If you have spent any time around trucking, you have heard the word “deadhead.” Deadhead in trucking means driving a truck without a paid load, either bobtail (tractor only) or pulling an empty trailer. Those miles still burn fuel, add wear and use up hours of service, but they generate no revenue. Understanding deadhead is one of the quickest ways for carriers, owner-operators and shippers to understand freight pricing.
Deadhead Definition and Common Examples
Deadhead miles are the empty miles between a truck’s last delivery and its next pickup, or the miles to return to a home terminal when no return load is available. Typical examples include:
- Driving 120 miles from a delivery in one city to a shipper’s dock in another to pick up the next load.
- Returning to a terminal or the driver’s home after delivering a one-way load.
- Repositioning a trailer or tractor to a yard, shop or inspection.
Some people use “deadhead” and “empty miles” interchangeably. Others separate miles driven to a pickup (often called out-of-route or empty miles to the shipper) from miles driven bobtail. For pay and cost analysis, the key question is simple: did the truck earn revenue for those miles?
How to Calculate Deadhead Percentage
The standard formula is:
Deadhead % = Empty Miles ÷ Total Miles × 100
If a truck runs 100,000 total miles in a year and 12,000 are empty, deadhead is 12 percent. Many fleets track this number by driver, truck and lane, because a small improvement multiplies across every truck. A well-run fleet working balanced lanes may keep deadhead low, while carriers in unbalanced regions can see much higher numbers. Treat any figure here as a benchmark to compare against your own history rather than a universal standard.
What Deadhead Really Costs
Each empty mile carries real costs: fuel, tires, maintenance, depreciation and the driver’s time. Even if you pay your driver per loaded mile only, the truck is still burning diesel and aging. To see the impact, take your cost per mile and multiply it by empty miles. Our walkthrough on how to calculate cost per mile shows how to include every cost category.
Deadhead also eats into hours of service. A driver has a limited number of on-duty hours per day, and any hours spent driving to an empty pickup are hours that cannot earn on a paid load. For the regulations, see our episode on hours of service.
Who Pays for Deadhead?
This depends on the business model:
- Owner-operators and small carriers absorb deadhead through the rates they accept. If the rate on a load does not cover the trip to the pickup, they are paying for it.
- Company drivers may be paid hourly or a mix of per-mile and flat rates, depending on the carrier’s pay plan.
- Shippers and brokers pay indirectly. Carriers build expected deadhead into their rates, so lanes with poor backhaul options are usually more expensive.
A shipper that understands this can gain better pricing by offering carriers backhauls, consistent volumes or lanes that connect to other loads in the network.
Why Deadhead Happens
- Freight imbalance. Some markets receive far more freight than they send out. Trucks arrive loaded and leave looking for freight.
- Seasonality. Produce, retail peaks and weather events shift freight direction through the year.
- Poor planning. Accepting a load without checking what is available from the destination.
- Equipment mismatch. A reefer trailer has fewer backhaul options than a dry van. See dry van vs. reefer.
- Shipper delays and cancellations that leave a truck without its next load.
8 Ways to Reduce Deadhead
- Look at the backhaul before you accept the outbound load. Search the destination market for return freight before you commit. If the return market is weak, price the load higher.
- Use multiple load boards. Compare options in our guide to the best load boards for owner-operators.
- Build direct shipper relationships. Regular shippers give you consistent freight and better planning than spot-only searching.
- Run regional or dedicated lanes where freight flows in both directions.
- Use power-only or drop-trailer arrangements to keep the tractor moving instead of waiting on loading. Read about power-only trucking.
- Charge for deadhead on long repositioning. Brokers and shippers will often pay a repositioning fee or higher rate when the pickup is far from your last delivery.
- Use a TMS or dispatch tool that suggests loads near your drop-off location. See what to look for in a TMS.
- Track deadhead as a KPI. If you are not measuring deadhead by lane and customer, you will not know which freight is truly profitable.
Deadhead vs. Empty Return vs. Bobtail
These terms overlap but are not identical. Deadhead is any unpaid driving. Bobtail specifically means a tractor without a trailer attached. An empty return is a trailer returning empty, common in container and drayage work where the container must go back to the terminal or depot. If you work in ports, read about drayage and why empty container returns are a major cost driver.
How Deadhead Should Influence Your Rates
When you quote or accept freight, calculate your rate based on the full cycle: deadhead to pick up, loaded miles, any wait time and the empty or loaded miles needed to get your next load. A rate that looks high per loaded mile can be poor if the truck must run 250 empty miles on each end. A rate that looks low per mile can be excellent if it sets up an immediate backhaul. Brokers and shippers should recognize this logic too, since carriers who are paid fairly for tough lanes tend to show up, reliably, every time.
Key Takeaways
Deadhead is not just a driver problem. It is a pricing, planning and technology problem that affects every part of the supply chain. Measure it, price it into every quote and use better planning tools to bring it down. Even a small reduction in empty miles can lift annual profit noticeably for a fleet of any size.
Want more practical trucking insights? Subscribe to The Freight Guru podcast for conversations on freight, carriers and logistics operations. To automate load matching and tracking, explore Go Freight.
