Reduce deadhead miles before they reach your tires

Deadhead planning starts before you accept a load

The cheapest way to cut empty miles is to choose the delivery city with the next load in mind. A load that pays well into a market with no outbound freight often costs more than it looks, because the truck has to run empty to get out. So before we bring you a load, we check the reload side too.

1. We look at how much freight leaves the delivery market for your equipment.
2. We estimate the empty miles to the nearest workable reload.
3. We run the trip as one number: total pay over total miles, empty miles included.
4. We bring you the load with that math, and you say yes, counter or no.
5. While the load moves, we call brokers in the delivery market and line up the next one for your approval.

Where empty miles come from

Deadhead tends to come from the same few places. Delivering into a one-way market, such as a city that takes in far more freight than it ships out, is the most common. Long runs home at the end of a week are another. So are short empty hops between a delivery and a pickup that looked close on the map but are an hour apart through traffic.

Then there are the hidden ones: a load cancelled at the last minute, a shipper who will not load until tomorrow, a reload that falls through and leaves the truck chasing freight. A desk cannot prevent all of those, but it can have a backup option ready more often than a driver working alone from the cab.

When some deadhead is the right call

Zero deadhead is not the goal. Sometimes a 150 mile empty run to a strong market sets up a week of good loads, and that beats taking a cheap load out of a weak one. Sometimes driving home empty on a Friday is worth it because home time matters more than the money.

What matters is that each empty mile is a choice you made with the numbers in front of you, not something that happened because nobody looked at the next load. We show you the trade and you decide.

Track your deadhead by week, not by feel

Most carriers guess their empty miles. Your logs, fuel receipts or ELD reports can give you the real number. Split each week into loaded and empty miles and note the delivery city before each long empty run. After a month, a pattern usually shows up: the same two or three markets cause most of the damage.

Share that list with us and we treat those cities differently. Either we avoid them, or we only take loads into them when a reload is already lined up or the rate covers the run out.

Deadhead looks different by equipment

A dry van can usually find freight in most markets. A reefer may need a produce or food region to reload well. A flatbed or step deck depends on construction and manufacturing freight, and a car hauler or dump truck has its own patterns. We plan reloads using the freight your equipment can actually haul, across all 11 types we dispatch, so the reload options we bring are ones you can take.

Backhauls and triangle routes

Two patterns do most of the work in cutting empty miles. A backhaul is a load that brings the truck back toward where it started, ideally picking up close to the delivery. A triangle route uses three loads instead of two, so the truck goes out, across and back, picking up each time near where it dropped.

Triangles help most when the straight return lane is weak. Instead of running empty from a slow market, the truck takes a load to a busier market nearby and reloads there for home. It takes more planning and more calls, which is the work a desk is there to do. Each leg is still a separate load, and you approve each one.

Timing is half of deadhead

A reload that is close but picks up two days later is not much better than a long empty run, because the truck sits. A reload that picks up the same afternoon fifty miles away is usually far better. So we look at both distance and timing: how far to the next pickup and how long the truck waits. When we bring you a reload, you see both numbers, along with the rate.

Appointment times matter here too. An early delivery can open a same-day reload that a late one would miss. When you approve a load, we ask the broker for the earliest delivery window the receiver allows.

Dispatch fees and empty miles

Our fee is a percentage of the gross on loads you haul, so we only earn when the truck is loaded: 5% for one truck with authority older than six months, 7% for a new MC or a single box truck or hotshot, and 4% for two or more trucks with authority older than six months, a limited-time rate. No fee on empty miles and none on weeks the truck sits. Details are on the dispatch rates page.