As of August 2026, national spot rates average about $2.93 a mile for dry vans, $3.38 for reefers, and $3.54 for flatbeds, fuel surcharge included, per DAT's market data. Contract freight runs its own, steadier schedule, and every one of those numbers moves weekly.
Now the part most rate articles skip. A rate per mile is not income; it is revenue. ATRI's latest operational-costs report clocked the average cost of running a truck at $2.336 per mile, an all-time high, which means the spread between what you are paid and what a mile costs you is thinner than the big numbers suggest. This page keeps both halves current: the going rates by equipment type, refreshed quarterly, and the cost-per-mile arithmetic that tells you whether any given rate is actually profit. The rates are the market's number. The cost per mile is yours.
Verified against DAT's national market data, August 2026:
Dry van: spot loads averaging about $2.93 per mile all-in (rate plus fuel surcharge). Linehaul only, excluding fuel, early-August vans averaged $2.32.
Reefer: about $3.38 per mile all-in; $2.65 linehaul excluding fuel. Reefer holds a premium for the equipment cost and the produce-season swings.
Flatbed: about $3.54 per mile all-in; $2.87 linehaul excluding fuel. The flatbed premium pays for securement work, tarping, and a smaller qualified-driver pool.
Three reading rules for any rate table, including this one. First, these are national averages: individual lanes run a dollar above or below depending on direction and density, and a backhaul lane out of a freight desert will pay under average every day of the year. Second, all-in versus linehaul matters when you compare quotes: a broker quoting "$2.90 all-in" and one quoting "$2.35 plus fuel" may be offering the same money. Third, the niches price differently: hotshot loads typically quote higher per mile on much smaller totals, with the math covered in our hotshot factoring guide, and box trucks run their own sub-$2 to low-$2 market where per-mile comparisons to Class 8 freight mislead more than they inform.
These figures are re-verified quarterly alongside our factoring rate data; the dateline above reflects the last check.
Rate figures on this page were verified against DAT national averages in August 2026 and are refreshed quarterly. Spot rates move weekly; treat these as the market's center of gravity, not a quote for your lane.
Rates are a supply-and-demand thermometer, and four forces do most of the moving.
Seasonality. Produce season pulls reefer rates up from late spring; retail freight builds into the fall; January reliably falls off a cliff. If your year feels like feast then famine, that is the calendar, not you, and the financial side of surviving it has its own playbook in our slow-season factoring guide.
Capacity. When trucks are scarce, rates spike; when everyone bought a truck during a hot market, the hangover suppresses rates for years. That is the cycle the industry has been grinding through, with ATRI documenting a third straight year of freight recession even as operating costs set records.
Spot versus contract. Spot prices one load today; contract prices a lane for a year. They trade places as the market turns, and knowing which side to be on, and when, is the subject of our spot vs contract factoring comparison's pricing cousin: same logic, applied to freight.
Fuel. Fuel surcharges pass part of the diesel bill through to the customer, which is why all-in and linehaul rates diverge by roughly the surcharge. Your exposure is the gap between the surcharge formula and what the pump actually charges you.
None of these forces care about your costs, which is the point of the next section: the market sets the rate, but your cost per mile decides whether you can afford to say yes.
Spot rate: the price to move one load, booked now, off a load board. Contract rate: a negotiated price for a lane over a term, usually a year. Spot swings with the week's supply and demand; contract smooths it out and trades upside for stability.
Cost per mile is total monthly cost divided by monthly miles. The discipline is in listing every cost once, in the right bucket.
Fixed costs hit whether the truck moves or not: truck payment, insurance, plates and permits, parking, phone and software, and your factoring or bookkeeping overhead. Say $2,000 truck payment, $1,300 insurance, $250 permits and compliance, $250 everything else: $3,800 a month.
Variable costs scale with miles: fuel, maintenance and tires, tolls. At 8,500 miles a month, a truck averaging 6.8 mpg with diesel around $3.90 burns about $4,875 in fuel. Budget maintenance and tires honestly, about 20 cents a mile ($1,700), because deferred maintenance is a loan at terrible rates, plus $250 in tolls: $6,825 a month.
