What are the worst states for loads for Owner Operators?

That’s like asking how long is a piece of string. No one here will know what your overhead is so profit is not going to be predicted. As far as loads go on a load board rates are ####.

 

I would imagine hawaii is a pretty rough state to get loads..although i hauled one load to hawaii from Utah.. Just had to meet the boat halfway in seattle...

 

well, when you retire, there ain't gonna be no weekly paychecks....

 

Florida is known for getting easy loads in, but there’s not many loads coming out that pay well.

 

but how long is the string

 

Oh boy. Here we go again. How many times should we do this????????

 

It’s gonna be a looooong 2023 on this site.

 

freight goes where people are and where business is.

there is a current flow to freight lanes, just like they used to use the rivers to move most of the freight from north to south, there are freight rivers from region to region that you can't see unless you saw the data of freight volumes on a chart.

some places make stuff and buy stuff, other places buy more stuff than they make, other places make more stuff than they buy.

the more population dense a region is the more stuff they buy. New York / New Jersey / "north east" is the most population dense so they buy way more than they make, if you take a load there there for ok money most of the loads leaving are garbage money.

Texas makes stuff like crazy, there is always stuff leaving Texas, it's one of top 3 largest international ports, the largest petrochemical area, population dense and manufacturing like crazy. Texas is a great place to leave.

the Midwest makes way more than they buy, less population dense and basically all the manufacturing to all 4 horizons in one spot, plus good rates coming out to get their stuff to the buyers. the Midwest you can go there and bounce around for a while, and it's not hard to get out when you're ready to leave.

if the big nodes are Texas, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, u want to figure out the timing of how to get out for enough, make enough across the week, then how to get back for enough. find spots that pay good to leave, then string together whatever u need to do to position yourself to get back to the spot that pays good to leave and do it again. or find a spot that's easy to leave, go somewhere where there's a constant feeding frenzy and just bounce around for two weeks, then go back to the spot that's easy to leave.

it's hard in general to leave the northeast and Florida, it's easy to leave Texas and Chicago, the midwest is a cornfed big boy that's always hungry and also always has something to put on your trailer. we don't talk about California.

 

Just one more time for old times sakes.

 

Food for thought... the average for owner operators is around 40-60k. If you are one those that is worried about how fast your truck climbs a hill, or trying to out accelerate the other trucks from stoplight to stoplight, odds are, you will NET pretty close to that average.