Load Boards for New MCs - Rate Accuracy

NJ rates suck most of the time in my eyes if you are using the load board. If you plan on doing O/O over the road you can make that but can also lose very easy. Know your lanes and the brokers you use.

If you have the ability to watch DAT all day long you will see how they play the game. Short runs normally pay better per mile but less revenue per day unless you can get a couple in a day. Hard to do in that area because of traffic and to be honest they suck around that area. Also dont forget you have tons of tolls in the area that kill profit fast.

I normally do not use the DAT boards but will use broker boards. To many people out here trying to take cheap freight on DAT and TruckStop. Soon as anything is posted it gets grabbed up for whatever the broker wants. If it sits on the board than it might be worth trying or could be a really crappy load.

Not a good time to be in trucking and believe it will be bad the rest of 2025 with a pick up maybe at the end. Git in at a higher than normal failure. As far as LTL loads you can do them with full truck if they have the room most of the time. Good money in LTL if you can get some constant customers but load board I would stay away from in my experience to hard to deal with them. Maybe in your area it would work better?

Good luck in what you try, Nothing wrong with trying to do your own thing!

 

The rates you're seeing on the boards are real. If you can make a living on that then more power to ya!

Board freight is trash freight. It's a joke of a business model. Find a real customer. Again, there's a guy like you posting here almost every day asking the same things over and over. It's like Groundhog Day.

People like you are a dime a dozen. There's thousands of you swimming around underbidding each other into slow bankruptcy over garbage.

Spend some quality time reading posts on this forum. Don't post...READ and you'll see/learn everything you'll need to know.

Someone will be along shortly to tell you how they're doing so well running spot freight but my advice is to take that testimony with a grain of salt because there's more to their situation than you know.

 

Just looking at rates mean nothing.
When you call in they can say is has 17 drops or that 350 mile load has a delivery appointment 3 days from pick up.
Happens allllll the time.

 

2.20 mile for 350 miles is a load to fill in your day when you had a morning delivery and can’t find something long, or it better be a 1000+ mile run taking you to a decent paying outbound area. if you plan on doing 350 miles a day for 2.20 than you might as well be a local company driver

 

The pricing is real but it's far from what's considered decent. You called it decent but it was not decent at all - that what makes people upset here. $2.20 on 350 mile should probably be like 4 dol per mile or more because it'll take you were outbound posted rates will be like 1.25 per mile. Any daily revenue for less than one grand does not cut it anymore.

You put down 20k on a new truck, the monthly payment plus gap insurance will be about $3500, then with auto insurance, and cargo insurance close to additional $1500 for a new authority. You're looking at $5 grand of commitment every month, and how you going to get on that with revenue of less than $4000 a week, because that's what running 350 miles a day will get you.
After fuel, tolls, truck wash and prime parking, you clear maybe $2800 to the truck, from that you must pay yourself to eat. As you can see, you have to run for 2 weeks at those 'decent' rates to afford the truck and insurance installment alone.

 

To answer your question possibly yes possibly no.

In a tight Market when good loads come, they disappear rapidly. There are times you can sit there and watch the loadboard all day like you are, and chase every single load you're looking for, and it will disappear before you get an answer.

Then, when you are stuck somewhere, you sit there looking and looking and looking and looking and you're going to have to do something because every moment you sit there, you are losing money.

You need to know which areas pay what and which are better pay going in and worse going out and you have to know how to navigate that.

On top of that the rates that you are seeing right now are meaningless. In 2 weeks or a month or tomorrow, those rates could completely turn around and pay nothing.

In case you do not know, the rates in this business are not based on you having a $150,000 truck and trailer. They are based on there are too many trucks in the market, so you can just haul it for less or your truck can sit.

It doesn't matter if the load paid double last week. This week is going to be whatever the market dictates, and maybe that's half of what it was last week.

If you can't make money at $2 a mile or a $1.50 a mile or whoever will take it for the absolute least amount, then you're going to have to sit down and make nothing.

Breakdown? Pay the breakdown while you pay your monthly bills while you pay your insurance while you pay for the repair itself..

What's that? The broker made a mistake and now that load has to sit on your truck for the next 2 weeks?

Yeah you'll like how that conversation goes...

Believe me this is not a business for the inexperienced or faint of heart in any way shape or form.

Also in case you haven't figured it out, brokered trucks are a dime a dozen.

Relationships do not help you, thinking the Brokers your friend does not help you.

And don't even get me started on the broker agreements, YOWSA!

Trucks are literally a dime a dozen, and the cheapest guy gets the load, that's the name of this game.

I would only recommend this to you if you knew this industry inside out and you had been in it for many many years.

And I would only recommend it if your truck was paid for and your trailer was paid for and your home was paid for and you know how to work on your own truck.

If I was somebody outside of this industry that had whatever you have several hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn't even think twice about this.

I would buy real estate, make investments do whatever else you have to do to make money.

This is literally a business where people start with a lot of money and they go broke.

Sadly, it happens all the time.

 

The only reason you may not get some of those loads listed is your being new and brokers tend to stay shy from new entrants, especially due to a huge amount of fraud in the last few years. All it means is that you may need to call on more of those loads in your first months of activity. It'll help, if you happen to get a few random DOT inspections along the way to establish credibility that you are a real o/o with a truck
Just do yourself and everybody else a favor and when you call on a load with a listed rate, always try to bump it up for more. Those listed rates should be only looked at as what the brokers wish for themselves, not what you can get. Subscribe to DAT version which shows 30 days lane average and rate range and at least try to get that. With time, you'll get a feel for what the market can pay on a lane.

 

And the cycle continues.