Every fleet owner knows an empty truck is expensive. Far fewer can say what it costs per day, which makes it hard to judge whether any recruiting spend is worth it.
Where $800 comes from
The figure is FMCSA’s own estimate for a commercial vehicle that is down, published in the Federal Register on 10 August 2026. It is not our number and we did not model it. We quote it because it is public, checkable, and conservative compared with what most owners tell us on the phone.
What it folds in:
- The truck payment, which does not pause
- Insurance, which does not pause either
- The loads you turned down because nobody could run them
- The share of fixed overhead that truck was carrying
What it does not fold in: the driver you already trained who left, the dispatcher’s time spent re-covering freight, or the customer who stopped calling after the second missed pickup.
The arithmetic against a sourcing fee
Five trucks sitting for thirty days, at that estimate, is $120,000 of lost capacity. The same five trucks running with drivers we found, over the same thirty days, costs $3,750 in our fees. That is 3.1% of what sitting costs you.
The comparison is deliberately unfair in one direction and we should say so: we are comparing a cost you are definitely paying against a fee you only pay once the truck moves. If we never seat anyone, the fee is zero and the $120,000 stays exactly where it was. That asymmetry is the entire product.
What the number does not tell you
It does not tell you how fast a seat gets filled. We do not publish a time to fill, because we have not measured one across enough fleets to put a number on it that we could defend. When we have, we will publish it with the month and the sample size.
It also does not tell you whether a driver will stay. That is why the fee is per day rather than per hire: if he leaves in week three, you stop paying in week three.
If you want to run your own version
The calculator on the home page takes your own downtime figure. Replace $800 with what a parked truck actually costs you, and the ratio updates. Most owners who do this put their number higher than FMCSA’s, not lower.