Every empty mile costs you fuel, hours and wear, and pays you nothing. You will never get deadhead to zero — freight does not lay out that neatly — but the gap between a tight empty percentage and a sloppy one is one of the largest controllable numbers in the whole operation.
Why deadhead is a tax and not just an annoyance
Do the division and the point makes itself. You pay for every mile the truck turns; a customer pays you only for the loaded ones. So your real cost figure is cost per loaded mile, which is total cost divided by loaded miles — and every empty mile pushes that number up without touching the top line. Run a fifth of your miles empty and your cost per loaded mile sits meaningfully above your cost per mile. Nothing about the truck changed. The denominator did.
There is a second tax nobody itemizes: the clock. Empty miles consume driving hours out of the fourteen-hour window and the weekly limit in Part 395 exactly as loaded miles do. Hours are the scarcest input in the operation, and spending them on unpaid movement is the most expensive way to run out of them. A week with heavy repositioning does not just gross less, it has less capacity left to fix the shortfall.
Why does deadhead happen at all?
Because freight is not symmetric. Regions consume more than they produce or produce more than they consume, and the imbalance shows up as rates: strong inbound and weak outbound, or the reverse. A market that pays well to enter is telling you something about what it will pay to leave.
Seasonality moves the same imbalances around the calendar — produce, construction, retail restocking and project freight each have their own clock. So does the shape of the equipment: open-deck and hotshot lanes are thinner than dry van lanes, which means fewer candidate loads inside a given radius and more chances that the best one is not close. Thin lanes make deadhead structural rather than careless, which is exactly why they have to be planned rather than absorbed.
And then there is the trap that looks like an opportunity. A high rate per mile on a load that delivers into a weak outbound market is not a high-paying load, it is an average load plus a bill you have not received yet. Rate per mile is a property of one haul. Deadhead is a property of the sequence.
The dispatcher's job: think two loads ahead
Good dispatch prices a load by the round trip it sets up, not by the haul in isolation. That sometimes means taking slightly less on paper to finish in a market where several brokers are competing for trucks, because the next load is where the difference comes back. A planner who knows your lanes builds chains: today's delivery lands inside tomorrow's pickup radius, and the week holds together instead of being rebuilt every evening.
Three levers do most of the work. Chaining, which is sequencing loads so each delivery is a viable origin. Radius discipline, which is deciding in advance how far empty you will run for how much money, so the decision is a policy rather than a mood at 9 p.m. And timing, because a load that delivers Friday afternoon into a market that reloads Monday has a weekend of unpaid parking baked into it that no rate per mile will show you.
This is also the straightforward argument for percentage-of-gross compensation. When the desk's revenue rises with yours, the incentive points at smart chaining rather than at simply keeping the wheels turning, and the conversation about a cheap repositioning load becomes a shared problem rather than an argument.
What you can do from the driver's seat
Give real constraints early and once: home time, regions you will not run, how long you are willing to sit for the right load, how far empty you will go and at what number. A planner working against fictional flexibility builds fragile plans, and the fragility shows up as your empty miles.
Measure your own deadhead weekly and keep the series. Empty miles divided by total miles, written down every week, is four minutes of arithmetic that turns a vague complaint into a specific conversation: 'my empty percentage has trended up for three weeks — what does the plan look like?' Numbers travel through an organization in a way frustration does not.
Then price the empty miles into every load decision before you accept it. Add the deadhead to the loaded miles, divide the total pay by the loaded miles only, and compare that against your break-even rate — that is the number a cost-per-mile calculator exists to give you. Do it twice and it becomes instinct. And close the loop after delivery: telling the desk that a lane strands you is coaching, while silence is just noise that will be repeated next week.
How this shows up at Arrow
Dispatch here builds plans around your home base, your preferred states and your home time, which is the mechanism that makes empty miles plannable rather than accidental — a planner who knows where you start and where you have to be can aim the chain instead of reacting to it. The desk is staffed 24/7, and both our hotshot and CDL-A divisions run on one authority, which keeps the planning conversation in one place.
What we cannot tell you in an article is what your lanes will pay next month, and neither can anyone else. What you can do is make your empty percentage a standing item: bring your own weekly number to the desk, say what you are willing to run empty and for what, and get the plan for the next two loads rather than the next one. A deadhead problem raised with numbers this month is a planning adjustment; the same problem found at tax time is just a smaller year.