Weekly Revenue Calculator for Owner-Operators

Enter your loads below and the calculator answers it for your truck in about thirty seconds. For a yardstick while you do: the American Transportation Research Institute measured an industry-average operating cost of $2.336 per mile for 2025, so a 2,500-mile week has to gross roughly $5,840 before it earns a dollar. Over a full year, ATBS measured average owner-operator net income of $71,808 for calendar year 2025 on roughly 95,000 miles — about $1,381 a week if you spread it across 52 weeks, which almost nobody does.

That is the honest frame for this tool. It totals every load you ran, deducts fuel at the current diesel price, takes out dispatch and factoring, and shows what is left — but what is left is contribution margin, not take-home. Your truck payment, insurance, maintenance, permits and tax still come out of it. The break-even output tells you where the real line is.

Figures updated August 11, 2026. Fuel price: EIA U.S. on-highway diesel average, week ending August 10, 2026. Operating cost: ATRI, data year 2025. Sources are listed at the foot of this page.

Nothing here is hidden. Every figure the calculator returns comes from one of these seven lines, and you can reproduce all of them on the back of a rate confirmation:

Two rate figures matter and they are not the same. Your loaded rate per mile is gross divided by loaded miles — the number brokers quote. Your all-miles rate is gross divided by total miles, and that is the number your costs are actually measured against, because you buy diesel for empty miles too. Deadhead percentage is simply deadhead miles divided by total miles. Work a single load rather than a week with the profit per load calculator, or price a lane before you book it with the rate per mile calculator.

Here is the whole calculation end to end at the EIA diesel price for the week ending August 10, 2026 ($5.257 per gallon), an assumed 6.5 MPG, a 5% dispatch fee and 3% factoring. Every figure below is arithmetic on those inputs, rounded to the nearest dollar.

Total miles are 2,550, so deadhead is 11.0% of the week. The loaded rate is $2.86 per mile but the all-miles rate is $2.55 — that 31-cent gap is what the empty miles cost in rate terms. Fuel is 2,550 ÷ 6.5 = 392 gallons at $5.257, which is $2,062. Dispatch at 5% of gross is $325 and factoring at 3% is $195.

So the week nets $3,918 after fuel, dispatch and factoring — and that number is why this page exists. Measured against ATRI's full operating cost, the same 2,550 miles cost about $5,957, so a $6,500 week clears roughly $543, not $3,918. The difference is everything the variable-cost view has not paid for yet.

This is the arithmetic most weekly calculators quietly skip. Take the worked example above: $3,918 of net after fuel, dispatch and factoring. Hold that pace for 52 weeks and you get $203,736 — roughly 2.8× the $71,808 ATBS actually measured across its owner-operator client base for 2025. The tool is not wrong; the label is. What it calls net is contribution margin.

Still to be paid out of that number:

• Truck and trailer payment — size it with the truck payment calculator.
• Insurance — primary liability, physical damage, cargo, occupational accident.
• Maintenance and tires — ATBS measured an average of $14,222 for 2025, an $874 increase year over year.
• Permits, IFTA and Form 2290 — reconcile fuel tax with the IFTA calculator.
• Parking, ELD, phone, tolls and scales — small lines that add up over 52 weeks.
• Self-employment and income tax — the calculator's net is pre-tax. Keep the books clean with our trucking bookkeeping guide and take the numbers to an accountant who does trucking returns.

Getting this distinction wrong is how carriers end up busy and broke — the pattern we walk through in why owner-operators fail.

One static answer hides how fragile a week is. Below, the same three-load week is re-run with one variable changed at a time. Rate increases are applied to loaded miles; extra miles are added as loaded miles at the week's loaded rate of $2.86. Dispatch stays at 5% and factoring at 3% of gross throughout.

The lesson is blunt: a 20-cent rate improvement is worth more than a 50-cent diesel shock costs, and it takes no extra hours out of your clock. Adding miles raises net but also raises break-even — the 3,050-mile week needs about $7,125 of gross at ATRI's $2.336 per mile, so the extra 500 miles only widened true margin from about $543 to about $807. Rate work beats mile work. That is the argument in our rate negotiation guide, and for fuel specifically see the 2026 diesel price outlook and the fuel cost calculator.

The calculator deliberately does not assume an MPG or a rate for your equipment — those vary too much by truck, load weight, terrain and driving style for a default to be honest. Enter your own. What genuinely differs by equipment is where the weekly money leaks:

• Dry van— The deepest freight pool and the most rate competition; deadhead is usually the easiest to control because reload options are dense.
• Reefer— Add reefer fuel on top of tractor fuel — the calculator's MPG input only covers the tractor, so budget the unit separately.
• Flatbed— ATRI measured a negative 0.5% operating margin for flatbed carriers in 2025, the only sector in the red; tarping and securement pay matters to weekly gross.
• Step deck— Higher rates per load but thinner lane density, so empty miles between loads tend to run longer.
• Power only— No trailer cost in your fixed stack, but drop-and-hook availability drives whether your week has gaps.
• Hotshot— Much better MPG than a Class 8, so the fuel line shrinks — but so does the rate, and total miles per week are usually lower.
• Box truck— Shorter runs and more stops; weekly gross depends far more on load count than on miles.
• Heavy haul— Permits, escorts and route surveys are real weekly costs this tool does not model — add them before you judge the week.

Comparing two of them directly? Our reefer vs dry van profitability breakdown runs the same weekly math across both.

This tool measures the week. These measure the pieces: cost per mile for your break-even, rate per mile before you book, profit per load for a single run, fuel cost for your largest variable expense, deadhead for empty legs, truck payment and IFTA for the fixed side, and dispatch ROI to test whether a dispatch fee pays for itself. Starting out? New authority cost prices the first year, and the first-year owner-operator guide covers the rest. The full set is on our free trucking tools page.

Sources

• American Transportation Research Institute, 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking (published July 15, 2026, data year 2025) — $2.336 per mile average operating cost, $1.854 excluding fuel, sector operating margins.
• ATBS, How Did Owner-Operators Perform in 2025? — $71,808 average net income, ~95,000 average annual miles, $14,222 average maintenance cost.
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices — U.S. on-highway diesel average $5.257 per gallon, week ending August 10, 2026.

Dollar figures in the worked example and scenario table are arithmetic on the inputs stated, rounded to the nearest dollar. The 6.5 MPG, 5% dispatch and 3% factoring values are assumptions for illustration, not measured averages — replace them with your own in the calculator. Our published dispatch pricing is on the pricing page.