Drivers Pay

Personally coming up on my one year of experience I’ve done the math these last couple of months regarding CPM.

I have to say any driver that’s got experience should not be working cents per mile unless it pays like GP transco and Walmart. There are more good paying cents per mile jobs but not a lot like the two above.

I can honestly say that hourly is the way to go.

I however want to dedicate a full year to U.S express but once a year hits I’m out. And I won’t take any trucking job that doesn’t pay hourly unless it’s Walmart.

Those are interesting conclusions. I really like being paid by the mile. Here's why...

I make a lot more money than the guys I am competing against. Mileage pay gives me an incentive to bust my ass and be productive. It allows me to determine my own income. I master things like the HOS rules and trip planning. I create a level of trust with my teammates in the office so that they can trust me to get more done than anybody else on the team. That relationship gives me priority over anybody else in my fleet. They literally do everything they can to keep me rolling.

I recently had to come off the road. I wish you could have heard the phone call I got from my driver manager. He was screaming, "NO! NO! - this can't be happening!" He actually broke down into tears during the call. He literally said this to me, "Dale, in over twenty years of doing this, I have never worked with a driver like you."

Hourly pay takes all the incentive out of driving for me. I want to know that I can produce the level of pay I want by being productive. It is a goad that pushes me to develop myself into something worthwhile. I love the feeling of accomplishment that performance based pay provides. I was all about the challenges when I got into trucking. I had plenty of them too. They helped to form my career and my success at it. Truckers like to focus on numbers. One of those numbers is CPM. I never focused on that number. I always put my focus on producing good numbers. I wanted to be hyper productive. Mileage pay allowed me the privilege of proving myself. I literally had drivers working right along beside me who were making the same CPM as I was, but when you compared our total take for the year, mine was double theirs. They were earning fifty grand a year and quite content with that. Not me. Mileage pay allowed me to double their income and gave me the control over my total income.

Bring it on! I love getting paid by the mile - it is a great motivating factor in my trucking success.

A scenario: Remember, the Company owns the truck, pays the fuel and the customer wants the load quickly.

Dispatch from St. Louis, MO to Anaheim, CA. 1,800 miles using I-70, I-15. At 50 cents/mile this earns $900. Approx 32 hours drive time.

1. Pay the driver by hub miles (actual road miles driven) driver chooses to route though Dallas/I-40. 2100 Miles. Pay: $1,050

2. Pay by hours @ $32/hr, but driver goes 50mph: $1,152

Just like a building contractor bids a job as a piece, the company quotes you're dispatch to keep everybody moving and cuts out the funny business.

Personally coming up on my one year of experience I’ve done the math these last couple of months regarding CPM.

I have to say any driver that’s got experience should not be working cents per mile unless it pays like GP transco and Walmart. There are more good paying cents per mile jobs but not a lot like the two above.

I can honestly say that hourly is the way to go.

I however want to dedicate a full year to U.S express but once a year hits I’m out. And I won’t take any trucking job that doesn’t pay hourly unless it’s Walmart.

Those are interesting conclusions. I really like being paid by the mile. Here's why...

I make a lot more money than the guys I am competing against. Mileage pay gives me an incentive to bust my ass and be productive. It allows me to determine my own income. I master things like the HOS rules and trip planning. I create a level of trust with my teammates in the office so that they can trust me to get more done than anybody else on the team. That relationship gives me priority over anybody else in my fleet. They literally do everything they can to keep me rolling.

I recently had to come off the road. I wish you could have heard the phone call I got from my driver manager. He was screaming, "NO! NO! - this can't be happening!" He actually broke down into tears during the call. He literally said this to me, "Dale, in over twenty years of doing this, I have never worked with a driver like you."

Hourly pay takes all the incentive out of driving for me. I want to know that I can produce the level of pay I want by being productive. It is a goad that pushes me to develop myself into something worthwhile. I love the feeling of accomplishment that performance based pay provides. I was all about the challenges when I got into trucking. I had plenty of them too. They helped to form my career and my success at it. Truckers like to focus on numbers. One of those numbers is CPM. I never focused on that number. I always put my focus on producing good numbers. I wanted to be hyper productive. Mileage pay allowed me the privilege of proving myself. I literally had drivers working right along beside me who were making the same CPM as I was, but when you compared our total take for the year, mine was double theirs. They were earning fifty grand a year and quite content with that. Not me. Mileage pay allowed me to double their income and gave me the control over my total income.

Bring it on! I love getting paid by the mile - it is a great motivating factor in my trucking success.

I respect your drive and I am also a driver who grinds. In my first year I’m gonna make $70,000 plus. CPM has definitely motivated me but I really had no other choice other than to grind my HOS.

Most good CPM jobs pay better than hourly but I would still prefer hourly for myself. Especially from what I see in my area offering. Today is one of those days I came to work only to have my truck break down before I got out the yard. I normally get out the yard in 30 minutes. Well, because of the truck holding me up which can happen in our field I didn’t get out the yard for over an hour and a half. That’s a hour+ of unpaid time. Once it adds up weekly you can see how I’m doing the math.

