ATRI Releases Estimated Cost Per Mile 2025

At its simplest, business is revenue minus expenses: you try to make more money than you spend. While everyone’s cost-per-mile profile is different due to an abundance of factors, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) likes to compile information as a general rule-of-thumb. Here is what they found as a result of their 2025 survey.

Details

There are multiple interlocking reasons that determine the cost of operating a truck on a per-mile and a per-hour basis, including:

• Fuel cost.
• Lease or purchase payments.
• Repair/Maintenance.
• Truck insurance premiums.
• Permits/Licenses.
• Tires.
• Tolls.
• Driver wages.
• Driver benefits.

When collecting this data from willing participants, ATRI found the average to be $2.336 per mile traveled. This is an increase of 3.4% from 2024.

But the news is not all doom-and-gloom. As stated at the beginning of this article, business is about revenue minus expenses, and revenue is doing good, increasing faster than expenses.According to the fine folks of DAT Freight and Analytics, current spot rates are higher than they were a year ago:

• Dry van spot rates are up 29.4%.
• Flatbed is up 35.8%.
• Reefer is up 21%.

While these are comparing 2025 to 2026 numbers, as opposed to ATRI’s 2024 to 2025 numbers, the numbers still show strong promise. Unless trucking costs increased across the board by over 20% in the last year, an unlikely possibility, the trucking industry still comes out ahead, which explains why there is a bit of a “gold rush” happening in the trucking industry right now: the last few months have had enormous year-over-year percentage gains in terms of the number of orders and sales.

Conclusion

While the cost of doing business has increased, so has the rate earned per mile for each truck, and as such, the trucking industry is arguably in its best position since the recovery form the COVID-19 pandemic, where bottled-up demand exploded like a bottle of Diet Coke being handed a Mentos.

If you want to participate in this explosion, TopMark Funding can help by working with our various funding sources to get you the best financing rate for your particular credit score. Read on below as to what we can do for you!

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