Empty Miles Cost Calculator
Every kilometre run without freight burns fuel, wears tyres and earns nothing. This calculator sizes the deadhead across your fleet for a year, and shows what a realistic share of it would be worth if it carried a load instead.
Your numbers
Typical weekly kilometres run with freight aboard.
Deadhead legs: repositioning, returning to depot, running to the next pickup.
Only count vehicles that share this running pattern.
Unladen burn. It is lower than the laden figure — do not reuse it.
Tyres, servicing and distance-driven wear. Exclude fixed costs.
What a kilometre earns when it carries freight.
Be conservative. Geography and timing make most deadhead unfillable.
Result
Direct cost of empty running
173,272
Fuel and running cost of 299,520 unladen km per year across 12 vehicles.
- Empty running share
- 17.8 %
- Empty distance
- 299,520 km/year
- Fuel burned empty
- 125,349 per year
- Maintenance and tyres
- 47,923 per year
- Cost per empty kilometre
- 0.579
- Fillable empty distance
- 74,880 km/year
- Revenue forgone on fillable legs
- 101,088 per year
The formula
- Empty km per year = Empty distance per vehicle × Operating weeks × Vehicles
- Loaded km per year = Loaded distance per vehicle × Operating weeks × Vehicles
- Empty running share = (Empty km per year ÷ (Empty km per year + Loaded km per year)) × 100
- Fuel = (Empty km per year ÷ 100) × L/100km when empty × Fuel price
- Running cost = Empty km per year × Running cost per km
- Direct cost of empty running = Fuel + Running cost
- Cost per empty km = Direct cost of empty running ÷ Empty km per year
- Fillable km = Empty km per year × (Fillable share ÷ 100)
- Revenue forgone = Fillable km × Revenue per loaded km
Assumptions and limits
- Only direct running cost is counted. Depreciation and driver wages continue during a deadhead leg too, but they would be spent on that shift regardless, so loading them here would double-count against your fixed-cost model.
- Revenue forgone is not a saving and should never be added to the direct cost. It is the value of freight you did not carry, and it only becomes real if a paying load actually exists on that lane at that hour.
- The fillable share is the input the whole opportunity figure rests on, and it is a judgement. A fleet running a fixed radial pattern out of one depot has far less fillable deadhead than a network with two-way lanes.
- Empty running is not automatically waste. A vehicle returning to depot for a scheduled service, or repositioning overnight to make a morning slot, is doing something useful with no freight aboard.
- One consumption figure is applied to every empty kilometre. Real unladen burn varies with terrain, weather and how the driver treats a light vehicle.
- Zero empty running is not a target any fleet reaches. Treat the output as the size of the pool, not the size of the prize.
Deadhead is the only cost with no invoice and no customer
A loaded kilometre has someone paying for it. An empty one has the same fuel burn, the same tyre wear, the same hours off the driver's clock, and nobody on the other end of it. It is the purest form of cost in a fleet: entirely real, entirely unbilled.
Most operations know their empty running is there and could not tell you what it costs. It hides inside the total distance figure, which is why the first output of this tool is simply the share. Once you can say what proportion of the fleet's wheels turn for free, the number stops being background noise.
Not all empty kilometres are the same problem
Some deadhead is structural. If your freight moves out of a plant and there is nothing to bring back, no amount of clever planning changes the geography. That share belongs in your rates, not in an improvement plan, and pretending it is fixable just makes the planners look bad.
Some is scheduling. The truck ran forty kilometres past a collection that was booked for the following morning, because the two jobs sat in different planners' heads. That is the fillable portion, and it is usually smaller than a software demonstration suggests and larger than the planning team believes.
The rest is habit. Vehicles return to a depot they do not need to visit because that is where the day has always ended. This tends to be the easiest to remove and the hardest to raise, since it is nobody's error.
Why the forgone revenue figure sits apart from the cost
Two numbers come out of this calculator and they are not additive. The direct cost is money already spent — fuel that was burned, tread that was worn. The forgone revenue is a hypothetical, worth exactly as much as the loads that could actually have filled those legs.
Keep them apart when you present the case. Combining them produces a total that is easy to attack and impossible to defend, and the direct cost on its own is usually enough to make the point without inviting the argument.
Frequently asked questions
Distance a commercial vehicle covers with no revenue-earning freight aboard. Also called deadhead or unladen running. It includes repositioning to a pickup, the return leg after a delivery, and any movement between sites that no customer is paying for. It excludes distance driven under a load, even if the load is far below the vehicle's capacity.
There is no honest benchmark that applies across operations, and any single figure you are quoted is describing someone else's geography. A distribution fleet on a hub-and-spoke pattern will always run a materially higher share empty than a two-way trunking operation. Compare your own figure against your own history and against depots doing the same work.
Because a truck running empty burns less than the same truck running at capacity, and using the laden figure would overstate the cost of every deadhead kilometre. If you only have one consumption number, use it and know the result is on the high side. If you have telematics per trip, take the average of legs where the vehicle was empty.
No. It prices deadhead you already know about, and its output is only as good as the empty-kilometre figure you type in. Most fleets are guessing at that number, because distinguishing a loaded leg from an empty one after the fact needs the trip record and the load record joined together — which is a system problem, not a spreadsheet problem.
Trips & Operations knows which legs had a consignment attached and which did not, so the empty share is derived from trip data rather than estimated. Where payload sensing is fitted, laden and unladen legs are separated by weight rather than by paperwork, which catches the legs a dispatcher forgot to close.
Stop estimating. Measure it.
Empty Miles Cost Calculator gives you the arithmetic. Trip Management Software gives you the live numbers from your own fleet.