Turnover is up, the trucks are out every day, and the bank balance still does not reflect it. If that sounds familiar, the problem is rarely effort. It is margin: how much of each pound the trucks earn the business actually keeps.
Haulage profit margins have been thin for years. The RHA’s Haulage Cost Movement 2025 report puts average pre-tax profit across the Motor Transport Top 100 at 2.17%, and that was before diesel set a record of 200.04p a litre in October 2026. This guide explains how to calculate haulage profit margin, which margins to track, why a busy fleet can still have poor margins, where margin disappears and how to analyse it by customer. It finishes with four habits well-run operators use to protect it.
What haulage profit margins near 2% actually mean
Put the margin next to the cost of a single truck. On £1 million of turnover, a 2.17% margin is £21,700 of pre-tax profit. The RHA’s model puts the annual cost of one 44-tonne artic, including fuel, at £211,180. So the whole year’s profit covers a little over five weeks of running one truck.
That proportion is why small things matter. A business with that little headroom cannot rely on one big win. It has to stop the small losses, every week, and that starts with measuring margin properly.
How to calculate haulage profit margin
Three terms do all the work, and mixing them up causes a lot of margin confusion.
- Revenue is everything you invoice for the work: the rate, extras such as waiting time or tolls, and any fuel surcharge.
- Costs come in two kinds. Direct costs move with the job: fuel, tyres and maintenance per mile, the driver hours it uses, tolls and any subcontractor charge. Standing costs are paid whether a truck works or not: vehicle finance or depreciation, insurance, vehicle tax and levy, the trailer, and overheads such as the office, premises and software.
- Profit is revenue minus costs. Margin is that profit as a share of revenue.
The formula is the same at every level:
Margin % = (revenue − costs) ÷ revenue × 100
What changes is which costs you subtract. Take only the direct costs and you get the job’s contribution margin: what the job contributes towards the standing costs. Take everything and you get net, or pre-tax, margin. Count the driver hours a job uses as a direct cost, even if drivers are salaried, because those hours could have been sold on another job.
A worked example: one day, one truck
Illustrative assumptions: one 44-tonne artic on a day’s work for £950, covering 300 miles (240 loaded, 60 empty); a mileage-driven cost of £0.88 a mile (fuel, tyres and maintenance from the RHA 2025 model, at 2025 fuel prices); 11 paid driver hours at £24 an hour including employment costs; standing costs of £333 a working day (the RHA model’s vehicle, trailer, insurance, tax and overhead lines, £79,826 a year, spread over an assumed 240 working days).
| Line | Working | £ |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Day rate | 950 |
| Mileage-driven costs | 300 miles × £0.88 | −264 |
| Driver | 11 hours × £24 | −264 |
| Contribution | 950 − 528, a 44.4% contribution margin | 422 |
| Standing costs and overheads | £79,826 ÷ 240 days | −333 |
| Profit on the day | 422 − 333, a 9.4% margin | 89 |
Now re-price the fuel. Diesel at the end of September 2026 was about 39% above its average for January to September 2025, which lifts the mileage-driven cost to around £1.11 a mile. The mileage line becomes £333, and the day’s profit falls from £89 to about £20, a margin of roughly 2%. Same truck, same customer, same rate. The margin went because the rate did not move with the fuel.
And £89 on a good day is not the business’s margin. Days lost to maintenance, waiting, empty positioning and quiet weeks still carry their standing costs. That is how a healthy-looking job margin becomes a 2% business margin.
Which margin should a haulier track?
There are three margins worth tracking, and each one answers a different question.
| Margin | How to work it out | What it tells you | How often |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job contribution | Job revenue minus its direct costs: miles, driver hours, tolls, subcontractor charges | Whether a job is worth taking at that rate | At quote, and checked after delivery |
| Customer or contract margin | All revenue from a customer minus the direct costs of all their work, including waiting time, empty legs and slow payment | Which customers fund the business, and which the business funds | Monthly or quarterly |
| Business pre-tax margin | Pre-tax profit ÷ turnover | Whether the operation as a whole is sustainable, and how it compares with the RHA benchmark | Quarterly management accounts and year end |
Job contribution is the planner’s and the salesperson’s number: it decides whether to take the work. Customer margin is the owner’s number, because it shows where the business is quietly subsidising someone. Pre-tax margin is the accountant’s and the bank’s number. Watching only the last one is like checking the fuel gauge once a year. By the time it moves, the damage is done.
Why a busy fleet can still have poor margins
Utilisation measures how much a truck is used. It does not measure whether that use makes money, and the two can drift a long way apart. A truck can be out every day and still lose money when:
- The work is priced below cost. Regular low-rate work taken to “fill the gaps” can end up filling the whole week.
- Busy time includes waiting time. Three hours held at a gate counts as a busy truck and earns nothing unless it is charged.
- The return leg runs empty. GB-registered HGVs ran empty for 30% of their distance in the 12 months to March 2026, according to Department for Transport figures. The empty leg costs fuel, tyres and driver time and earns nothing.
- Costs rise faster than rates. The RHA found operating costs excluding fuel rose 5.91% over the year. A customer on an unchanged rate is paying less in real terms every month.
