Fleet Utilization is a Balance-Sheet Problem: A CFO Framework for Cost Per Mile Across Owned, 3PL and Gig in 2026

Why fleet utilization belongs on the balance sheet: the business case

Two things changed the arithmetic, and neither is operational.

The first is cost inflation in the asset itself. ATRI’s operational cost analysis puts the industry-average cost to operate a truck at $2.336 per mile in 2025, up 3.4% on the prior year and the highest since the series began in 2016. Excluding fuel the figure is $1.854 per mile, up 4.2%, with the sharpest increases in tolls at 13.2% and repair and maintenance at 8.6%. Cost per mile is rising in the lines a CFO cannot negotiate away.

The second is accounting. The old route to fleet capacity without balance-sheet consequence was the operating lease, and that route is closed. Under both ASC 842 and IFRS 16, leases beyond twelve months are recognized on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset with a corresponding lease liability, and Deloitte’s comparison of the two standards notes that IFRS 16 removes the operating and finance lease distinction for lessees entirely. Obligations that once sat in the footnotes now sit in the accounts.

The consequence is that own-versus-buy is now a genuine capital allocation decision rather than a structuring exercise. And it matters most in the leg that carries most of the cost: McKinsey puts the last mile at 60% to 70% of total parcel delivery cost.

Locus data shows what the capital side of this looks like when nobody is measuring it. A Fortune 50 parcel and freight enterprise found more than $14M in unused contracted capacity, including $565K at a single site once the analysis was scaled across 25 more, while lifting weekly execution rate from 75% to 92%. That was capacity already paid for and not consumed, which is the same failure as an underused owned asset in a different accounting line.

Also Read: What Is Fleet Utilization? Key Metrics and Importance in 2026

How to build the cost-per-mile framework

Step 1: Split owned-fleet cost into fixed and variable

Separate what you pay regardless of miles from what you pay per mile. Fixed typically covers finance or lease payments, insurance, licensing, telematics and an allocation of fleet management overhead. Variable covers fuel, driver wages and benefits attributable to driving hours, tires, repair and maintenance, and tolls.

Step 2: Add a capital charge, because cost per mile does not contain one

This is the step that changes the answer. An owned vehicle ties up capital that has an opportunity cost, so multiply the capital deployed per vehicle by your weighted average cost of capital and treat the result as an annual fixed cost. On illustrative inputs of $150,000 deployed at a 10% WACC, that is $15,000 a year that no operational cost-per-mile report contains.

Step 3: Establish the market rate you are actually comparing against

The comparator is not a 3PL’s headline rate. It is the all-in rate you would pay for equivalent capacity at your volume and service level, including accessorials, fuel surcharge and any minimum commitment. Comparing an internal partial cost to a supplier’s full price is the most common error in this analysis and it always favors owning.

Step 4: Solve for the breakeven annual miles

Breakeven miles equal annual fixed cost plus capital charge, divided by the contribution per mile, where contribution is market rate minus your variable cost per mile. On the illustrative inputs above, with $45,000 fixed, a $15,000 capital charge and a $1.00 contribution, breakeven is 60,000 annual miles. Omit the capital charge and it appears to be 45,000, a 25% understatement.

Step 5: Compare breakeven against the utilization you can actually achieve

This is the sequencing point. Utilization is capped by demand variability, maintenance and mandated non-driving time, so the relevant question is not what utilization you want but what your operation can sustain. If your achievable utilization implies fewer annual miles than your breakeven, the vehicle should not be owned.

Step 6: Run the same calculation per vehicle class and per site

Duty cycles, capital cost and achievable utilization differ by vehicle class and by location, so a fleet-level answer will be wrong for most of the fleet. Refrigerated units, box trucks, last-mile vans and linehaul tractors each need their own breakeven, and a site with lower demand variability can justify owning where another cannot.

Also Read: Fleet Utilization for 3PLs: How to Maximize Asset Performance Across a Multi-Client, Multi-Fleet Operation

The breakeven, and what utilization does to it

Illustrative inputs: $45,000 annual fixed cost per vehicle, $150,000 capital deployed at a 10% WACC, $1.60 variable cost per mile, $2.60 market rate per mile, 100,000 miles of practical annual capacity. Substitute your own figures.

Two conclusions follow, and both are uncomfortable.

First, the curve crosses market rate at roughly 61% utilization, which is close to the achievable ceiling for a typical last-mile operation once demand variability, maintenance and mandated non-driving time are subtracted. For that profile, owning is roughly break-even and any shortfall in utilization makes it the wrong answer.

Second, a seasonal or service operation with an achievable ceiling nearer 48% is running around 48,000 miles against a 60,000-mile breakeven. It should be buying capacity, and it will usually conclude otherwise, because the breakeven it calculated omitted the capital charge and told it 45,000 miles was sufficient.

