Every mile counts in the transport industry, so finding the best routes for optimizing time and distance is essential. Understanding your trucking cost per mile helps you make informed pricing decisions to gain a cost-per-mile profit margin, determine your associated costs and expenses, find ways to save, and ultimately optimize operations in the long run

What is the cost-per-mile formula?

You can calculate a fleet's average cost per mile using an easy formula—divide your monthly expenses by the total miles driven.

For example, if your total monthly expenses were $7,000 in October, and you drove 11,000 miles across your truck fleet, your average cost per mile is approximately $0.64. Depending on other operational factors, the cost may vary per truck.

You can use a similar formula to calculate more specific averages, like the fuel cost per mile for individual semi trucks. You would divide the total fuel expense by the total number of miles a particular truck drove that month.

This trucking cost breakdown provides a starting point for what you can expect. Other considerations include determining and adding up your fixed and variable costs and compensated and uncompensated miles driven.

Using mileage and routing software provides a faster, more simplified way to get real-time, accurate data, including route information to optimize your cost per mile per truck.

4 Benefits of using our truck routing and mileage software

Whether you’re in the business of shipping goods or are a third-party logistics company, you should know your average trucking cost per mile in order to plan trips efficiently. Our software solution helps ensure safer routes while maintaining optimal mileage usage. Some benefits include: 

1.     Route optimization: Our software allows you to select tools and features that optimize specific routes. For example, you can set practical, quickest, and household goods routing configurations. You can also select items to avoid, such as tolls, tunnels, highways, and border crossings, and set a departure time to factor in variables such as historic traffic data. 

2.     Accurate vehicle configurations: You can adjust vehicle configurations, such as trailer length, height, width, weight, axles, and maximum speed, allowing you to  assess their impact on fuel efficiency and cost per mile.

3.     Set cost parameters: You can set fuel parameters, including fuel price, economy, and maintenance and labor costs. This allows you to see how much the trip will cost before it commences, including out-of-route mileage.

4.     Save favorite routes and templates and organize stops: Save routes and use route templates to avoid manually entering them every time. You can also apply the order optimization feature, which will keep the same origin and destination points, while organizing the rest of your stops in an efficient manner. It will also show how much you've saved in miles, days, tolls, and fuel costs.

Request a software demo and start saving on costs per mile

Integrate our MileMaker mileage and routing software to explore and compare your fuel and toll costs, routes, and other vital information that may impact your trucking cost per mile.

Request a demo today.

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