The Truck Is Paid For. Nobody's Driving It.
What an open seat costs you a day, what one turn costs end to end, and what a year of turnover comes to — from your revenue, your time-to-fill, your cost per hire. Free, no signup.
- No signup
- Runs in your browser
- Contribution, not gross
/ What the gap costs /
Your open seats, per day
$299$2,090 a week in lost contribution
One full turn
$18,450
The wait costs more than the hire. Time-to-fill is the lever, not recruiting spend.
- Contribution per seat
- $2,090 /wk
- Turns per year
- 4.4
- Turnover, annual
- $81,180
- …as % of fleet revenue
- 3.5%
One day faster is worth
$1,314/ year
Cut one day off your time-to-fill across every seat you turn this year. If that beats what faster hiring costs you, it pays for itself.
Nothing here is sent anywhere — it runs in your browser.
How the empty-seat math works
The same steps the calculator runs, worked through on its default fleet, so every line can be checked against the panel above. Change an input and it repeats them on yours.
- What a seat contributes$5,500 revenue a week × (1 − 62% variable costs)$2,090 a week
- Today's open seats$2,090 ÷ 7 days × 1 empty seat$298.57 a day
- The wait, per turn$2,090 × 35 days to fill ÷ 7$10,450
- One full turn$10,450 waiting + $8,000 to hire$18,450
- Turns a year8 trucks × 55% annual turnover4.4 turns
- A year of turnover$18,450 × 4.4 turns$81,180
- Against fleet revenue$81,180 ÷ ($5,500 × 52 weeks × 8 trucks)3.5%
- One day faster$2,090 ÷ 7 × 4.4 turns$1,313.71 a year
What the number cannot tell you
- Days to fill is an average. One seat that stays open for months costs far more than the average shows, and a single figure cannot see it.
- Turnover drives the annual line and is the least precise input. A count of the seats you refilled last year is enough for an order of magnitude, not a budget.
- It prices the seat, not the person. A hire who quits in the first weeks restarts the clock, so an early quit costs a second full turn, not part of one.
- Revenue per truck is one ordinary week. When freight is strong the same open seat costs more, and in a slow month it costs less.
What to do with it
- Replace the cost per hire with your own: advertising, screening, checks, the physical and drug test, orientation and paid training — whatever you can defend.
- Look at the split bar. Whichever half is bigger, the wait or the hire, is the one worth working on first.
- Hold the value of one day faster against what faster hiring would cost you. The recruiting funnel calculator shows where applicants drop out.
- Recount turnover each quarter. It drives the annual line, and a single early quit moves it.
About the empty-seat math.
Because a parked truck also costs less to run. No diesel, no driver pay, no tire wear — those stop with the wheels. Counting the full revenue as lost would overstate the damage by whatever those would have been — the variable cost share you entered. This tool loses the contribution instead: revenue minus the costs that only happen when the truck moves. It's the smaller number, and it's the one that survives an argument.
Deliberately absent, and not because they don't matter. They bill the same whether the seat is filled or empty, so they are identical on both sides of the comparison and cancel out — adding them on top would count them twice. Their role is the reason contribution matters at all: fixed costs are what the contribution is supposed to cover, and an empty seat covers none of it.
Everything between the seat opening and the replacement being dispatchable: advertising and job-board spend, recruiter time, MVR and background checks, the DOT physical and drug screen, orientation, and any paid training days. If you have never totaled it, add what you can defend and leave the rest out — the split bar shows how the hire compares with the wait.
Count the seats you actually refilled over the last twelve months and divide by your truck count. Four turns in an eight-truck fleet is 50%. It doesn't need to be exact to be useful — the figure it drives is an order of magnitude, and a rough one is still worth knowing.
It's the annual value of cutting a single day off your time-to-fill, across every seat you expect to turn this year. It's the honest way to price recruiting: if a day is worth more than what faster hiring costs you, the spend pays for itself — and if it isn't, no pitch should convince you otherwise.
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