Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO
One Truck. $240,000 Gross. And Almost Nobody Can Tell You What Is Left.
Owner-operators do not usually fail because the freight dried up. They fail because nobody ever added up what the truck costs to run, so every decision after that is a guess with a payment attached.
This page collects the questions owners actually ask, and answers each one with the whole calculation shown. Same truck, same miles, same fuel price, every time. You can check the math instead of trusting it.
Start Here
The Five Problems Behind Almost Every Question
Dr. Paul has worked with more than a thousand small business owners across fifty states and Canada. In trucking, the questions arrive in a hundred different forms and land on the same five problems every time.
Dr. Paul's Insight
The settlement statement is not a P&L.
Owners hand Dr. Paul a stack of settlement statements and call it their books. A settlement shows what a carrier or broker paid on a load. It does not show the truck payment, the insurance, the tires wearing down under the trailer or the hour spent on paperwork at midnight. Add those in and a good week can turn into a bad month. Start every conversation with the annual number, not the last settlement.
The Questions
Ten Questions Owner-Operators Ask, Answered in Full
Each one is a complete article with the arithmetic worked all the way through. They share one illustrative truck, so the numbers agree with each other across all ten.
Phase One · Before You Buy
- 01Should I become an owner-operator or stay an OTR company driver?The honest comparison, after payroll taxes come off both sides.
- 02How much money do I really need to start an OTR trucking business?The down payment is $18,600. The startup number is about $52,000.
- 03Should I run my own authority or lease onto a carrier?What you keep under each arrangement, insurance included.
- 04Should I buy a new truck or a used truck?They land $147 apart. So the decision is cash and risk, not cost.
Phase Two · Running the Truck
- 05What is my actual cost per mile?The calculation everything else on this page is built on.
- 06Why is my business making money but leaving me broke?Where $240,000 goes, line by line, until $74,959 is left.
- 07How do I find loads with a new authority?Why brokers wait 90 days, and how to shorten the wait.
- 08How much should I save for maintenance and repairs?Twenty cents a mile, funded per mile, moved out on settlement day.
Phase Three · Growing
The Model
One Truck, Every Number, Out in the Open
Most trucking advice quotes an average and moves on. This one shows the whole truck. Used Class 8 sleeper and a dry van, bought at $93,000 with 20 percent down. Own authority. Based in Florida. One hundred thousand miles a year, 20 percent of them empty. Diesel at $5.60. Freight at $3.00 per loaded mile with the fuel surcharge in it.
| Line item | Annual |
|---|---|
| Fuel, 15,385 gallons at $5.60 | $86,154 |
| Truck and trailer payment | $21,240 |
| Insurance | $12,000 |
| Maintenance and repair reserve, $0.20 per mile | $20,000 |
| Tires, $0.04 per mile | $4,000 |
| Tolls | $4,300 |
| Permits, plates and compliance | $2,600 |
| Load board subscription | $2,028 |
| Factoring, 2.8 percent of revenue | $6,720 |
| Meals, parking, phone, accounting | $6,000 |
| Total before owner pay | $165,041 |
Three numbers come out of that table, and every article on this page inherits them. Cost per total mile before owner pay, $1.65. Cost per loaded mile before owner pay, $2.06. Left for the owner after every bill, $74,959.
Built from the bottom up, then checked against two datasets that were not used to build it. ATBS reported average 2025 owner-operator net income of $71,808, a 4.4 percent difference. ATRI reported an all-in cost of $2.336 per mile for 2025, and adding $70,000 of owner pay here produces $2.350, a 0.6 percent difference. Read those as sanity checks on scale and nothing more. ATBS reports on a tax basis, ATRI surveys for-hire fleets on 2025 fuel, and this model reports cash to the owner on 2026 fuel. Close is not the same as confirmed.
Dr. Paul's Insight
Put your own pay in as a cost, not as what is left.
Most owners pay themselves whatever survives the month. That is not a wage, it is a remainder, and it hides a losing rate for years. Dr. Paul puts owner pay in the cost table at a real number before a single rate is evaluated. On this truck, leaving it out understates cost by 88 cents on every loaded mile. Eighty-eight cents is the difference between a business and an expensive job.
Working With Dr. Paul
When Reading Is Not Enough
Everything above is free and it is the real method. For plenty of owners that is the whole answer. Then there are the situations where a page cannot help, because the problem is your numbers, not the general case.
