A $1,400 load pays $542. Here is the whole calculation.
Other load boards print the gross rate. loadez prints what is left after fuel, the empty miles to get there, and the driver's cut. This is the arithmetic loadez runs on every load before you claim it, with the constants written down so you can check it against your own truck. Or run your own load →
Updated 3 October 2026·8 minute read·Written by the team that wrote the engine
The load
A real shape of load, not a flattering one. Three operable cars, Kansas City to Denver, posted at $1,400. Your truck is 140 miles from the pickup. You run a 7-slot stinger. The broker pays by ACH on net-30 terms and you factor those invoices.
On the board this load shows one number: $2.26 per loaded mile. That number is true and it is also useless, because none of it is yours yet.
The arithmetic
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Gross rateWhat the broker agreed to pay. Not the posted rate if you countered — the settled one. | $1,400 |
| Fuel, loaded620 mi ÷ 7 mpg × $4.75/gal, plus 10% overhead, then × 0.75 because three of the four slots this trip are yours | −$347 |
| Fuel, deadhead140 mi at 9.5 mpg empty × $4.75/gal, plus 10% overhead. Not shared — you drove those miles for this load alone. | −$77 |
| TollsI-70 west of Kansas City is toll-free. On a tolled route this is priced off the toll miles in the route, capped at $350. | −$0 |
| Driver pay28% of gross, the terms on this driver's own record | −$392 |
| Factoring3% on ACH and net terms. Cash, COD, Zelle and instant pay are 0%; quick pay is 2%. | −$42 |
| Net profit39% margin · $0.87 per loaded mile · $271 per day of the two days it takes | $542 |
$2.26 a mile on the board. $0.87 a mile in your pocket. Same load.
Run your own load
The same arithmetic with your numbers. It starts on the load above; change anything and the lines below follow.
| Line | Amount |
|---|
Leaves out your truck payment, insurance and repairs. Inside loadez the same math also prices diesel along the actual route, weighs the deck, pads mountain and winter miles, and swaps the deadhead for real road miles.
Free for one truck, forever.
Why the fuel line is smaller than you expected
Because three cars is not a full deck. Fuel burned hauling the load is split across the slots that are earning on that trip: this load takes three, the engine assumes four are working, so it charges this load three quarters of the loaded-leg fuel. The assumption comes from a fill factor of 0.6 applied to your rig's capacity, and it is overridden by reality the moment there are other live assignments on the same trailer.
Deadhead never gets that discount. You drove 140 empty miles for this load and nothing else, so this load pays all of it, at the better mileage an empty rig gets.
Where the numbers come from
- Diesel price. The weekly on-highway diesel average from the US Energy Information Administration, for the PADD region each mile of the route is in, weighted by miles in each state. When we cannot get a quote the card says so in words rather than quietly substituting a national average.
- Miles. Loaded miles come from the posting, and from routing when the posting omits them. The highway and city split comes from the route steps, because a rig burns differently in each. Deadhead starts as straight-line distance times 1.2 and is replaced with real road miles for the driver who actually wins the load.
- Mileage. Your truck's highway mpg if it is on file, clamped to a believable 4 to 13. A truck with nothing on file is priced at 7 mpg. City miles are derated, empty miles get a bonus, and a lighter load gets a small bonus capped at 15%.
- Driver pay. Whatever that driver's record says: percent of gross, percent of net, per mile, per day, or flat, with an optional floor. Percent of gross at 30% is the default on a new driver.
- Pads. A flat 10% on fuel for idling and headwind. Another 20% on the miles that cross the eight mountain states. Another 6% in December, January and February in the cold ones. Both of those last two are applied only to the share of miles actually in those states, and only when the route is known well enough to say.
What this number is not
- It does not include your truck payment, repairs, or insurance. Those are real and they are yours, and the engine does not know them. The code that computes this calls the result optimistic, in those words.
- It does not include the broker's fee. The gross is the broker's full rate to you, and a dispatch agency's commission, where there is one, is charged as a separate line against the carrier, never netted out of the invoice.
- It is a forecast until the load delivers. Diesel moves, and the settled rate can differ from the posted one. After delivery the fuel line is re-based on the price that was real when the truck rolled.
- Handling on an inoperable car adds $120 per car. This example has none.
When we show you nothing at all
If a posting has no measurable lane, the honest answer is not a number. It is silence. A load with no distance on it, or a driver paid by the mile on a lane nobody has measured, gets no net profit, no margin, and no AI score — the fields come back empty rather than filled with something plausible.
This matters more than it sounds. A dispatch tool that always produces a number teaches you to trust it, then quietly hands you a $600 posting and a $600,000 posting with the same confident margin. There is a test in our codebase whose only job is to fail if that ever starts happening again.
The same rule applies elsewhere. Hours of service shows as unknown, because no electronic logging device feeds us. Pickup ETA is empty until the truck has actually reported a position. Each of those used to be a formula with a plausible-looking output, and each was deleted on purpose.
What the score on top of it means
The number next to each load on the board is not the margin. It ranks the load for a specific driver, and net profit per day is the heaviest thing in it, followed by margin, then how far that driver has to run empty to reach it, then how fast the broker pays, then whether the cars fit the deck, then the broker's own record with you.
It runs from 1 to 99, never 0 and never 100, because a load is never impossible and never perfect. Requirements that do not fit cut it hard: an enclosed-only load to an open trailer, more slots than the deck has, cargo value above what your insurance covers. Hours of service is deliberately not part of it.
A slot, for what it is worth, is one 16.5-foot reference car. Deck capacity is derived from your deck configuration and its length, not typed into a profile, which is why a crew-cab pickup counts as 1.18 slots and a motorcycle counts as less than one.
The point
None of this is exotic. Any dispatcher with a calculator, a fuel app and the driver's pay sheet gets to roughly the same place. The problem is that it takes four minutes per load, the good loads are gone in two, and at six in the morning nobody does it at all. So the load gets claimed on gross per mile, which is the one number that does not tell you whether the week was worth it.
Doing that arithmetic on every posting, before you touch it, is most of what loadez is.
Run this on the loadez board, with your own truck's numbers.
Open loadez and take one of your real loads end to end: what it nets, Autopilot claiming it under your rules, BOL signed in the cab, invoice sent from the office.
Free for one truck, forever. Every feature free for your first 30 days, no card.