With April 15 having arrived, it’s time for Todd Amen to answer the annual question posed to him by FreightWaves: what sort of numbers are truck drivers filing to the Internal Revenue Service this year?
Amen is the president of ATBS, which primarily services independent owner operators. Amen put the size of the business management company’s client base at about 20,000, and part of the services it provides is the filing of income tax returns.
ATBS’ data provides a rare insight into the finances of over the road economics year in and year out. (Previous stories about Amen’s calculation of average driver pay and shared with FreightWaves can be found here.)
The key number: $71,800 was the average income for owner operators in 2025, according to Amen. But there’s a hitch.
Amen said ATBS has changed its methodology in determining that number. A prior practice that took out some of the extremes–the lowest-paid and the highest-paid as outliers–has been changed along with a few other steps.
So the end result is that while the average income for 2024 reported by ATBS under the old system was $64,000, the $71,800 for 2025 was basically flat to the 2024 figure if that latter number had been calculated on the same basis as the 2025 number.
But within that largely unchanged average number, there’s plenty of variability.
Amen said the 2025 figure was able to come out mostly flat to 2024 because of the surge in rates at the end of the year that has continued into 2026. Revenue per mile increased about five cents per mile year over year, he said, “and that all came in the fourth quarter.”
Amen noted that any impact from diesel prices was flat, since the comparison of full year average fuel prices between 2024 and 2025 was largely unchanged.
Amen, in his interview with FreightWaves, said he had no firm numbers on how much better drivers did in the first quarter of 2026 relative to 2025, but his summation of what he does know was succinct: “it’s good.”
The data compiled by ATBS also revealed that total miles driven by the company’s clients was down. The average number of miles driven by Amen’s customer base was about 95,000 miles for the year, which he said declined about 4%.
Miles driven are down
That development is unusual, Amen said. In tough times, he said, drivers tend to pile up more miles to make up for weak per mile freight rates. “I just think the miles weren’t available until the very end of last year,” he said. “They weren’t there no matter how many miles I wanted to run.”’
But things were different in the first quarter, Amen noted. And he cited a reason that has been heard widely: “How much of it is the illegal driver enforcement,?” he said. “I think that’s a big part of it.”
Except for the final weeks of the year, the general consensus in the trucking market was that 2025 was disastrous. And yet the average income stayed mostly steady, according to Amen’s calculations.
The ones who made it through, Amen said, “are crafty and smart when you know the ones who survived.”
Driving without a truck payment
A new statistic for 2025 calculated by ATBS is that 34% of the company’s clients do not have a truck payment. While a firm number had not been calculated previously by ATBS, Amen said he knows that 34% is far more than in recent years. He estimated pre-COVID, only between 15% and 20% or drivers would have had no truck payment.
“I think a lot of drivers paid off their trucks during COVID with government stimulus and when they were making great money,” Amen said. “So they’re just running when they need to and where they need to, but they can survival”
The drivers who are in that position, with no truck payment to make, are avoiding a monthly bill that Amen said averages $2,900 per month. “So if you take out that from the equation, a driver can survive and run where he needs to and put food on the table,” he said.
A big issue drivers faced last year was the rise in maintenance costs.
Crazy maintenance
“Maintenance is crazy,” Amen said, saying those costs had risen 6.5% last year from 2024. Drivers are now spending about 14 cents per mile on maintenance when a few years ago it would have been closer to 6-7 cents, Amen said.
“Maintenance costs have gone up a ton,” Amen said. “That’s not going to change.”
The ATBS figures also highlight the top earners. That top 10% saw their earnings peak during COVID at about $276,000 per year. That number is now down about 5%, Amen said.
Of the top earners, Amen said, “they are all super specialized, whether it’s hazmat, whether it’s government freight, all those kinds of things.”
The top third of all drivers is pulling in about $166,000, down from a COVID peak of about $188,000, Amen added.
“They’re down, but it’s not enormous,” Amen said, particularly in light of just how insanely high earnings were during COVID.
The impact from higher fuel costs
The strong outlook for 2026 built into freight rates has a new threat for independent owner operators: fuel costs.
Amen said he did not have hard data yet, but that many of his drivers are spending about an additional $350 per week on diesel.
Many of the independent carriers working for brokers are beneficiaries of a fuel surcharge levied by the broker against the shipper. But Amen said the drivers don’t necessarily see all of that.
“The brokers can pull the wool over the owner operators’ eyes sometimes and say, hey, I know fuel costs you more,” Amen said. The brokers are getting a little bit more (through the fuel surcharge) but maybe not pass through the full rate they’re getting.”
The result, Amen said, is that “the individual owner operator is taking longer to make up increased rates to compensate for the price of fuel.”
What is offsetting that to some degree, Amen said, is a heightened knowledge base in the driver community about how fuel markets work and how the drivers can be protected from getting hit by rising diesel costs.
“They’re getting smarter,” Amen said. “Everybody writes about it and there’s just so much data that lets them know what to ask for.
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The post ATBS: average truck driver earnings in 2025 held mostly stable from ‘24 appeared first on FreightWaves.
