Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO
A Bigger Share of a Load You Have to Find Yourself Is Not Automatically More Money.
Leasing onto a carrier trades revenue for simplicity. The carrier finds the freight, carries the authority, files the insurance, bills the customer and chases the payment. You drive.
Your own authority keeps more of every rate and hands you all of that work. Insurance runs $12,000 to $18,000 instead of $3,600 to $4,800. Compliance, billing and sales become your job. The question is not which pays more per mile. It is which pays more after everything you now have to do yourself.
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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 does each arrangement actually mean?
One is a business with a customer. The other is a business with customers.
Under a lease, you own the truck and operate under the carrier's authority. The carrier holds the operating authority, files the liability insurance, and takes responsibility for the freight. You are paid a percentage of the load or a rate per mile, and the carrier deducts what the agreement says it can deduct. You carry physical damage and non-trucking liability, which covers personal rather than business use, typically $300 to $400 a month.
Under your own authority, you are the carrier. You hold the MC number, you file the insurance, you find the freight, you invoice the customer, and you chase the money when it does not arrive. You also keep the entire rate.
The difference people focus on is the percentage. The difference that decides the outcome is the work.
Dr. Paul's Insight
Leasing on is a good place to learn. It is a poor place to stay.
Dr. Paul has found that leasing under a carrier works well for startup truckers and for truckers with subprime credit. It lets them get working and start drawing a paycheck while they repair the credit and learn the business from the inside. His own preference is to run under your own authority, because you choose your own loads and control where you go, when you go and how you run, and sometimes control is worth more than maxing out the revenue. That is a preference rather than a rule. Plenty of operators are better off leased on for the long term, and the later section on temperament says why.
The Money
What do you keep under each one?
Run the same truck, the same miles and the same freight through both structures and the gap narrows fast.
Start with what your own authority costs that a lease does not. Insurance is the big one, roughly $12,000 a year established against $3,600 to $4,800 for the physical damage and non-trucking liability an owner-operator carries under a lease. Add the authority and permits, about $2,600 a year in plates, UCR, HVUT, IFTA and compliance. Add a load board at $2,028. Add factoring at 2.8 percent, which is $6,720 on $240,000 of revenue, because now you are waiting on brokers rather than a carrier settlement.
That is roughly $20,000 a year of cost that a leased owner-operator does not carry. To break even on the switch, your own authority has to produce about $20,000 more gross revenue on the same truck, which on 80,000 loaded miles is 25 cents a mile.
That is achievable. Independents historically run well above leased rates on the same freight. But it is not free money, and it is not automatic in a soft market or in the first ninety days when brokers will not work with you yet.
Worked example: the 25 cent hurdle
The Operation
What work do you take on with your own authority?
Sales, billing, compliance and collections. None of it is billable, and all of it takes hours.
Sales. Finding freight is not searching a load board. It is building relationships with brokers who will call you, and eventually with shippers directly. That is a sales process, and owner-operators who treat it as a search stay on the board.
Billing and collections. Every load becomes an invoice, and every invoice becomes a receivable, and some of them go bad. Brokers pay in 30 to 45 days when they pay on time.
Compliance. Your own authority means the drug and alcohol program, the Clearinghouse queries, the annual DOT inspection, the biennial MCS-150 update, IFTA filings every quarter, UCR every year, and Form 2290 every year. Miss the MCS-150 and the USDOT number deactivates. Let the insurance filing lapse and the authority is revoked, and reinstatement is $80 plus the downtime.
The New Entrant Safety Audit. Within twelve months of starting, a safety investigator reviews your driver qualification file, maintenance records, insurance, drug and alcohol program and hours of service. It costs nothing. It costs a great deal if your records are not in order.
Dr. Paul's planning assumption is about ten hours a week of unbilled work, which is a part-time job the business is not paying anyone for. That is an estimate for the model rather than a measured industry average, so track your own for a month and use the real number.
Dr. Paul's Insight
Administrative hours are a real cost, even though nobody invoices you for them.
Dr. Paul puts a dollar figure on owner hours in every model he builds, because work that is not priced tends to be treated as free until the owner burns out. Ten hours a week of billing, compliance and load hunting is roughly 500 hours a year over a 50-week schedule. If the switch to your own authority nets an extra $20,000 and costs 500 unbilled hours, that is $40 an hour, and the owner should decide whether that trade is worth making rather than discovering it later.
Do This
Which arrangement fits where you are right now?
Three honest tests. Answer them before the paperwork, not after.
Credit. If your score puts you in the subprime tier, a lease lets you earn and repair at the same time. Financing a truck at 15 to 30 percent with 50 percent down and then adding new-authority insurance on top is how an owner starts underwater.
Cash. Your own authority needs about $52,000 to start on the illustrative numbers, and that figure already includes sixty days of operating capital. A lease needs a truck and far less cushion, because the carrier pays on a settlement schedule rather than in 45 days.
Temperament. Some owners want to drive. Some want to run a business that includes driving. Both are legitimate. The second one should have their own authority, and the first one is often happier and sometimes better off leased on.
There is no shame in either answer. There is real damage in picking the one that sounds better and discovering you wanted the other one after you signed a five-year note.
Do This
What Dr. Paul Would Do
Dr. Paul would run both structures through the same financial model with the same truck, the same miles and the same freight, and look at what the owner keeps after everything, not at the percentage split. The percentage is the number people argue about and it is almost never the number that decides the outcome.
He would price the owner's administrative hours as a real cost. If your own authority nets an extra $20,000 for 500 hours of unbilled work, that is a decision worth making deliberately.
He would check the credit tier honestly before anything else, because it changes the financing terms and the insurance premium at the same time, and both of those run for years.
And for owners whose goal is a company rather than a job, he would treat leasing on as a stage. Get working, draw a paycheck, fix the credit, learn how brokers and shippers actually behave, then go get your own authority with a cushion behind you and a plan in hand. Note that leasing on does not by itself repair credit or replace savings. It buys time to do both.
The trucking business plan template includes the financial model for running this comparison. For help building it with your own numbers, look at the consulting and business plan writing options.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The four questions Dr. Paul gets most on this one.
Should I hire a dispatcher or book my own loads?
What does running my own authority cost per year?
Can I go back to leasing on if it does not work?
Do I need my own insurance when I lease onto a carrier?
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.
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.
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.
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: FMCSA New Entrant Safety Assurance Program, 49 CFR Part 385 Subpart D. FMCSA reinstatement and MCS-150 requirements. Insurance, dispatcher and factoring ranges from commercial and broker-published sources, 2026. No primary source publishes premium data.