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The Money Side of a Small Truck Business, in Numbers

Updated September 2026

Most advice about small-business money comes with a statistic attached, and most of those statistics can’t be traced to anything. This guide uses only figures we read at the organisation that published them — the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the IRS, the Department of Labor — and says what each one measured. Where a well-known number fails that test, we say so.

None of this is specific to hauling, junk removal, roll-off or moving; nobody publishes that. It is the best available picture of businesses your size.

Cash: half of small employers say it arrives unevenly

The Federal Reserve Banks survey small employers every year. In the edition fielded in late 2024 (7,653 firms with 1–499 employees), 75% said rising costs of goods, services or wages were a financial challenge, 56% said paying operating expenses was, and 51% said uneven cash flow was.

How thin is the cushion? The JPMorgan Chase Institute looked at about 597,000 small businesses with Chase accounts and found the median business held 27 days of cash — enough to cover 27 days of its usual outgoings if money stopped coming in. A quarter held 13 days or fewer. That study used 2015 data and only one bank’s customers, so treat it as a shape, not a current reading: for a typical small business, one slow-paying month is the whole cushion.

The practical reading for a truck business: the dump fee, the fuel and Friday’s payroll go out this week, and the commercial customer pays in 30 days. Knowing what each job cost the week it happened is what lets you see the gap before the bank balance shows it.

Late invoices: common, and a vendor’s number

Intuit QuickBooks publishes a yearly late-payments report. Its 2026 edition says 59% of the businesses it surveyed had invoices 30 or more days overdue (47% the year before), and that those with unpaid invoices were owed $17,700 on average. Its 2025 edition (2,487 US businesses with 0–100 employees) put 56% as being owed money on unpaid invoices.

Read that for what it is: a survey by a company that sells invoicing software, partly of its own customers. The direction is believable; the exact percentages are not a census.

  • Invoice the day the job is done, not at month end. The 30-day clock starts when the invoice is sent, not when the truck left.
  • Send proof with it — the photos, the scale ticket, the signed-off job. An invoice that answers the customer’s questions doesn’t sit in a queue waiting for someone to ask them.
  • Know which customers pay late. A contractor who pays in 60 days is a loan you are making; price it that way or ask for a deposit.

Hours and payroll: the record is the law

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, an employer has to keep specific records for every non-exempt worker — including the hours worked each day and the total hours each workweek. The Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet #21 sets out the retention: payroll records for at least three years, and the records the pay was calculated from — time cards, schedules — for two years. States can require longer.

It matters because errors get collected. In fiscal year 2025 the Wage and Hour Division recovered more than $259 million in back wages for 176,957 employees — about $1,465 a worker. Construction alone accounted for $43.4 million for 18,340 employees. Those are federal cases only; state agencies and private lawsuits are on top.

A crew that texts its hours on Friday is a crew whose hours you cannot prove on Monday. The point of a time clock is not catching anyone — it is that when a former employee says they worked 50 hours, you have a record made at the time that says what they worked.

Receipts: a card statement is not proof

The IRS is direct about this in Publication 583: proof that you paid an amount does not, by itself, establish that you are entitled to the deduction — you should also keep the documents that show what the cost was for, such as the sales slip or the invoice. For vehicles, Topic 510 says the law requires you to substantiate expenses with adequate records.

How long to keep them, from the IRS’s own page:

  • 3 years — the general rule.
  • 4 years — employment tax records, counted from when the tax was due or paid, whichever is later.
  • 6 years — if income was under-reported by more than 25% of what the return shows.
  • 7 years — for a bad-debt or worthless-securities claim.
  • Indefinitely — if no return was filed, or a return was fraudulent.

Thermal-paper fuel and scale receipts fade in a glovebox. A photo taken at the pump or the scale house, filed against the truck and the job, is the version that still exists at tax time.

