Cost of truck driver turnover: a formula where every input is yours

The cost of truck driver turnover is what your fleet spends to replace each driver who leaves: recruiting and screening, orientation and training, the fixed costs and lost profit of trucks that sit without a driver, and the lower output of a new driver while they learn your freight. Add your annual costs in each bucket, then divide by the number of drivers you hired to replace departures.

Published per-driver estimates range from a few thousand dollars to more than $20,000 depending on the fleet and on how well it keeps records. That spread is the reason to run the formula on your own books instead of borrowing an average.

The formula

Cost per replaced driver = (A + B + C + D) ÷ R

A + B + C + D on its own is your annual cost of turnover. Dividing by R gives the cost to replace one truck driver.

The structure follows the worksheet the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute (UGPTI) at North Dakota State University published with its study The Costs of Truckload Driver Turnover. That study grouped costs into entry and exit administration, fixed costs of idle equipment, profit lost on idle equipment, and other costs including safety, insurance, legal, maintenance and lost productivity. Its replacement-hire count subtracts fleet growth, so drivers hired to add trucks aren't charged to turnover.

How to fill in each input

A: hiring and onboarding. Use the full year's spend, not a per-hire guess. Include recruiter salaries only for the share of their time spent replacing drivers. If your fleet pays drivers to attend orientation, count that pay plus hotel and meals. Screening costs belong here too. As of October 2026, final federal rules in effect require, for drivers subject to drug and alcohol testing, a pre-employment drug test with a narrow exception for recently tested drivers (49 CFR 382.301), a Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse full query (49 CFR 382.701) and motor vehicle records from each state that licensed the driver in the past 3 years (49 CFR 391.23), so those costs recur with every hire. Our driver onboarding best practices post lists the required steps.

B: idle equipment. This is often the largest bucket. Count the average number of tractors with no driver during the year, excluding trucks waiting to be sold or prepared, which UGPTI also excluded. Multiply by what one truck costs you to own for a year whether it moves or not.

C: lost profit. Use your real margin. Margins are thin in much of trucking. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) reported that truckload and refrigerated operating margins stayed below 1.0% in 2025, and flatbed carriers averaged a loss (ATRI, July 15, 2026). With margins that thin, C can be small while B stays large: an unseated truck still costs money even when its lost loads would have earned little.

D: new-driver costs. Estimate the miles or loads a new driver runs below a settled driver in their first weeks, and value the gap at your contribution per mile. Add any claims, damage or maintenance cost you can trace to new drivers. This bucket matters for safety too. A 2003 research report sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, now hosted by ATRI, found that crash odds rise once a driver averages more than two job changes a year. It said its results reinforce the broad view in industry and government that even experienced drivers who change jobs "represent an increased crash risk during the first three-to-six months with the new carrier" (Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Retention and Safety, 2003).

R: replacement hires. Take total hires and subtract net growth. If your headcount stayed flat or shrank, subtract nothing: every hire replaced someone, so R equals total hires.

Worked example

Illustration only, not real fleet data. A fleet starts the year with 100 drivers, ends with 104, and hires 52.

• R = 52 − (104 − 100) = 48 replacement hires
• A = advertising $60,000 + recruiter and staff time $70,000 + screening 52 × $250 = $13,000 + orientation pay, hotel and travel 52 × $1,500 = $78,000 + sign-on and referral bonuses $40,000 = $261,000
• B = 5 unseated trucks on average × $30,000 annual fixed cost = $150,000
• C = 5 trucks × $200,000 revenue per truck × 2% margin = $20,000
• D = ramp-up output gap 48 × $1,000 = $48,000 + new-driver claims and maintenance $30,000 + exit admin 48 × $150 = $7,200 = $85,200

Annual cost of turnover = $261,000 + $150,000 + $20,000 + $85,200 = $516,200. Cost per replaced driver = $516,200 ÷ 48 = about $10,754.

The same fleet had 48 separations on an average of 102 drivers, a turnover rate of about 47% by the BLS JOLTS method (BLS technical note). See how to work out your truck driver turnover rate.

What moves the number

• Unseated trucks. In the example, idle equipment is 29% of the total. Faster hiring or a smaller fleet cuts B directly.
• Early quits. A driver who leaves in week three carries the full A cost with almost none of the return. Track the first 90 days as their own group.
• Recruiting channel. The National Academies' 2024 report on long-distance trucking found that drivers recruited through referrals from current drivers appear less likely to leave (National Academies, 2024). A referral bonus can cost less than the turnover it prevents.
• Record keeping. UGPTI found that "the better the records are kept, the higher the actual cost." Fleets that tracked fewer items reported lower costs, because they left items out.

Published estimates, with their dates

Use these only as labelled examples. None is a current industry average.

UGPTI itself warned that its carriers were not chosen at random, that the companies supplied the data, and that some of the most important cost items weren't available. Many carriers "simply do not keep the numbers that are required for a full calculation," the authors wrote.

Is it cheaper to pay more than to replace drivers?

Sometimes. Trick, Peoples and Ross (2021) found that drivers who stayed earned $54.25 a week more than drivers who left (2018 dollars), about $2,836 a year or 6.02% above leavers' mean wage. Because that gap was smaller than the per-driver turnover cost they compared it with, they concluded "it is cost effective for trucking companies to increase driver compensation."

The National Academies report adds a caution. Long-distance truckload carriers compete mainly on price, and the committee, drawing on an economic model of truckload costs, found that a typical carrier may accept high turnover because cutting it to less-than-truckload (LTL) or private-fleet levels can cost more in pay, routing and lost revenue. Run the formula on your own fleet first, then test any change against it. If a raise isn't possible, see driver retention without raising pay and how to retain truck drivers.

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This article is general information, not legal advice. Confirm requirements against the current regulation text and with your compliance counsel.