How Much Will I actually Earn?

OK, I saw a similar thread but the answers there were all misleading, so I think this should be posted with it's own heading, and probably made sticky or docked or whatever you call it.

If you are still in truck school, or thinking about joining onto a carrier for "free" training, or even if you aren't that serious yet, just kind of kicking around the idea of driving truck for a living...

First question you've got to answer is if you can afford it or not. Or simply stated, "How much will I actually earn?"

Here are two formulas for you to figure it out yourself:

WEEKLY PAY FORMULA:
(A times 2700 times ".8") - 200 = Your weekly take-home pay in dollars.
Where "A" is your pay rate in Dollars per mile, such as .32 dollars (32 cents) or .29 dollars (29 cents) or whatever it is.

The 2700 is a good estimate of what your weekly miles will be the first few years of OTR driving, if your dispatchers keep you moving. The ".8" should be obvious, but that's to allow for taxes. The "- 200" is to pay for road expenses, weekly. Some spend more per week, some spend less. But the average is about $200 a week for food, showers, miscellaneous expenses related to living on the road in a tractor.

PAY RATE IN DOLLARS PER HOUR:
A times 2700 divided by 80 = Dollars Per Hour
Where "A" is your pay rate in Dollars per mile, such as .32 dollars (32 cents) or .29 dollars (29 cents) or whatever it is.

Again, 2700 is a good estimate of what your weekly miles will be the first few years of OTR driving, if your dispatchers keep you moving. "80" is a good estimate of how many hours you will work each 7-day week. Note you can't log 80 hours in 7 days, obviously. But that doesn't change the fact that you will work almost 12 hours every day, 7 days a week. For 2700 miles, you will need to drive about 48 hours. But that's just driving time. Other time you are working (on or off the log book) you will be doing pre-trip/post-trip inspections, fueling, paperwork, scaling, sliding axles, re-scaling and (here's the biggie) waiting to be loaded or unloaded.

Those two formulas listed above should be pretty darned close to what you actually earn, either in weekly take-home pay or in dollars per hour. So all you need to do is ask your prospective employer what the cents-per-mile pay rate is, then you will know what you will actually earn, based on that cents-per-mile pay rate.

 

Thank You! I saw elsewhere in this web site estimates of 35,000 or 40,000 or even more your first year for earnings. I myself made $44,000 (gross) my first full calendar year of OTR truck driving. So I know that $40,000 or even more is possible. But I also believe that discussing gross yearly salary in relation to OTR Truck Driving is very misleading. That's why I posted this thread with the formulas that I did.

To illustrate why I think discussing yearly earnings can be misleading, let's compare another job (say, a banker) to a truck driver.

If you are a Banker, and you work in an office within a short drive (easy commute) from your home and you have gross yearly earnings of $45,000... taxes will cut that to about $36,000. So your take-home pay is about $36,000.

But if you are an OTR truck driver, the pay works out quite a bit differently, even if your gross earnings are identical. Let's say you are an OTR truck driver with gross earnings of $45,000 per year, just like your Banker buddy. Again, taxes cut that to about $36,000. But as a truck driver, you have living on the road expenses that your Banker buddy does not. For living a full year on the road, maintaining a separate household (your tractor), you will spend about $10,000 that your Banker buddy won't. That's about $200 per week for 50 weeks.

For the primary household, the banker and the "trucker" very likely have similar expenses. That is, they each pay things like rent or mortgage, utilities, food (for the family), etc. But the trucker also has a second household (the tractor) with expenses of food, showers, entertainment, etc...

So it works out that, even though the banker and the trucker have identical gross income per year, the trucker brings home about $10K less. And let's face it...regardless of what you earn, your take-home pay is the bottom line.

That's why I posted the first formula not as yearly income, but as weekly take-home pay. I believe it is a more accurate (much less misleading) way of estimating how much you will earn as a truck driver.