Truckers are paying a record $2.336 per mile—and earning just a penny of profit. But the real story isn’t the sky-high costs; it’s the hidden savings waiting to be unlocked. From empty miles to wasteful dock time, simple technology solutions are emerging that can cut costs, boost efficiency, and turn those pennies into dollars. The tools are here, and the decision is yours: keep bleeding, or start saving.
ATRI’s 2026 Operational Costs of Trucking study is out, and every operator should sit with one number. In 2025, the average marginal cost of running a truck hit $2.336 a mile. That is a record, and it happened in a year when fuel stayed flat and freight stayed soft. Strip fuel out and costs rose 4.2%, a point and a half above inflation, and faster than they rose the year before.
Now hold that against what carriers earned. The average truckload operating margin in 2025 was 0.4%. Run the arithmetic on freight in the $2.30s, and that is about a penny a mile. Flatbed averaged a loss. Refrigerated kept 0.6%. Outside of LTL, the industry hauled a record-cost mile and kept pennies for the trouble.
And the report’s forward view says the squeeze is still tightening. In the first quarter of 2026, insurance premiums rose another 6.4%, the fastest of any line item, which is exactly the post-Montgomery repricing we wrote about. Fuel jumped 5.9% as this year’s volatility arrived. The study’s data ends right where the hard part of 2026 begins.
Where the Dollar Actually Goes
ATRI breaks the $2.336 into its parts, and the shape of it tells you where to look. The driver is the biggest line: 81.8 cents a mile in wages and another 21 cents in benefits, about 44 cents of every cost dollar, and wages have climbed every year for a decade. Fuel is 48.2 cents. Truck and trailer payments hit a record 40.4 cents. Repair and maintenance rose 8.6% to 21.5 cents, tolls jumped 13.2%, and insurance premiums reached 10.6 cents a mile before this year’s increases even started.
There’s a cycle in those numbers. Fleets deferred new equipment to save cash, so the average truck got older, broke down more often, and maintenance climbed. ATRI says fleets also ran with fewer miles between breakdowns, higher driver turnover, and thinner non-driver staff. Austerity bought survival in 2025, and it added costs of its own along the way.
Capacity paid the bill too. Carriers cut effective capacity 5.5% last year, the deepest cut of the whole freight recession, by shrinking fleets and leaving 10% of their remaining trucks without a driver in the seat. That contraction is a big part of why the market tightened this year, the story we told in the midyear review.
The Costs You Can’t Vote On
Be honest about the list. A carrier does not set driver market wages, the price of a Class 8 truck, the insurance market, or the pump. Those lines move on forces outside the fence, and most of them move one direction. That is roughly three-quarters of the cost dollar where your only play is to buy smart and use well what you already pay for.
Which is exactly why the rest of the report matters more than the headline. Past the price of the mile, ATRI shows where miles and hours produce no revenue at all. That is the money an operator can actually go get.
The Money Sitting in the Report
Start with empty miles. Deadhead ran 16.5% in 2025. One mile in six burned fuel, driver hours, and equipment life and earned nothing. ATRI calls deadhead one of the greatest drains on cost and operations, and it is also the most fixable line in the study. Matching the right load to the right truck, against hours of service, home time, driver operating market area, and where the next load and availability actually are, is the whole job of the load match optimizer EKA is entering customer pilots in early August. It works like a dispatch assistant: the plan is built overnight, your planner approves and adjusts it, and the empty mile percentage starts coming down. Also, EKA is introducing AI-driven Market Velocity and Automated Asset Match in Q4, with loads available from load-board decision support tools that will automate workflow processes, reduce deadhead, and improve profit contribution per mile.
Then there is EKA On-Time™ AI that does not treat on-time load pickup and delivery service management as a feature but as a foundation. Visibility tools show you where trucks are, but they do not help you pickup or deliver on time. You’re left babysitting dashboards, reacting to delays too late, and managing commitments manually. And operational costs that balloon as you throw more people at the problem. Higher on-time rates protect revenue, lower operational costs, and preserve margin. You don’t build this by hiring more people to watch dashboards; you build software with intelligent automation, and let EKA Omni-TMS™ do the rest.
Then the dock and detention delays. Your driver just texted: “Hour 4 at dock, still no bay assignment”. Nearly 40% of the stops blow past the two-hour “free“ window. About 5% stretch past 4 hours. That is $15+ billion in lost productivity and $3.6 billion in detention fees that shippers simply won’t pay.
EKA DockTime AI™ eliminates the guesswork and automates the entire detention management process: from tracking arrival, free and detention times to billing shippers and paying drivers. The result is that your employees deal with exceptions only and capture work cost recovery plus.
Fuel is its own case, because 2025 was the calm before the pump got loud. The study logged fuel nearly flat for the year, then up 5.9% in the first quarter of 2026. You cannot vote on the price, but you can control the buying: which stops, how many gallons, tax by state, all of it computable per trip. That is the fuel optimizer, arriving alongside the load match optimizer, priced for fleets that could never afford this solution before. Typical fleets can accrue 3%-6% fuel cost savings.
And the back office. ATRI found fleets cut non-driver staff in 2025, which meant fewer employees to handle paperwork. Load auto-processing automates reading PDFs and spreadsheets, reducing order delays, cycle times, and errors. EKA Documents AI™ handles delivery documents automatically, so staff only manage exceptions. This boosts productivity by over 80% and speeds up billing to two days or less, improving cash flow.
EKA Control Center AI™ goes beyond a typical dashboard; it’s your central hub for monitoring key business activities across Operations, Administration, and Accounting. It adapts to changing conditions and keeps important alerts visible in one place, helping you prioritize resources and streamline workflows. This enables proactive management, boosts employee productivity, and lowers operational, accounting, and administration costs.
One More Number for the Brokers
If you broker freight, this study is your buy rate. A carrier hauling at $2.336 with a penny of margin has no room to eat your rate pressure, and the ones that survive will pick the brokers who pay fairly, pay fast, and hand them freight that keeps their trucks loaded. Density and a healthy carrier base stopped being nice-to-haves this year. We covered that side in network drift.
The Bottom Line
The ATRI study reads grim, but it doubles as a map. The record $2.336 is mostly costs you cannot vote on. The penny of margin is what’s left after paying them. But the same pages show one mile in six running empty, nearly two hours parked at every dock, a fuel buy almost nobody plans, and a back office drowning in documents. That is where the recoverable money is, and going after it takes tools that see the whole operation on one platform instead of a dozen screens, the case we made in the relay piece. The market sets your costs. Utilization decides your margin. EKA Omni-TMS™ continues to help businesses reduce costs and thrive by embedding affordable automation and real-time quality management directly in the platform. Talk to EKA “pronto” about getting started on reducing your operations and non-operations costs.