On average how much should I make my first year?

You can only work 70 hours a week. So that's your limit. You can probably drive about 120,000 miles a year. So 120,000x your rate per miles is how much you will make a year. If you never go home maybe 125,000

 

It's not the hours you work; it's the pay stucture of the company you work for.
I only know of one OTR company that pays buy the hour vs. cents-per mile & that's Liquid Trucking.
With 20 years experience, I accepted a job that paid .36 cpm and my "take home" pay averaged $1200 weekly. Accessorial pays are on top of cpm. That's why you can't base what you might make, on cents-per-mile only. Cents-per-mile is only part of the pay structure. If every driver was only paid cent's -per-mile, we'd all be on welfare.
For example, if you're in the hiring area, you can team and each team driver can make $80K per year with FFE on the "Plasma Account" and that's for new cdl school grads.
A new cdl school grad can make $125K teaming with a line haul outfit such as Old Dominion.
Most reefer new cdl grad drivers, running coast to coast can make $60K - $65K without breaking a sweat.

 

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Let's imagine you in a perfect scenerio driving 620 miles a day for .37/mi at 62 mph (I figured that might be the higher average for the mega carriers) and this would equate to 10 hours a day of work.
.37 x 620 = $230/day rounded up, but then you are out of hours on the 8th day.
So based on driving 620 miles a day for 7 days at .37 you're looking at making $1610 per week $6440 per month.
There are 52 weeks in a year and eventually you are going to want to go home plus remember you are not working 1 day because you have no hours so lets subtract 8 weeks of off time including the 1 day per week you are not working and well say you log 620 miles a day every day for 44 weeks out of 52 every year. 1610 x 44 is $70,840 per year.
That number looks pretty sweet considering you just busted your ### for 44 weeks driving 620 miles every single day... but sadly Uncle Sam didn't get his cut yet.
Ill round up and call it 71k now.
Based on a Calculator for taxes and if you live in Virgina and you are single you just lost 15k to the IRS
so now you have about 53k in the bank.. right?
Unfortunatley not.
We based this all on a perfect scenerio. You drove 620 miles a day, at 62mph for 10 hours non stop. This doesn't add in:
Loading
Unloading
Delays from shipper or reciever
Maintenance
Traffic
Weather
Waiting for a load
and the many other reasons that could cause us delay

I think ideally your first year you should look at around 45k realistically, and that's still busting your chops. =)

 

Loading
Unloading
Delays from shipper or reciever
Maintenance
Traffic
Weather
Waiting for a load
and the many other reasons that could cause us delay
Except for traffic; all the above pay accessorial pays. At least, every company I've ever worked for did. Not all companies pay detention for "weather" delays, but many do.

 

You're absolutely right, I think for me when I was with knight it was like 15-20/hr but only for a certain amount of time.

 

It depends on where you work. They don't hand out average pay to everyone. Don't work for CRST, CR England, Western Express.

 

Breakdown pay, we were paid hourly starting the minute we logged a breakdown. Hourly pay was up to 8 hours per day, then went into a hotel/motel with paid for meals.
Different companies have various policies on that and the other pays.
One reefer outfit, we were paid $25 for the stop, then hourly pay until we left the customer.
Stop pay covered the first hour, then the hourly pay kicked in.
That's one reason I liked pulling reefers; the pays were good. "Shipper/receiver, delay me as long as you want; I'm on the clock until you sign my paperwork."

 

I agree, I know with Knight I had these pays but none of them were equal to just being on the road making money. Dentention pay kicks in after waiting for 2 hours.
I don't think much of this would effect the big number at the end though when I was trying to lay out a good example. It might be +/- $1000 but I know in my 4 years I never pocketed that much money from delays or breakdown.

 

Thread to shakalaka?Thread to shaklaka? Any update?