Also Read: ROI of Logistics Technology Investments: How to Measure It

Owned, 3PL and gig on comparable terms

The framework that follows is a tiering exercise rather than a choice. Own the base volume that reliably exceeds breakeven miles, contract the predictable layer above it that you do not want on the balance sheet, and buy the peak at the margin. What most operations do instead is size the owned fleet for something close to peak, which guarantees low utilization on the marginal vehicles and therefore a cost per mile above market on exactly the assets that were hardest to justify.

What to look for in fleet analytics and orchestration

Utilization reported per vehicle class and per site. A blended fleet figure cannot support a per-class breakeven, and the breakeven is the decision. Confirm the platform segments rather than averages.

Time, distance and capacity utilization measured separately. They move independently, and only one of them maps to the miles in your breakeven calculation. A composite score cannot tell you which constraint is binding.

Cost per mile that can carry a capital charge. Ask whether fixed cost inputs are configurable per vehicle, so a finance team can add a capital charge and produce a fully loaded figure rather than an operational one.

One plan across owned, contracted and gig capacity. Tiering only works if a single plan can allocate across all three and attribute cost correctly to each, otherwise the comparison is reconstructed in a spreadsheet after the fact.

Committed capacity consumption tracking. The cheapest capacity you can buy is the capacity you already committed to. Confirm the platform reports contracted capacity used against contracted capacity purchased, by site.

Also Read: 3PL CFO ROI Framework: Quantifying Dispatch Automation

The framework in action: real-world results

Fortune 50 parcel and freight, 4,500 drivers, 51 sites. Capacity was contracted and dispatch decided locally, so nobody could see whether committed capacity was being consumed. Centralizing execution on Locus lifted weekly execution rate from 75% to 92% and surfaced more than $14M in unused contracted capacity, at 99.99% uptime. For a CFO the relevant point is that this was spend already committed, so recovering it required no new capital.

Global FMCG, 10 countries, 5,000+ riders. Distribution across 1,000+ distributors with demand peaks differing by market, which is the pooling case that raises achievable utilization. On Locus the operation reached 3X ROI with more than 12,000 trips saved per month across $4B+ in optimized orders. Trips saved is capacity recovered rather than a cheaper trip.

Common mistakes in fleet cost-per-mile analysis

Omitting the capital charge. The single most consequential error. On illustrative inputs it understates the ownership breakeven by 25%, which systematically biases every own-versus-buy decision toward the fleet you already have.

Comparing internal cost to a supplier’s headline rate. Your cost per mile is partially loaded and their rate is fully loaded. Compare like with like by adding your capital charge and overhead allocation, and by adding their accessorials and surcharges.

Using one fleet-level breakeven. Vehicle classes differ in capital cost, duty cycle and achievable utilization, so a single number will be wrong for most of the fleet and most wrong for the specialist assets that cost the most.

Sizing the owned fleet for peak. It guarantees that marginal vehicles run at low utilization, which puts their fully loaded cost per mile above market. Peak is the volume to buy, not the volume to own.

Why Locus makes the mixed-fleet decision measurable

Locus, the world’s first Decision-Intelligent, Agentic TMS, plans owned, contracted and gig capacity in one plan while accounting for each separately, which is the precondition for running this framework on real data rather than in a spreadsheet.

The Digital Supply Chain Officer (DiSCO) framework runs a continuous Sense-Decide-Execute-Learn cycle across eight specialized agents, reasoning over 250+ real-world constraints. The Capacity Agent models owned, contracted and third-party tiers distinctly, with their own cost and reliability characteristics, so base volume can be tiered to owned assets and peak bought at the margin. The Carrier Agent allocates across 1,000+ pre-integrated carriers through ShipFlex, which is what makes buying peak capacity a configuration rather than a procurement project. The Dispatch Agent plans across the whole pool, raising the utilization that owned assets actually achieve and therefore the miles that go into your breakeven. Analytics and Insights reports utilization and cost per delivered order by vehicle class and by site rather than as a fleet average, with fixed cost inputs configurable so finance can add a capital charge and see a fully loaded figure.

Also Read: AI-Powered Fleet Utilization Analytics 2026

Across more than 1.5 billion deliveries for 360+ enterprise customers in 30+ countries at 99.99% uptime, Locus has produced over $320M in documented logistics cost savings and removed more than 800 million miles from the road. Locus has been recognized by Gartner for seven consecutive years, including the 2026 Gartner Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Execution and Logistics Technologies, is a Leader in Transportation Management Systems in the QKS Group SPARK Matrix, and ranked #1 in Route Planning on G2’s 2026 Best Software Awards.

In October 2025, Ingka Investments, the investment arm of Ingka Group, the world’s largest IKEA retailer, acquired Locus. Locus continues to operate independently.

Request a Locus fleet economics assessment to run your own breakeven against the utilization your operation can actually achieve.