Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO
$240,000 In. $74,959 Left. Here Is Where the Rest Went.
Gross revenue is not income. On a truck grossing $240,000 a year, fuel alone takes $86,154 at current diesel prices. The payment takes $21,240. Insurance takes $12,000. By the time every bill is paid there is $74,959 left, and that is what the owner lives on.
Healthy deposits can hide weak cash flow. The cause may be low rates, too many empty miles, high operating costs, slow collections, or draws the business cannot support. Usually it is more than one, and usually nobody has added up what the truck actually costs to run.
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Last Updated: 9/9/2026 · Figures last verified 9/9/2026 · Reviewed by Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Start Here
What is the difference between gross revenue and take-home pay?
Gross revenue is what the load paid. Take-home is what is left after the truck, the fuel, the insurance and the government are done with it.
Most owner-operators track one number. It is the one on the rate confirmation, and it is the one they repeat at the truck stop. It is also the least useful number in the business.
One definition before the numbers. Every figure in this article is cash available to the owner before personal income taxes, after the equipment payment and after money set aside for maintenance. It is not accounting profit and it is not taxable net income. A loan payment is mostly principal repayment rather than a deductible expense, a transfer into a reserve is not a repair you have paid for, and an owner draw is not a deductible wage. Those distinctions belong to your accountant. This is a planning number for the question owners actually ask, which is what the truck leaves them to live on.
A settlement statement is not a profit and loss statement. What the broker or the carrier shows you is revenue minus their deductions. It may show deductions for insurance, equipment or advances, but it will not capture your own payment, your reserve, or the rebuild that is coming. It cannot tell you whether you made money. Only your own numbers can do that.
Here is the gap in plain terms. A truck grossing $240,000 a year sounds like a strong business. Run the costs and $165,041 of that never belonged to you. What is left is $74,959, before self-employment tax. That is a living. It is not $240,000, and the distance between those two numbers is where most of the frustration in this industry lives.
Worked example: where $240,000 goes
Dr. Paul's Insight
The settlement statement is not a P&L.
Dr. Paul sees this on nearly every trucking engagement. The owner brings a stack of settlement statements and calls it his books. It is not. It is a record of what someone else paid him minus what that someone else took out. It says nothing about his payment, his insurance, or the engine that is three years from a rebuild. A business that is measured by the customer's paperwork is a business that is not being measured.
The Money
Where does the gross revenue actually go?
Four line items take 84 percent of the operating cost. The remaining $25,600 still matters, but these four decide the year.
Fuel is the giant. At 6.5 miles per gallon and $5.60 a gallon, a truck running 100,000 miles burns $86,154 of diesel. That is 36 percent of gross revenue, and it is the reason 2026 is harder than 2025 was. The U.S. average on-highway diesel price sat at $5.599 the week of August 31, 2026. The 2025 annual average was $3.660. That is a 53 percent rise, and it is a weekly reading against a full-year average rather than a like-for-like comparison. Either way, every industry cost figure built on 2025 fuel understates what a truck burns today.
The truck payment is the next largest fixed number, and unlike fuel it does not care whether you drove. At $1,770 a month it is $21,240 a year whether the truck runs 100,000 miles or 60,000.
Insurance is third, at roughly $12,000 a year for an established authority in this illustration. Broker-published ranges put a new authority higher than an established one, commonly quoted as 25 to 40 percent, which is one of the reasons the first year is the hardest. Ranges overlap heavily, so get your own quotes rather than planning off a rule of thumb.
Maintenance is fourth, and it is the one owners skip. Twenty cents a mile is $20,000 a year. Most owners do not set that aside. They spend it, and then a repair bill arrives that they cannot cover, and the truck sits.
Then there are the percentage costs that come off the top before any of this. Factoring runs 2.5 to 3.5 percent for a small operator. A dispatcher takes 5 to 10 percent. Stack those and roughly a tenth of gross revenue is gone before the first gallon of diesel is bought.
Dr. Paul's Insight
Older trucks are the quiet reason for a lot of this.
Dr. Paul finds that when an owner-operator is making money and still broke, higher-than-normal maintenance cost is one of the first places to look, and it usually traces to an older truck. Repair and maintenance costs across the industry rose 8.6 percent in a single year and are up 45 percent since 2019. On an older rig the owner is paying that increase on more repairs, more often, while also losing the days the truck is not moving.
The Operation
Which costs are you forgetting to count?
The forgotten costs are the ones that do not arrive as a bill every month.
Your own pay. This is the big one. An owner-operator who treats his pay as the leftovers has built a business that cannot fail, because there is no line it can fall below. That sounds like safety. It is the opposite. It means the business can run at a loss for years and nobody notices, because the owner absorbs it by living on less.
Empty miles. You pay for fuel on every mile. You get paid on the loaded ones. At 20 percent empty, a truck driving 100,000 miles only earns on 80,000 of them. Go from 20 percent to 25 percent and the owner loses $15,000 of gross revenue, about $14,580 in cash once the smaller factoring fee is netted off, without a single rate changing.
