Owner-Operator Pay

Every carrier office has had this argument at least once, usually right after a driver walks in waving a rate confirmation and asking why his check looks smaller than he expected. Percentage pay versus per-mile pay isn’t a philosophical debate. It’s a math problem, and most of the time the argument keeps going because nobody actually ran the numbers on the load in front of them. So let’s run them. ...

Ask five dispatchers how they calculate a driver’s settlement and you’ll get five slightly different answers, and at least one of them will be wrong in a way that costs the carrier money or the driver’s trust. The settlement step is where a lot of small fleets quietly lose accuracy — not because anyone’s being careless, but because the math has more moving parts than it looks like from the outside. ...