percentage honest, and counts every mile in your live cost per mile — the same records IFTA wants. Free for 14 days, no card required.
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