Empty miles — the distance a truck travels without a paying load — represent one of the most significant and persistent inefficiencies in domestic freight transportation. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, empty miles account for roughly 15-20% of total truck miles driven annually in the United States, representing billions of dollars in wasted fuel, driver hours, and equipment wear that ultimately flows through to shipper rates.
The American Transportation Research Institute consistently identifies empty miles and deadhead repositioning as among the top operational cost concerns for U.S. carriers — and those carrier costs become shipper costs through the rate structures that fund them. Understanding how empty miles are created and how they can be reduced is foundational to building a cost-effective freight solutions strategy that benefits both shippers and their carrier partners.
Empty miles — also called deadhead miles — arise when a carrier completes a delivery and cannot find a paying load for the return trip or next movement. The structural causes include:
The FMCSA carrier operations data consistently shows that empty mile rates are highest on regional and short-haul corridors — where the economics of repositioning weigh most heavily against carrier profitability and where rate volatility is most severe when capacity tightens. Rising fuel costs tracked by the U.S. Energy Information Administration amplify the financial impact of every empty mile driven — making this an increasingly urgent efficiency target for the entire freight ecosystem.
The most direct way to reduce empty miles is to match outbound lanes with return freight opportunities — creating round-trip load coverage that eliminates repositioning entirely. A reliable freight forwarder with lane density across multiple shippers can identify backhaul opportunities that individual shippers cannot see — matching outbound freight from one client with return freight from another to create round-trip coverage that produces rate advantages for both.
This is one of the core value propositions of working with a 3PL logistics partner rather than managing carrier relationships individually — the aggregated freight volume creates backhaul matching opportunities that no individual shipper’s volume can support alone.
Partial loads contribute to empty miles indirectly by reducing load factor efficiency across the network. Freight consolidation through a logistics partner allows shippers with partial loads to combine freight with complementary shipments heading to the same destination — filling trailers more completely, reducing the total number of trucks in the network, and lowering per-unit cost for all participating shippers.
For shippers moving between less-than-truckload (LTL) forwarding and full truckload thresholds, consolidation programs can convert multiple LTL shipments into optimized truckload moves that improve service reliability while contributing to lower empty mile rates across the carrier network.
One of the most impactful levers for reducing empty miles is shipper flexibility on appointment windows. Carriers build routes around the aggregate of their delivery commitments. When a significant percentage of shippers demand narrow, inflexible delivery windows, carriers lose the scheduling flexibility that allows them to combine loads efficiently and minimize repositioning.
Shippers who offer flexible pickup windows — particularly on non-time-critical freight — give carriers the scheduling latitude to build more efficient load sequences. This flexibility is most easily achieved on freight qualifying for dry van trucking or standard 53-foot van freight moves and is a factor worth discussing with your dedicated account managers when reviewing lane structures.
Empty miles at the individual shipper level are often symptoms of systematic lane inefficiencies that only become visible when freight data is analyzed across a network. Freight tracking solutions and real-time cargo visibility platforms that capture lane-level performance data enable the kind of network analysis that identifies these inefficiencies. According to BTS freight flow data, lane-level analysis consistently reveals 10-15% efficiency gains available to shippers who move from transactional carrier management to network-level optimization.
Vendor-managed logistics programs that give a logistics partner visibility across a shipper’s full freight network are particularly effective at capturing these data-driven efficiency gains — because the partner has the lane density and analytical capability to identify opportunities that a shipper managing individual carrier relationships cannot.
On corridors where truck empty mile rates are structurally high, intermodal transportation can provide equivalent transit times at lower cost while reducing the total number of trucks in the network. Freight that currently moves as individual full truckload (FTL) shipping shipments on backhaul-constrained lanes may be more efficiently handled through ocean cargo consolidation or intermodal solutions on longer corridors.
The right mode selection analysis requires visibility across all available options — which is exactly what a comprehensive transport management partner with capabilities spanning domestic trucking solutions, ocean, air, and intermodal provides.
Every empty mile in the network is a cost that eventually appears in freight rates, capacity constraints, or both. Shippers who actively participate in reducing empty miles through backhaul matching, load consolidation, window flexibility, and data-driven lane optimization build carrier relationships that are more durable, more reliable, and more cost-stable than those built purely on transactional rate negotiation.
BMI Shipping’s end-to-end logistics solutions approach — spanning Gulf Coast freight forwarding through domestic distribution — gives our clients the network visibility and carrier relationships to reduce empty miles as a structural outcome of how their freight is managed, not as a one-off negotiation. Contact our team at bmishipping.com/contact-us — New Orleans: 504-467-4220 | Houston: 832-229-5677.
