Owner-operator reference
Your whole business is one number.
Cost per mile. Everyone selling you a truck, a lease or a load has a reason to leave it vague, so this site computes it properly: from your own fixed costs, your real fuel economy, and the diesel price the EIA published for the week ending September 7, 2026.
A typical operation, at this week’s diesel
120,000 miles · 6.5 mpg · $4.157 a gallon
Cost per mile
$1.350
$0.388 of that is there whether the truck moves or not.
To clear $0.35 a mile
$1.93
per loaded mile at 12% deadhead
Fuel alone
$0.640
47% of every mile
Where the mile actually goes
- Fuel47%$0.640
- Truck payment15%$0.200
- Maintenance13%$0.180
- Insurance9%$0.117
- Fuel tax5%$0.070
- Tyres3%$0.042
- Parking and overhead3%$0.035
- Tolls2%$0.030
- Permits and plates2%$0.029
- ELD and software1%$0.007
Those are typical inputs, not yours. The point of putting them on the front page is that the shape holds: fuel is about half the variable mile, and the payment does not shrink when the miles do.
Put your own numbers inWhat the arithmetic says about a lease
Break-even is 3,371 miles a week.
Run a typical lease-purchase programme through the same model. A $1.35 loaded rate at 88% loaded is really $1.188 against every mile you drive. Take fuel and maintenance out and $0.335 a mile is left to cover $1,130 of weekly deductions that do not care whether you got miles.
At 2,500 miles a week
-$292
At 3,000 miles a week
-$124
At 3,500 miles a week
$43
Before income tax, and before anything breaks. This is arithmetic rather than an opinion, which is why the page shows every input and lets you change all of them.
Run your own termsThe reference
17
Tractors
What each one actually returns on fuel, what it is known to break, and what the classics cost you every day they work.
18
Engines
Sorted by emissions era, because that decides the aftertreatment, and the aftertreatment decides most of what goes wrong.
11
Transmissions
An automated manual is not an automatic, and the difference decides how it fails and what it costs to fix.
13
DPF and DEF faults
What actually strands a modern truck, what each fault costs, and which ones derate you to a walking pace.
Also here
The federal weight rules, drawn rather than quoted.
A legal 80,000 pound truck can still be over on an axle group, because the bridge formula governs spacing as well as total.