Downtime. Fixed costs do not pause. The payment, the insurance and the plates all continue through home time, breakdowns and slow weeks. Every idle week raises the cost of the miles you do run.
Self-employment tax. On $74,959 of net income the self-employment tax is $10,591. A company driver splits that with an employer. An owner-operator pays both halves.
Undercutting. Taking a load that covers fuel and feels like money is the most expensive habit in this industry. Fuel is 36 percent of revenue on this truck. A load that covers fuel is covering roughly a third of what it needs to cover.
Dr. Paul's Insight
Owner pay is a cost line, not the remainder.
Dr. Paul puts owner compensation into the model as an expense, the same as the truck payment, before anyone looks at whether the business is profitable. A business that cannot pay its driver is not a profitable business, and in a one-truck operation the owner is the driver. Doing it the other way around, taking whatever survives, is how an owner works eleven years and finds out at the end that the truck was the only thing earning.
Do This
How do you start paying yourself before the leftovers?
Four steps, in this order. None of them requires a new truck or a better market.
One. Calculate your real cost per mile, using your numbers and every mile you drive, not just the paid ones. Until that number exists, no rate decision you make is informed. Most owners come out 20 to 30 cents low on their first attempt because they leave out their own pay.
Two. Set a target pay for yourself and put it in the model as a cost. Pick a number you can live on. It becomes the floor the business has to clear, not the scrap it leaves behind.
Three. Move the maintenance reserve out of the operating account the day each settlement lands. Separate account, automatic transfer, 20 cents for every mile you drove. A reserve you can see is a reserve you will spend.
Four. Set a minimum rate and hold it. Once you know the truck costs $2.06 per loaded mile to run before you are paid, a $1.90 load is not a slow week. It is a loss you drove 600 miles to take.
None of this is complicated. It is arithmetic. What makes it hard is that the answer is often uncomfortable, and it is easier to keep looking at the gross.
Do This
What Dr. Paul Would Do
Dr. Paul would build the cost per mile first, from the owner's own fuel receipts, settlement statements and repair invoices, not from an industry average. Then he would put owner pay in as a line item and see what the business looks like with a real driver cost in it. Most of the time the picture changes immediately, and the owner stops arguing about whether the rate is fair and starts deciding which loads he can afford to take.
Next he would look at routing and consistency. He has found that truckers running dedicated routes hold their profits steadily even though the revenue is typically lower, because the miles are predictable, the deadhead is lower, and the fuel stops are known. Chasing the highest rate on a board and running 30 percent empty to get to it is often worse business than a quieter lane that never leaves you hunting.
Then the reserve. Twenty cents a mile, moved on settlement day, no exceptions. And finally the loads themselves. Any load that does not clear the cost per mile plus the owner's pay is a load the business is subsidizing, and no volume of them adds up to a profit.
To build the model, the trucking business plan template includes the Excel financial model this calculation lives in. To have it built with you and reviewed, look at the consulting and business plan writing options.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The four questions Dr. Paul gets most on this one.
Why is my truck insurance so expensive?
Is freight factoring worth the fee?
How do I get paid for detention and loading delays?
Should I be paying myself a set salary?
Next Step
Put the Whole Truck in One Forecast
Every figure on this page came out of one financial model: the miles, the empty miles, the fuel price, the payment, the reserve and the rate, all in the same place, with the owner's own pay in as a cost line. Change one input and the projections move with it. That is the difference between a number you can defend to a lender and a number you remembered.
Everything on this page sits inside a larger system. Start at owner-operator trucking for the wider planning framework.
How to Write a Trucking Company Business Plan in Ten Steps
Ten steps, plus a complete sample trucking company business plan you can work from.
Trucking Business Plan Template
The Word plan and the Excel financial model built for a trucking company. Change the miles, the rate and the fuel price and the projections move with them.
Consulting and Business Plan Writing
Dr. Paul builds the model with you, in your numbers, and tells you what it says. Fifty states and Canada.
Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO | 14+ Years | 1,000+ Clients Served
Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA, business consultant and fractional CFO, is dedicated to making owners stronger, sharper, and more effective. He is the founder of Quality Business Plan, creator of Dr. Paul's Organize-Plan-Grow™ Strategy, author of numerous published books on Amazon including How to Write a Trucking Company Business Plan in Ten Steps, and publisher of over 1,000 business-focused videos on YouTube. For over 14 years, he has helped trucking and small business owners turn a busy operation into a profitable one.
About the Numbers on This Page
The dollar figures on this page are illustrations of a calculation, not projections for any business, and they show cash available to the owner before personal income taxes rather than accounting profit. Insurance, repair, tire, dispatcher and factoring figures are industry averages from published data, not quotes. Every number here is an estimate, so get your own quotes and run your own figures before you decide anything.
Sources: ATRI Operational Costs of Trucking, 2026 Update. EIA Weekly Retail On-Highway Diesel Prices, week of 8/31/2026. ATBS owner-operator data, 2025. DOT Office of Inspector General report ST2018019.