A simple test is to compare revenue per truck per working day with cost per truck per working day. On the RHA model, a 44-tonne artic costs £211,180 a year. Over an assumed 240 working days, that is about £880 a day before any profit. A day that earns less has kept the truck busy and made the business poorer. Our guide to pricing haulage work in 2026 shows how to build a day rate from your own figures.
Where haulage margin disappears
Margin rarely disappears in one place. It leaks in small amounts across the life of a job, which is why it is easy to miss.
| Where it goes | How it shows up in margin |
|---|---|
| Empty mileage | Fuel, tyres and driver time spent on miles that earn nothing |
| Waiting time | Paid driver and vehicle hours absorbed instead of invoiced |
| Underpriced extras | Tolls, demurrage, turned-away loads and extra drops left off the invoice |
| Rate errors | Jobs billed at old rates, the wrong zone or without the surcharge, then credited |
| Subcontractor costs | Subbed legs that cost more than the rate covers, or invoices nobody checks |
| POD and invoice delays | Cash tied up for longer, and disputes that end in credit notes |
| Poor customer mix | Large customers on thin rates crowding out better-paid work |
The first six are covered in detail, with the control and the measure for each, in our guide to reducing haulage costs. The last one needs its own analysis.
How to analyse margin by customer or contract
Total turnover hides a lot. A business can grow its revenue every year and still carry a customer that loses money on every job, paid for by the customers that do not.
To see it, work through one quarter of jobs:
- Group revenue by customer. Include the extras and surcharges actually invoiced, net of credit notes.
- Attach direct costs to each job. Miles at your mileage-driven cost, driver hours, tolls and any subcontractor charges.
- Add the costs that hide. Hours of waiting at that customer’s sites, empty legs that only exist because of their work, and failed or redelivered jobs.
- Add the cost of credit. A customer who pays in 75 days costs more to serve than one who pays in 30. Multiply their average outstanding balance by your cost of borrowing.
- Rank by margin, not revenue. Then read what the ranking tells you.
The result can be uncomfortable. In the illustration below, the largest customer brings in more than half the revenue but only just over a quarter of the contribution.
What to do with the answer is a commercial decision, not an automatic one. A low-margin customer may still cover standing costs that would otherwise go unpaid, so dropping them can make things worse. Sensible first moves are to reprice, to charge for the waiting time and extras the analysis exposed, to tighten payment terms, or to change the mix of work you take from them.
How well-run operators protect haulage profit margins
Analysis tells you where margin goes. Keeping it is a matter of habit, and four habits do most of the work.
1. Cost every job before you quote
Start from your own cost per mile and day rate, including empty running, and quote up from there. That gives you something to stand on in a rate negotiation. Not “the market says”, but “this is what the work costs us”. Price the extras too: a fuel surcharge linked to an index, waiting time beyond an agreed allowance, and failed or turned-away deliveries. Our haulage cost per mile guide shows the working.
2. Run compliance every day, not the week before an audit
Under DVSA’s guide to maintaining roadworthiness, safety inspection records and drivers’ defect reports must be kept for at least 15 months. Since the April 2025 update, every safety inspection is expected to include a brake performance assessment. The RHA’s cost report notes the minimum of four laden brake tests a year, one of them the MOT. Evidence assembled as you go costs a few minutes a day. Evidence reconstructed before a DVSA visit costs days, and is weaker for it. Our guide to DVSA Earned Recognition evidence covers what a well-joined record looks like, whether or not you apply for the scheme.
3. Treat driver retention as a planning job
Replacing a driver costs recruitment, training and lost work while the truck stands. Among HGV businesses with vacancies in early 2026, the three most common reasons were drivers leaving the industry, better pay elsewhere and retirement, each cited by around a third, according to the same DfT figures. Pay is part of it: the RHA’s survey summary found a median driver pay rise of 3%, against 5.3% nationally. But some of what drives people out is decided at the planning desk. Plans change late and nobody tells the driver. Slots cannot be met. There is no live ETA, so a driver cannot plan a break. Fixing those costs less than a vacancy.
4. Build skills in the office, not just on the road
Logistics UK’s 2026 Employment and Skills Report describes a widening capability gap and found that 61.6% of HGV drivers and 47.7% of warehouse managers are aged 45 or over. In the office, that risk is concentrated in the senior planner who knows every customer’s quirks, or the administrator who is the only one who understands the invoicing spreadsheet. List every task only one person can do, train a second person on each, and move the knowledge into a shared transport management system rather than a notebook.
| Habit | First step this month | What to measure |
|---|---|---|
| Cost every job before you quote | Work out your own cost per mile and day rate | Job contribution at quote, and margin by customer monthly |
| Run compliance every day | Time how long one vehicle’s records take to produce | Minutes to produce 15 months of records |
| Treat retention as a planning job | Count late plan changes per driver for a week | Late changes per driver, per week |
| Build skills in the office | List the tasks only one person can do | Number of single-person tasks |
None of these habits depends on a particular product. They do depend on having one reliable record of the work, so the numbers are there to count. If that is where your operation struggles, the TMS for growing hauliers and TMS for Transport Managers pages show how HaulierMagic approaches it at different fleet sizes.
Haulage profit margins are set partly by the market and partly by what happens inside the business. You cannot change the first. Calculate margin at the level that answers your question, find where it leaks, know which customers carry the business, and the four habits will keep more of every pound the trucks earn.
