Maintenance reserve calculator: how much to set aside per mile

By Edwin Horton · Updated October 2026

How the maintenance reserve calculator works

A repair reserve turns unpredictable repair bills into a steady per-mile cost. Every mile the truck runs, a few cents go into an account that pays for the next brake job, tire set or injector.

• Reserve per mile = repairs and maintenance per mile + tires per mile + extra for age or known issues
• Per truck per year = reserve per mile × miles per year
• Per truck per month = per year ÷ 12
• Fleet per month = per truck per month × trucks
• Last year's spend per mile = last year's repair bills ÷ miles
• Shortfall = last year's bills − a year of this reserve (when positive)

EXAMPLE A truck runs 110,000 miles a year. The owner uses the 2025 industry average for repairs and maintenance, $0.215/miATRI, Operational Costs of T…Repair and maintenance cost per mile, 2025$0.215/miATRI's 2026 Operational Costs of Trucking: repair and maintenance (parts, labor, roadside service; tires counted separately at about $0.05/mi) averaged $0.215 per mile in 2025, up 8.6% from 2024. Truckload fleets under 5 trucks averaged $0.275 per mile, against $0.169 for fleets over 1,000 trucks. By region: Midwest 21.4, Northeast 22.1, Southeast 19.8, South Central 19.4 and West 21.9 cents per mile.ATRI, Operational Costs of Trucking (2026 edition), 2025Checked Oct 2026Close, plus 5 cents for tires and 3 cents extra because the truck is past 500,000 miles: 29.5 cents a mile. That's $32,450 a year, about $2,704 a month per truck. Last year's repairs were $24,000, so the reserve would have covered them with room to spare.

Each jar in the result shows how much of last year's repair bill a year of this reserve would have covered. A full jar means you're covered; a short one means the reserve is too thin for that truck.

Is your reserve big enough?

Reserve covers last year with room: good. The room goes toward the big items that don't come every year: an overhaul, a transmission, a full set of drive tires.

Shortfall: raise the extra per mile, or plan for the gap with cash. A shortfall usually means an older truck, hard routes, or deferred maintenance catching up.

No history yet: start with the average, track every repair for a year, then switch to your own number. Small fleets often run above the average; ATRI's data showed fleets with fewer than five trucks spending noticeably more per mile on repairs.

Fuel is the other big variable cost. Check what a fuel card saves with the fuel card savings calculator, and see how dispatch fees compare with the dispatcher fee calculator.

Make it policy

Put the reserve rule in writing; our truck driver handbook template has a section on equipment care and reporting defects early. The fleet benchmark report tracks published repair costs by year. On our small fleet dispatch desk, empty miles are planned down, because they wear the truck without paying into the reserve.

Review the reserve every quarter. If the account keeps growing past the cost of your biggest likely repair, you can lower the cents per mile a little. If it keeps getting drained, raise it, or look hard at whether the truck should stay in the fleet. The reserve tells you the truth about a truck before the repair bills do.

Start from last year's invoices

• Total last year's repair invoices for each truck
• Separate tires from other repairs if your records allow
• Add extra per mile for trucks past their warranty
• Open a separate account for the reserve