Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO
20 Cents a Mile. $385 a Week. And Still Not Enough for a Bad Engine.
Fund the reserve per mile and move it out of the operating account the day each settlement lands. On a truck running 100,000 miles a year, 20 cents a mile is $20,000, or $385 a week. Tires are funded separately at 4 cents a mile.
Then understand what it does and does not do. A contribution of $20,000 a year is not a $20,000 balance sitting there. An in-frame engine overhaul runs $15,000 to $25,000 and an out-of-frame runs $25,000 to $40,000, so depending on the balance and what else has broken, the reserve may or may not reach it. The reserve is not the emergency fund, and an owner who has only one of them has neither.
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Last Updated: 9/9/2026 · Figures last verified 9/9/2026 · Reviewed by Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Start Here
Why a per-mile reserve beats a monthly guess.
Most wear tracks miles, so funding by the mile keeps the set-aside proportional to what you did to the truck.
A flat monthly number drifts out of step with the work. In a heavy month you under-fund a truck that just aged faster than usual. In a slow month you over-fund out of an account that cannot spare it. A fixed monthly figure is not wrong if it comes from a realistic annual maintenance plan, but per-mile funding tracks reality with less thought.
Miles are not the only thing that wears a truck. Calendar time, engine hours, idling, duty cycle and the manufacturer's service intervals all matter, and a truck that sits still still ages. Use miles as the funding mechanism and the service schedule as the sanity check.
Per-mile funding tracks the actual wear. Drive 9,000 miles this month and $1,800 goes across. Drive 5,000 and $1,000 does. The reserve stays proportional to what you did to the truck.
It also makes the number visible in the place where it matters. If the reserve is 20 cents a mile, then 20 cents a mile is part of your cost, and any rate you evaluate has to carry it. Owners who fund maintenance out of whatever is left at the end of the month are the same owners who discover in year three that the truck has been running on borrowed time.
For calibration, ATRI put fleet repair and maintenance at 22 cents a mile for 2025, up 8.6 percent in one year and up 45 percent since 2019. ATBS reported average owner-operator maintenance spending of $14,222 in 2025 on about 95,000 miles, which is roughly 15 cents a mile. Note that ATRI counts tires separately from repair and maintenance, and this model does too.
Twenty cents sits between those two averages, which is where this article puts it for a truck past 500,000 miles. Being between two averages does not make it the right number for your truck. Two averages of different populations, using different cost definitions, cannot tell you what your specific engine is about to need. Start from your own service history and the work you know is coming, then use 20 cents as a check on whether your figure is plausible.
Dr. Paul's Insight
Newer truck or older truck changes the answer.
Dr. Paul points out that this really depends on whether you have a newer or older model truck. Newer trucks, based on his research and experience, need less maintenance and get better fuel efficiency. He has seen owners with newer trucks budget three to four months of average maintenance cost as a set-aside. On an older truck he has seen truckers go as high as six to eight months of average maintenance cost. On this truck, four months is $6,667 and eight months is $13,333.
The Money
What the reserve should be, and how it is funded.
One rate, moved automatically, into an account you do not carry a card for.
Worked example: funding the reserve
Dr. Paul's Insight
A reserve you can see is a reserve you will spend.
Dr. Paul is blunt about the mechanics because the mechanics are where this fails. Separate account at a different institution, automatic transfer on settlement day, no debit card. Owners who keep the reserve in the operating account and promise not to touch it touch it, every time, usually for something that felt urgent and was not.
The Operation
Scheduled maintenance, unscheduled repairs, and downtime.
A breakdown bills you twice, and only one invoice arrives.
Scheduled work is predictable and cheap by comparison. Oil, filters, greasing, the annual DOT inspection, preventive component replacement on a schedule. Reactive emergency repair typically costs several times what the same job costs when planned.
Unscheduled work is where the reserve gets tested. Industry data shows miles between breakdowns fell from 38,249 to 36,891 in 2025, and that is a fleet average on trucks averaging 3.6 years old. Older equipment runs shorter intervals than that.
Then there is the second invoice, the one nobody sends you. Every day the truck sits it earns nothing and still owes its share of the payment, the insurance and the plates. On the illustrative truck, a day that should have been worked gives up roughly $475 of contribution, which is the revenue lost minus the fuel, maintenance, tires, tolls and factoring you did not spend, spread over a 250-day working year. A week in the shop is about $2,400 on top of the repair bill. Use contribution rather than gross revenue here, or you will double-count the fixed costs you are already carrying.
That is why the reserve calculation is incomplete if it only covers parts and labor. Budget for the repair and for the week.
Tires deserve their own line. Steer tires typically go 150,000 to 200,000 miles and drives 200,000 to 300,000. At roughly $400 to $800 per steer and $350 to $650 per drive, plus trailer tires, this is a predictable $4,000 a year on this truck. Predictable costs belong in the budget, not in the emergency fund.
Do This
Where the money should sit so you do not spend it.
Two accounts, two purposes. They are not the same money.
Account one is the maintenance reserve. Twenty cents a mile, funded on settlement day, target six to eight months of average spend on an older truck or three to four on a newer one. This pays for tires, brakes, the DOT inspection, the alternator, the ordinary.
Account two is the emergency fund. This is the one that covers the overhaul, the aftertreatment failure that runs past $15,000, or the eight weeks when freight disappears. Target sixty days of full operating cost, which is $27,130 on this truck.
If one repair empties both accounts, the business has no cushion left at all and the next surprise is the one that ends it. Keeping them separate is not bookkeeping neatness. It is the difference between a bad month and a closed business.
One more decision worth running the numbers on. An extended warranty transfers repair risk for a premium. Owner-operator policies have historically run a few thousand dollars for two years and 250,000 miles up to roughly $12,000 for four years and 500,000 miles, though current pricing is almost certainly higher given how much repair costs have risen. To an owner with a full reserve it is usually not worth it. To an owner with a thin one it can be the thing that keeps the truck.
Do This
What Dr. Paul Would Do
Dr. Paul would set the reserve by the mile rather than the month, because that is how the wear actually accumulates, and he would automate the transfer so the decision is made once instead of every week.
He would size it to the truck, starting from its own service history and the work known to be coming rather than from an industry average. Newer trucks require less maintenance and get better fuel efficiency, and Dr. Paul has seen owners of newer trucks target three to four months of average maintenance cost. On an older truck he has seen owners go to six to eight months, and on a rig past 500,000 miles that is the range he would aim for.
He would keep the reserve and the emergency fund in separate accounts, because a single account gets treated as a single pot and gets emptied by the first thing that scares the owner.
He would put the reserve into cost per mile as a line item, so that every rate decision already carries it rather than pretending the truck maintains itself.
And he would budget for downtime, not just for parts. A week in the shop gives up about $2,400 of contribution, and it is invisible on every repair invoice ever written.
The trucking business plan template includes the financial model where the reserve, the downtime and the cost per mile all sit in the same place.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The four questions Dr. Paul gets most on this one.
What are the most expensive repairs on a semi truck?
Is an extended warranty worth it for an owner-operator?
How many days of downtime should I plan for each year?
Does a maintenance reserve replace an emergency fund?
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: ATRI Operational Costs of Trucking, 2026 Update. ATBS owner-operator data, 2025. Component repair and tire ranges from repair-shop published sources, 2026. No primary industry body publishes component repair pricing.