It cost $2.26 per mile to operate a truck in 2024.
The good news: that's a 0.4% decline from 2023.
However, the bad news is that if lower fuel prices are removed from the equation, marginal costs rose 3.6 percent to $1.779 per mile. That's the highest cost ever recorded by a major trucking industry research group for non-fuel operating costs.
And, that's just one of the critical findings in the American Transportation Research Institute's costs and performance benchmarking report, An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, which was released today.
ATRI's annual study of carriers' costs also found:
- fuel costs declined from 2023 to 2024, as did repair and maintenance expenses
- driver wages – the primary contributor to cost increases in the three years following the COVID-19 pandemic – rose by 2.4%, half a percentage point less than the rate of inflation
- driver benefits costs rose 4.8% to $0.197 per mile
- truck and trailer payments rose by 8.3% to a record-high $0.390 per mile, and 53.2% since 2019
- truck capacity dropped 2.2% as carriers sold trucks
- the number of empty miles rose to an average of 16.7%
- the number of drivers per truck fell to 0.93 as carriers parked trucks
- carriers reduced non-driver staff by 6.8%
- per-hour operational costs in 2024 totaled $90.89 with fuel and $71.57 without fuel
ATRI also found average truck age, average dwell time per stop, and mileage between breakdowns all improved. ATRI said these are testaments to industry performance despite economic headwinds.
However, despite carriers' efforts to reduce expenses, financial results in the trucking industry suffered in 2024. Average operating margins dropped below 2% in all sectors other than LTL, as well as in all fleet size categories below 1,000 trucks – with truckload carriers averaging an operating loss of -2.3 percent.
ATRI's study also found economic conditions in the trucking industry continue to appear uncertain at best for the foreseeable future. The nation's GDP slipped 0.2% in the first quarter of this year due primarily to the large volume of imports ahead of expected tariffs, and it is forecast to be counterbalanced by a disproportionately high second quarter GDP, according to the ATRI study.
The pertinent disappointment for trucking, however, is that the swell of first quarter import freight did not buoy freight rates; aside from slight improvements in the flatbed sector, rates continued to stagnate in the first quarter of 2025, ATRI found.
