What a Healthy Trucking Company P&L Actually Looks Like

Ask ten owner-operators what their net margin is and nine of them will tell you "around 6%." Pull their actual books and the real number — once you back out detention, deadhead, claims, and dispatcher leakage — sits closer to 2%. That gap is the entire conversation.

The benchmark, line by line

For a mid-size dry van carrier running 25–75 trucks, here is what a healthy P&L actually looks like as a percentage of gross revenue. These numbers come from the engagements we've run, not from an industry report.

• Driver wages + benefits: 28–34%
• Fuel (net of surcharge): 18–22%
• Equipment (lease/depreciation + maintenance): 16–20%
• Insurance: 6–9%
• Dispatch + back office payroll: 5–7%
• Tolls, permits, ELD, software: 2–3%
• Claims + accessorial leakage: 1–3%
• Net operating margin: 6–10%

If your insurance line is north of 10%, you have a CSA score problem masquerading as a premium problem. If your equipment line is north of 22%, you bought trucks at the wrong point in the cycle and are now financing the mistake. Both are fixable. Neither is what's actually killing most carriers.

The line nobody tracks: dispatcher leakage

The single biggest gap between the P&L owners think they're running and the one they're actually running is dispatcher leakage — the revenue you should have captured but didn't, because of decisions made (or not made) between 6am and 6pm.

It shows up in five places, none of which appear as a line item in QuickBooks:

• Detention not billed. Driver sat 4 hours, dispatcher logged 2 to keep the shipper happy. That's $150 you walked away from.
• Deadhead taken on faith. Empty mile run to a load that was already covered. 200 miles at $0.85 cost = $170 burned.
• Lumper / accessorial not invoiced. The receipt is in the truck. It never makes it to billing.
• Repower paid out, not recovered. When a load gets handed off to another driver, the original driver still gets paid. The customer rarely does.
• TONU and layover never collected. The contract allows it. Nobody asks.

Across the carriers we've audited, dispatcher leakage averages between 4% and 8% of gross revenue. On a $12M book, that is $480K–$960K of margin walking out the door every year — more than most owners pay themselves.

How to find your real number in 30 minutes

Pick your last 50 completed loads. For each one, answer four questions:

1. Did we bill every accessorial we were entitled to under the rate confirmation?
2. Was the deadhead in/out under 12% of total miles?
3. Was the load delivered without a claim, OS&D, or service failure note?
4. Did the driver get to home time within 24 hours of the request?

Score one point per "yes." If you're under 180 out of 200, your P&L is lying to you and the leak is in the dispatch office, not the equipment line.

What to do about it

You don't fix dispatcher leakage with software. You fix it with accountability — specifically, a weekly review where every dispatcher walks through the loads they touched, the accessorials they captured (and missed), and the deadhead they accepted. The carriers that run this meeting religiously close 60–70% of the leakage gap within two quarters.

The ones that don't keep buying more trucks to outrun a margin problem the trucks aren't causing.