Dr. Paul takes on owner-operators and small carriers as a business consultant and fractional CFO. That means building the model in your figures, on your lanes, at your rates, and telling you what it says even when it is not what you hoped. Fifty states and Canada, across every industry Dr. Paul serves, not only trucking. No junior consultants and no hand-offs.
Dr. Paul's Insight
The owners who call early are not the ones in trouble.
The calls Dr. Paul cannot do much with arrive at month eleven, after the reserve is gone and two payments are behind. The ones that work arrive while there is still a decision left to make. If you are weighing a second truck, a new authority or a rate you are not sure about, that is the moment the arithmetic is worth something. Afterwards it is just a post-mortem.
Watch
Dr. Paul on Trucking
Three short ones from the channel. Full walkthroughs of the plan itself live on the carrier guide.
How to Start and Grow a Trucking Company
The short version of everything on this page. (5 min)
Three Growth Strategies for Trucking Businesses
For the owner thinking about truck number two. (8 min)
OTR Truckers: What Motivates You?
Why owners get into this, and why that matters. (4 min)
Common Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does an owner-operator actually take home?
On the illustrative truck used across this page, a gross of $240,000 leaves $74,959 for the owner after fuel, the equipment payment, insurance, the maintenance reserve and every other operating cost. That figure is cash available to the owner before personal income taxes, not accounting profit and not taxable net income. ATBS reported an average 2025 owner-operator net income of $71,808 on a tax basis, which is a different measure of a similar scale. Your own number moves with your rate, your miles, your fuel price and your payment.
What is a realistic cost per mile for an owner-operator?
On this truck it is $1.65 per total mile and $2.06 per loaded mile before the owner is paid, and $2.94 per loaded mile once $70,000 of owner pay is included. The number matters less than the method. Use every mile you drive for cost per total mile, use the same annual cost against loaded miles for cost per paid mile, and never compare a cost per total mile against revenue per paid mile. That single mistake flatters every rate you look at.
Is being an owner-operator worth it compared to company driving?
On these figures an owner-operator grossing $240,000 against a company driver on the $58,640 median wage keeps about $10,200 more a year once payroll taxes come off both sides, roughly 19 percent. That is the return for carrying a $74,400 equipment note, every repair bill, every empty week and every unpaid hour of paperwork, with no employer benefits. For some drivers that trade is clearly worth it. The ones who get hurt are the ones who never ran the comparison.
Do I need a business plan to run one truck?
You need the numbers. Whether they live in a formal document depends on what you are doing next. If you are borrowing, buying a second truck or applying for authority-related financing, a lender wants the document. If you are simply trying to find out whether your rates cover your costs, what you need is the model underneath it. Dr. Paul builds the model first either way, because a plan written on top of the wrong cost per mile is a well-formatted mistake.
Next Step
Run Your Truck Through the Same Model
Every figure on this page came out of one financial model, with the owner's own pay in as a cost line. The fastest way to know where you stand is to put your miles, your rate and your payment into it and see what comes out the bottom.
Business Consulting With Dr. Paul
Dr. Paul builds the model in your numbers, on your lanes, and tells you what it says. Consulting and fractional CFO work, plus business plan writing when you need the document.
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. The cheapest way to start.
Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO | 14+ Years | 1,000+ Clients Served
Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA is a business consultant and fractional CFO, founder of Quality Business Plan, and creator of the Organize-Plan-Grow™ method. He holds a Doctorate of Business Administration and an MBA in Finance, and has spent more than fourteen years helping small business owners across fifty states and Canada turn thin-margin operations into businesses that can be funded, sold or handed off. Learn more about Dr. Paul.
Last Updated: 9/9/2026 · Reviewed by Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
About the Numbers on This Page
Dollar figures on this page are illustrations used to show a calculation, not projections for any specific business. They represent cash available to the owner before personal income taxes, after the equipment payment and after money set aside for maintenance, which is not the same as accounting profit or taxable net income. Insurance premiums, repair and tire costs, dispatcher fees, factoring rates and load board fees shown here are industry averages drawn from published data, not quotes for any one carrier. Your own numbers will be different. Rates, fuel prices, insurance premiums and repair costs change. Industry figures are presented to the best of our knowledge based on publicly available information at time of publishing. Sources on this page: ATRI, An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update, July 15, 2026, covering 2025 data. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Weekly Retail On-Highway Diesel Prices, week of August 31, 2026. ATBS, owner-operator performance data for 2025, published April 16, 2026. DAT dry van spot rate reporting, July 2026. Every number on this page is an estimate. Do your own research, get your own quotes and run your own figures before you make a business decision.