Of course, I’m sure most would say who cares if you’re making $70,000 a year. I say I could have had more. There is a big gap between the time I’m not paid for things I can’t control.

I could fix this if I ran illegally like so many drivers do on our yard but I don’t. So I’m limited to $1200-1400 most weeks

I believe there should definitely be hourly pay for things done while not driving, there are far more aspects to trucking than just holding a steering wheel that the driver does uncompensated.

Last 2 days I have had to do shuttles since the usual shuttle guy is off sick, so I was on the clock its only a 20 mile drive to the other terminal which makes mileage pay unreasonable. Yesterday I had to do a tractor swap and bring them back one of their trucks off of PM and pick up another for repair, I jumped into the one I was driving up there and it needed a parked regen right away because it's a P&D truck that does not get a lot of highway miles. If I was mileage I would have to sit there for the entire 40 minutes it took for it to finish uncompensated.

Mileage and hourly pay should be used in conjunction with each other to better compensate drivers. However realistically it will probably result in a low CPM and hourly pay resulting in about the same pay driver make now and just appear different on paper.

However realistically it will probably result in a low CPM and hourly pay resulting in about the same pay driver make now and just appear different on paper.

That's precisely what I was about to say. No matter how it sliced up, the whole process of getting products from a to b will pay only so much. That pay isn't just for driving, as some would think. It should also include the incidentals that go along with driving. We as drivers have the choice of taking the job offered or not. It isn't exactly fair to join the game by taking the job, only to want to change the rules afterward. Nobody forced anyone to take the job.

There are always going to be occasional things that pop up. Most of those things will be absorbed in your normal pay, and should be considered part of the job as a cpm driver, in my opinion.

When looking at the big picture, there aren't many other jobs out there where you can start out of the gate making between $50k-$100k with relatively minimal training or investment.

No matter how it sliced up, the whole process of getting products from a to b will pay only so much.

This is a very important point in a discussion like this one. There is a market value for moving goods. We drivers get ourselves all in a lather some times thinking one way of getting paid is going to net us more money than the other. The simple truth is that you are going to get paid well at this if you prove to be good at it. Turtle and Leeva804 are both great examples of what I am saying. One of them is hourly, and the other is paid by the mile. I think Leeva804 is serving the same customer that employs Turtle. They are both doing an excellent job, and because of that they are making more than your average truck driver.

The point I like to bring out in these discussions is that hourly pay requires more hours to increase your income. Some trucking jobs pay really great hourly pay, but if a driver proves to be putting in too many non productive hours he won't last long. They aren't going to keep paying him more than the market value of moving goods if he isn't worth what he's getting paid. Let's take a guy like Leeva804 who is productive and understands how to manage his time properly so that he is hyper productive. He is getting more done than some of his fellow drivers, yet his companions are working the same amount of time as he is. In a scenario like that he should be getting paid more than them. If he is moving more goods, then he should be rewarded for his ability to make that happen. They are getting paid the same rate, yet Leeva804 is the more productive driver. If they are all working 70 hours per week they are all making the same money.

Now, I get mileage pay. I am on a small team of about fifteen drivers. Let's assume we are all getting mileage pay in the amount of fifty CPM. if I am out working everybody and getting more done, I will be earning much more money than them. If I can average 3,000 plus miles per week I am getting paid for every bit of it. That doesn't matter if I can do that in 62 hours or 70 hours. If my fellow drivers are producing less miles while still bumping up against their 70 hour clock each week, and being forced off the road for a 34 hour reset, I am going to get paid considerably more than them.

I have been shown records where guys working my same account, at the same pay rate as me, earned half of what I did. Productivity, as opposed to amount of time, is what controls my level of income. I can use my head to figure out how to be more productive. There are hundreds of ways I can do that, and the circumstances which might affect my productivity can change with each week. I can be the master of those circumstances if I can properly react to them on any given occasion.

Whether you are on mileage pay, or hourly pay, you are going to be limited by the amount the freight market is willing to pay you. That limit is based on how much freight you can move. With mileage pay you are rewarded for your ability to outsmart and outwork your competitors. This is a competitive field whether we recognize it or not. I can assure you the markets recognize that. investors are going to invest in the most productive trucking companies. Those trucking companies are going to employ the most productive drivers. Productivity rules the markets in the world of Logistics.

There is not necessarily a right or wrong choice here. I just like knowing that I can get rewarded for my ability to produce more than the average driver. Mileage pay does that for me. I get to control how much money goes on my paycheck.

I've been paid by the mile and I've been paid by the hour. I prefer hourly. I get paid for everything I do at the same generous rate, from log in to log out. Getting loaded/unloaded, driving, sitting in traffic, fueling, you name it. When I was at Schneider, getting paid by the mile, I was only making money when I was rolling. It was like pulling teeth trying to get the accessory pay that I deserved. The driver managers had a list of excuses as long as their sleeves for why they couldn't pay detention pay in many situations. I spent many hours of that year on ridiculous searches for empty trailers, time that I was very poorly compensated for. These are just a couple examples of the drawbacks of being paid by the mile. Hourly pay takes a lot of stress out of the job and I have no problem staying motivated. The company knows how to reward their drivers that go above and beyond, too.