One thing fleets miss: the IRS standard mileage rate (70 cents a mile for 2025) can’t be used by anyone operating five or more vehicles at the same time. At five trucks you are on actual expenses — which means the receipts are the deduction.

What a truck costs to run

The American Transportation Research Institute surveys for-hire carriers every year. Its 2026 update put the industry-average cost of operating a truck in 2025 at $2.336 a mile — the highest it has recorded — or $1.854 a mile before fuel. It also reported truckload operating margins below 1%.

That survey is mostly highway tractor-trailers running long miles. A local junk or roll-off truck runs far fewer miles with far more labor and idling per mile, so your per-mile figure will be higher and is not comparable. What carries over is the structure: labor is the biggest line, fuel and repairs come next, and the margin is thin enough that one untracked cost per job is the profit.

Fuel moves faster than anything else on the list. The Energy Information Administration publishes the national average on-highway diesel price every week; check it rather than trusting a number in an article, including this one.

  • Cost every job with its real disposal fee. When one dump run empties a truck three jobs filled, each job owns part of that ticket. Spread evenly across the month, the fee hides which jobs lose money.
  • Put labor on the job, not just on the week. Two people for five hours is a cost of that job.
  • Look at price against cost per job type — cleanouts against construction debris against single items — a few times a year, and move the prices that don’t cover themselves.

How many businesses make it

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks every employer establishment in the country through unemployment-insurance records. Of those that opened in the year to March 2024, 77.9% were still operating a year later. Of those that opened in the year to March 2020, 51.4% were operating five years on. Of the March 2015 group, 34.7% reached ten years.

Two cautions. "Didn’t survive" includes businesses that were sold, merged or closed by choice, not only failures. And the count leaves out businesses with no employees.

Two statistics to stop repeating

"82% of small businesses fail because of cash flow." Every trail for this figure ends at the same attribution — a person at U.S. Bank — with no study title, year, sample or document. Sites that repeat it, including well-regarded ones, give no citation. We could not find a study behind it, so we don’t use it. The Federal Reserve and Chase Institute figures above make the same point and can be checked.

"The American Payroll Association says time theft costs X% of payroll." The figure attached to that sentence is anywhere from 1.5% to 8% depending on who is quoting it, and none of them link to a document. We could not find an APA study containing any of them. The Department of Labor figures above are the ones with a source — and they point the other way: the documented, collected cost is employers getting hours wrong.

Work it out on your own numbers: What an hour of your crew actually costs

RelayPoint, in your trade’s words: Movers · Junk removal & hauling · Roll-off & dumpsters · Landscaping & tree service · Portable sanitation & septic

Sources

  1. Federal Reserve Banks — Small Business Credit Survey, 2025 Report on Employer Firms — fielded Sept–Nov 2024; 7,653 employer firms
  2. JPMorgan Chase Institute — Cash is King: Flows, Balances, and Buffer Days — 2015 data; about 597,000 Chase business customers
  3. Intuit QuickBooks — 2026 Small Business Late Payments Report — a vendor’s survey
  4. Intuit QuickBooks — 2025 US Small Business Late Payments Report — a vendor’s survey; 2,487 businesses
  5. US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division — Fact Sheet #21: Recordkeeping Requirements under the FLSA
  6. US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division — WHD by the Numbers — fiscal year 2025
  7. US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division — Low Wage, High Violation Industries
  8. IRS — Publication 583, Starting a Business and Keeping Records
  9. IRS — Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car
  10. IRS — How long should I keep records?
  11. IRS — Standard mileage rates
  12. American Transportation Research Institute — An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update (release)
  13. US Energy Information Administration — Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update — weekly
  14. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Business Employment Dynamics, Table 7: Survival of private sector establishments by opening year

This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice, and RelayPoint is not a law firm, an accountant or a compliance consultant. The figures are other organisations’ published findings, read in September 2026 at the addresses listed under Sources; they describe the businesses those organisations studied, not yours, and none of them is a result of using RelayPoint.