Hotshot rate per mile

There is no single good hotshot rate per mile — there is only your rate, and it starts with your cost per mile. Add everything your truck costs for a month, divide by the miles it runs, and that number is your floor. Any load priced under your floor costs you money to haul, however good it looks.

Work out your cost per mile

• Fuel for the month ÷ miles run.
• Insurance, plates, permits and authority costs, spread monthly, ÷ miles.
• A repair and tire reserve — pick a monthly amount and hold to it — ÷ miles.
• Truck and trailer payments, if any, ÷ miles.
• Your own pay. If the number leaves nothing for the driver, the business is buying you a job at a loss.

Most drivers who do this honestly land on a floor somewhere they did not expect — higher than the number in their head. That is the point of doing it. The floor tells you which loads to refuse, and a driver who refuses bad loads politely stays on every door's call list.

Rate per mile is only half the quote

Quote the whole job, not the mile: loaded miles, unpaid miles to reach the load and to get home, waiting time, and whether the load strands you somewhere with no freight out. A short, well-paid load out of a rental yard ten minutes from home beats a long load into empty country almost every week of the year. Being based where the doors are — several yards, auctions and dealers within an easy drive — is worth more than a few cents a mile, and it is exactly what a state book of doors is for.

Why do so many hotshot loads pay so little?

Because posted freight is priced by whoever is most desperate to move. A broker pricing a partial load against a 53-foot trailer's empty space, and fifty drivers bidding from a parking lot, will find the floor every time. Add the drivers who do not know their cost per mile — who take a load that pays less than it costs because the gross number looked big — and the posted market stays thin. The loads that pay are mostly not posted: they sit with the yards and dealers whose own name is on the delivery. That is not a slogan; it is why the rate guides and the direct doors are the same conversation.