Deadhead Miles: How to Cut Empty Running

2026-07-24 · 6 min read

Deadhead — running empty — is the cost most small carriers accept as unavoidable. Some of it is. A lot of it is a booking decision made without the numbers in front of you.

Measure it first

Deadhead percentage is straightforward:

deadhead % = empty kilometres ÷ total kilometres × 100

Run it per truck, per month. Most carriers who have never measured it are surprised by the result, and the surprise is rarely in the good direction.

What counts as reasonable depends on what you haul. General dry van operations running balanced lanes should be able to keep it low. Specialised equipment serving thin markets will always run higher, because the freight simply is not there in both directions. The useful comparison is not against an industry figure — it is against your own number last quarter.

What deadhead actually costs

Empty kilometres burn fuel, consume tires and maintenance life, and use up driver hours that are legally capped. That last one is the part people miss: hours spent running empty are hours not available for revenue freight, and under hours-of- service rules that is a hard ceiling, not a soft one.

So the cost of a deadhead kilometre is not just its variable cost. It is the variable cost plus the margin you could not earn because the clock was running.

Bringing it down

Book the round trip, not the load. Before accepting outbound freight, know what the return looks like. If you cannot name a plausible reload within a day of delivery, the rate needs to cover the empty return or you should pass.

Learn which markets reload. Every region has a rhythm. Major hubs turn freight quickly; thinner and more seasonal markets do not. After a few months of running the same corridors you will know this better than any published index — provided you were writing it down.

Take a lower rate into a better market. This is the counterintuitive one. A load paying less into a busy hub frequently beats a higher-paying load into a dead one, once the empty return is priced in. Carriers who evaluate loads individually rather than as round trips get this wrong consistently.

Widen the pickup radius, carefully. Sometimes 150 empty kilometres to a much better load is correct. The test is whether the round trip clears your floor, not whether the deadhead feels long.

Talk to other carriers. Someone delivering into the market you are leaving has the mirror image of your problem. Carriers who share lane information fill each other's empty legs constantly.

Use a board for gaps only. This is what load boards genuinely do well — covering an empty leg you could not fill through relationships. Searching by origin near your delivery point, a day or two ahead, is the highest-value way to use one.

Watch for the trap

Cutting deadhead is not free. Waiting two days for a perfect reload to avoid 300 empty kilometres usually costs more than the deadhead would have. The truck sitting still earns nothing at all, and fixed costs accrue regardless.

The objective is the best revenue per available day, not the lowest deadhead percentage. A carrier optimising deadhead in isolation will start refusing profitable freight.

Getting the data

You cannot manage this without knowing empty versus loaded kilometres per trip, which means recording both — not just the loaded leg on the invoice. Carriers tracking dispatch in a management system get this as a by-product of normal load entry. On paper or in spreadsheets it takes deliberate effort, which is exactly why it usually does not happen.

Start anyway. Even a rough monthly deadhead percentage, tracked consistently, will change how you book freight within a quarter.