Empty kilometres are created upstream of the empty leg. A method for measuring deadhead honestly, finding where it originates, and fixing the causes.
Key takeaways
Most fleets cannot state their deadhead percentage without a guess, and the guesses are usually low. Pick one definition and hold it: empty kilometres divided by total kilometres, per truck, per week. Pull the numerator from the same source every time — your telematics platform (Geotab, Samsara and TruckMate all report odometer and trip data) or your TMS trip records, not both. Natural Resources Canada’s SmartWay program gives a rough benchmark: participating for-hire fleets averaged 15.89%–16.24% empty kilometres from 2014 to 2017, while private fleets — which lack a second shipper’s freight to fill the return leg — ran 17.07%–17.95% empty over the same years. Use it to sanity-check your own number, not to set a target; your lanes are not the benchmark’s lanes. The fuel-efficiency gap tracks it: over the same 2014–2017 span, SmartWay-reporting for-hire fleets used 3.34–3.88 litres per 100 tonne-kilometres against 4.27–5.48 for private fleets — most of that difference is unpaid empty movement, not engine technology.
Then split it, because three different things are hiding in one number.
Every one of those kilometres still gets reported somewhere, for the trucks the rule catches. IFTA defines a qualified motor vehicle as one with two axles and a gross vehicle weight over 11,797 kg (26,000 lbs), or three or more axles regardless of weight. A carrier registered under the International Fuel Tax Agreement must file a quarterly return covering all mileage travelled by its qualified vehicles, not only loaded miles — Alberta’s Tax and Revenue Administration requires it due on the last day of the month following the quarter, with a penalty of $50 or 10% of the tax owing, whichever is greater, for filing late. Your empty kilometres are already sitting in a government filing; you might as well use the same number to manage the fleet. The return comes due every quarter regardless of how the freight went — Alberta’s rules require a return even for a quarter with no travel at all, so a slow quarter does not buy a fleet out of the paperwork — and Alberta lists a clean filing history and no outstanding balance as conditions of eligibility to register for IFTA in the first place, which is another way of saying the empty kilometres you never logged can eventually cost you the credential that lets you run interprovincially at all.
The empty leg is where you see it. It is created three days earlier, when someone accepted a load into a place with no outbound freight, or accepted a delivery appointment that lands the truck in a market at 16:00 on a Friday.
So the diagnostic is not where you ran empty, but which bookings reliably produce empty legs. Sort a quarter of loads by destination region and look at the average empty distance that followed. A handful of destinations will account for most of it. Those are your problem, and the fix is a pricing conversation with that customer, not a dispatch trick.
If a destination consistently produces 300 empty kilometres afterwards, that cost belongs in the rate for the inbound load. Fleets that lose money on deadhead are usually pricing legs and dispatching round trips.
A delivery window of two hours forces the truck to sit or run empty. The same load with a 06:00–12:00 window can be reloaded the same day. Renegotiating windows with three large receivers usually beats any load-board tactic.
For lanes you run repeatedly, the outbound should exist before you commit the inbound. The Canadian boards make this practical: Loadlink and DAT both let you post the truck and search the outbound in advance rather than reactively.
Trailer drops, wash bays and shop visits generate empty running nobody counts. Consolidating shop days, using a drop yard closer to your freight, and staging trailers rather than tractors are unglamorous and they show up in the total. They also cost more than fleets assume: the hours-of-service regulations define “on-duty time” to expressly include time spent inspecting, servicing, repairing, conditioning or fuelling a commercial vehicle (s.1), so a driver sent to a shop or wash bay is burning the same clock a loaded run would, and so is one left waiting while a trailer is serviced, loaded or dispatched (s.1(v)) — the yard leg was never free, it was just uncounted.
Repositioning that a driver cannot legally complete is not repositioning. Cycle limits under the hours-of-service regulations — 70 on-duty hours in 7 days (s.26) or 120 in 14 (s.27), reset only by 36 or 72 consecutive hours off (s.28) — mean an empty leg spends the same scarce resource as a loaded one. Seasonal constraints matter too: Ontario publishes highway closures and seasonal load restrictions through Ontario 511, and a reduced-load period can make a planned reload undeliverable. Under s.122(1) of the Highway Traffic Act, a designated highway in a reduced-load period caps the weight on any axle at 5,000 kg — well under a fully loaded axle — so a truck that arrived legally loaded may not be legal to reload for the return trip on the same road.
Worked example: where the empty kilometres were actually made
A 40-truck dry van carrier believed its deadhead problem was northern Ontario. Splitting a quarter of trips by destination showed something else: two-thirds of empty distance followed deliveries into a single industrial park east of Montreal, because the receiver’s only appointment slots were 15:00 and 16:30. Trucks delivered late, could not reload that day, and ran back empty the next morning.
Nothing about the dispatch process was wrong. The fix was a conversation: the customer had 07:00 slots available and had never been asked. Moving that customer to morning appointments changed the empty pattern for a third of the fleet’s Quebec runs. The deadhead report did not find this. Sorting empty distance by preceding destination did.
You will find published deadhead percentages and savings claims attached to software. Treat them as marketing unless the source is your own fleet. What is measurable in your own data is the change — empty kilometres per truck per week, before and after one specific change, held for a quarter. That is the only number worth quoting to your own management.
No. Chasing zero produces cheap reloads that block the truck for a better-paying one and burn on-duty hours. The goal is empty kilometres that are chosen rather than inherited.
They reduce the duration of an empty leg once it exists. They do not stop it being created. Both matter, but only one is a fix.
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