Total: $10,625 across 8,500 miles, or $1.25 a mile before the driver earns a dime. Pay yourself $70,000 a year ($5,833 a month) and the all-in number is $16,458, or $1.94 per mile. That is your break-even: every loaded mile above $1.94 builds the business, every mile below it quietly spends your savings. For reference, ATRI's industry average, weighted toward larger fleets with driver wages and benefits inside, hit $2.336 in the latest report, with fuel at 48 cents and repair and maintenance costs climbing 8.6% in a single year.
Two habits make the number useful. Recompute it monthly, because fuel and insurance move. And keep the with-driver-pay and without versions separate, so a cheap-freight week is a conscious choice about your own wage rather than an accounting surprise.
Run your cost per mile monthly, not once. Fuel alone moved your break-even several cents this year, and an insurance renewal can move it a dime overnight. Twenty minutes a month keeps the one number every load decision depends on honest.
Put the two numbers together and load boards get much less confusing.
The deadhead haircut. Rates pay loaded miles; your truck runs all miles. A $3.00 load with 100 empty miles against 400 loaded is $1,200 over 500 total miles: $2.40 a real mile, and suddenly a $1.94 break-even is a lot closer than it looked.
The great-rate trap lane. A $3.40 dry van load into a freight desert, where the best reload pays $1.60 out, averages $2.50 across the round trip; a boring $2.80 both ways pays $2.80. Price the round trip, always.
The timing tax. A profitable load is not profitable cash until it pays. Brokers pay in 30 to 45 days; fuel bills in days. That gap is survivable with reserves, bridgeable with factoring, and fatal to ignore, and whether the bridge is worth its fee at your volume is exactly the arithmetic our worth-it breakdown walks through.
The tool that ties it together: our freight factoring calculator runs the revenue-timing side of this same decision on your actual volume and invoice size, and pairs naturally with the cost-per-mile number you just built. Rate, minus cost, adjusted for deadhead, discounted for timing: that is the whole discipline of picking freight.
A load that is profitable on paper can still sink you in the week it pays nothing. Rate-per-mile math tells you whether to take the load; cash-flow math tells you whether you will be solvent when it finally pays. Run both.
The whole page in four lines. Market spot averages, August 2026, all-in: vans about $2.93, reefers $3.38, flatbeds $3.54. Industry average operating cost: $2.336 a mile and rising. Your job: know your own break-even to the penny, price round trips not loads, and treat payment timing as part of the rate.
As of August 2026, national spot averages including fuel surcharge run about $2.93 per mile for dry vans, $3.38 for reefers, and $3.54 for flatbeds, per DAT data. Linehaul-only rates excluding fuel run roughly 60 cents lower. Individual lanes vary widely around these averages.
Gross and net are different planets. An owner-operator grossing $2.90 a mile against ATRI's $2.336 average operating cost nets under 60 cents a mile before deadhead; a well-run single truck with lower fixed costs can do meaningfully better. The honest answer comes from your own cost-per-mile worksheet, not an industry average.
Any rate comfortably above your round-trip cost per mile, which is why the useful answer is a formula rather than a number. Compute your break-even (Section 3), add deadhead (Section 4), and a "good rate" becomes arithmetic: for many single-truck operations in 2026 that lands somewhere north of $2.25 to $2.50 all-in on the round trip.
Add one month's fixed costs (payment, insurance, permits) and variable costs (fuel, maintenance, tolls), divide by that month's total miles, and recompute monthly. The worked example in Section 3 lands at $1.94 a mile including the driver's wage; yours will differ, which is the point.
Hotshot freight quotes higher per-mile on smaller invoices, with economics covered in our hotshot factoring guide. Box trucks run a separate market with generally lower per-mile rates and lower costs; comparing either directly to Class 8 van averages misleads without the cost side attached.
ATRI's 2026 operational-costs report recorded the highest cost per mile it has ever measured: $2.336, with fuel at $0.48, and tolls (up 13.2%) and repair and maintenance (up 8.6%) leading the increases, in the third consecutive year of soft freight rates.
A rate per mile is an opinion. Your cost per mile is a fact.
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