Trip Profitability Calculator
A rate that looks good on the phone can lose money by the time the truck is back. This calculator builds the trip from the bottom up — the empty leg to the pickup, the fuel actually burned, the days the asset is committed — and tells you what is left of the freight rate.
Your numbers
The agreed freight rate for this trip, excluding tax.
Distance run with freight on board.
Repositioning to the pickup and running back afterwards.
Average across the whole trip, loaded and empty combined.
Maintenance, tyres and consumables. Distance-driven wear only.
Trip rate, day rate or hours worked. Include allowances.
From dispatch to being free for the next job, including the return leg.
Depreciation, insurance, licensing and finance, divided by working days.
Result
Trip margin
181
Trip revenue minus total trip cost over 760 km, of which 140 km run empty.
- Margin on revenue
- 10.8 %
- Total trip cost
- 1,499
- Fuel
- 377
- Running cost
- 137
- Driver pay
- 260
- Fixed cost for the trip
- 640
- Tolls and permits
- 85
- Revenue per kilometre
- 2.211
- Cost per kilometre
- 1.972
The formula
- Total distance = Loaded distance + Empty distance
- Fuel = (Total distance ÷ 100) × L/100km × Fuel price
- Running cost = Total distance × Running cost per km
- Fixed cost = Fixed cost per day × Days committed
- Total trip cost = Fuel + Running cost + Driver pay + Fixed cost + Tolls
- Trip margin = Trip revenue − Total trip cost
- Margin on revenue = (Trip margin ÷ Trip revenue) × 100
- Revenue per km = Trip revenue ÷ Total distance
- Cost per km = Total trip cost ÷ Total distance
Assumptions and limits
- Fixed cost per day is an allocation, not a cash outflow. If the truck would have sat idle anyway, the honest question is whether the trip beats zero, not whether it beats the allocation.
- One consumption figure covers the loaded and empty legs. A tipper running back empty burns noticeably less than it did full, so a single average flatters the loaded leg and punishes the empty one.
- Waiting time at the dock is not modelled here. If the trip routinely sits three hours at delivery, that cost lands in the detention calculator, not this one.
- Damage, claims, reweighs and rejected pallets are excluded. They are rare per trip and expensive per year, which is exactly why they distort a single-trip model.
- Backhaul revenue is not included. If the return leg is sold, treat it as its own trip rather than netting it off here.
- Every currency field must use the same currency. The tool does no conversion.
The rate is not the margin
Freight is quoted per load and costed per kilometre, and the two rarely meet in the same conversation. A dispatcher hears a number, compares it against a rate they remember from last month, and says yes. Nothing in that exchange accounts for the eighty kilometres to reach the pickup, or the day and a half the trailer is unavailable for anything else.
Costing a trip properly means starting at the depot gate and finishing when the vehicle is free again. That is the window the asset is consumed for. Any model that starts at the loading bay is measuring the part of the job the customer sees, not the part you pay for.
What to put in the fixed cost per day field
Take everything that accrues whether the vehicle moves or not — depreciation, insurance, licensing, finance interest, the fixed share of your yard and admin — and divide it by the number of days that vehicle is realistically available in a year. Not 365. Working days, minus planned maintenance.
The number that comes out is usually higher than people expect, and that is the point. It is the reason a cheap trip is not free money. Every day the vehicle spends on a marginal load is a day it cannot spend on a better one.
There is one honest exception. When the alternative is genuinely an empty yard, the fixed cost is sunk and any trip covering fuel, wear and the driver adds something. Judgement lives here, not arithmetic. Run the tool with the fixed field at zero to see that version of the answer.
Reading margin per kilometre against margin per trip
Margin per trip tells you whether to accept the load. Margin per kilometre tells you whether the lane is worth keeping. A short urban delivery can show a strong margin per kilometre and a poor margin per trip because the day is gone regardless of the distance covered.
Long-haul does the reverse. The kilometre figure looks thin while the trip figure looks healthy, since fixed cost is spread across hundreds of kilometres instead of a handful. Compare lanes of similar shape, or the comparison is measuring geography rather than commercial performance.
Frequently asked questions
Subtract every cost the trip causes from the freight rate. That means fuel for the loaded and empty legs, distance-based wear, driver pay including allowances, tolls and permits, and a share of the fixed costs that accrue for as long as the vehicle is committed to the job. What remains is the margin. If you skip the empty leg or the fixed allocation, the answer will be optimistic by a wide margin.
Yes, if the empty running exists because of that trip. Repositioning eighty kilometres to reach a pickup is a cost the load caused, and pretending otherwise makes remote pickups look cheaper than they are. Empty running that happens for scheduling reasons unrelated to any single load is a fleet-level problem rather than a trip-level one.
Because payment covers cash costs and the model covers economic ones. Depreciation and finance do not appear on any invoice, but they accrue while the vehicle is on the job. A trip that pays for fuel and the driver but does not cover its share of ownership is consuming the asset faster than it is replacing it. That is a real loss even though the bank balance went up.
It can tell you the floor. Set the margin to zero and the total trip cost is the rate below which the load costs you money to carry. It cannot tell you the ceiling, because that is set by what the lane will bear and who else is bidding. The calculator handles the half of the question that is arithmetic.
Trips & Operations already holds the distance actually driven, the fuel actually consumed, the tolls recorded and the hours the vehicle was assigned. Rate and driver cost come from the trip record. The margin is computed per completed trip from what happened rather than from an estimate, which is the difference between costing a lane and remembering it.
Stop estimating. Measure it.
Trip Profitability Calculator gives you the arithmetic. Trip Management Software gives you the live numbers from your own fleet.