How Do Trucking Companies Find Backhaul Loads?

The usual way is a load board, searched backward: instead of looking for freight near the truck now, they search outbound from the city the truck is about to unload in, on the days it will be empty, filtered to the trailer they are pulling. The loads that come back are the candidate backhauls. The fleet then judges each one on three things — how far the truck must run empty to reach the pickup, what the lane normally pays, and whether the broker pays reliably — and books the one that covers the return leg best. Fleets that hold more than one board check more than one, because a lane that looks thin on one may not be thin on another. In Trucker Path for Fleets the boards sit as tabs on one screen — TruckLoads, which is built in, plus Truckstop, C.H. Robinson and Coyote once those accounts are connected — so moving from one to the next is a click rather than another login. Every row shows deadhead miles to the pickup, total miles, weight, trailer type, the broker with their days to pay and credit score, the market average rate for the lane and the posted price, and opening a load adds the estimated toll charge and estimated driving time. Taking one turns it into a dispatched trip routed on that truck's own height, weight, length and axle count.

A backhaul is the load a truck carries on the return leg of a trip, after it has delivered the freight it went out with. The outbound leg is the headhaul. If no backhaul is booked, the truck runs that return leg empty, and those empty miles are called deadhead: the fuel, the hours and the wear are spent, and nothing is earned against them. Finding a backhaul is the direct way a fleet turns a return leg from a cost into revenue.

They describe the same stretch of road from opposite sides. Deadhead is distance driven with an empty trailer, most often the run home after a delivery or the run from where the truck sits to where the next load is waiting. A backhaul is freight booked to fill that stretch. Booking a backhaul removes deadhead miles; failing to book one leaves them. On a load board the two appear together: the deadhead column tells you how far the truck must run empty to reach a load, so a load with a high posted rate and eighty miles of deadhead can be worth less than a nearer load that pays less.

Three things are within a dispatcher's control. Search from the delivery point rather than from the yard, so the return leg is being planned while the truck is still loaded rather than after it is empty. Judge every candidate load with the deadhead to its pickup included, not on the posted rate alone. And measure what actually happened afterwards, per driver and per period, because a lane that repeatedly runs empty is a routing or a sales problem, not a dispatch accident. Trucker Path for Fleets supports all three: the board shows deadhead on every row before you book, and Driver Performance reports total miles, trips completed and excess miles by driver after the fact. Fleets that read the figures back into their own systems can pull out-of-route, scheduled and actual miles per driver through the fleet API.

In Trucker Path for Fleets, yes. The load board sits under Marketplace with four tabs on one screen — TruckLoads, Truckstop, C.H. Robinson and Coyote — with the pickup and drop-off radius, date range and trailer filters in one bar above them. TruckLoads is built in. The other three are accounts the fleet already holds elsewhere and connects once: Truckstop through a Truckstop login, C.H. Robinson with an MC number and a C.H. Robinson ID number from a load confirmation, and Coyote with a Client ID and an API key from Coyote support.

The load row carries the numbers the decision needs: deadhead miles to the pickup, total loaded miles, weight, trailer type, the broker, the broker's days to pay and credit score, the market average rate for that lane, and the posted price. Opening the load adds the estimated toll charge and the estimated driving time. A lane that looks profitable on the posted rate alone can stop looking profitable once deadhead and toll sit on the same screen, which is the point of having them there.

Add to Trips turns the load into a trip in Trucker Path for Fleets, with its stops and appointment windows carried over, routed on that truck's own height, weight, length and axle count, and sent to the driver in the Trucker Path app they already use. Nothing is retyped between the board and the dispatch board, because they are the same product.

TruckLoads, the Trucker Path load board for carriers and owner-operators, is free to search and is a reasonable place to start if you run one or two trucks. The load board inside Trucker Path for Fleets is a paid dispatcher tool — an add-on seat on an operator who already holds a Trucker Path for Fleets seat. What it adds is the other three boards on the same screen, the broker credit and market rate columns, and the handoff straight into a dispatched trip.

No. Truckstop, C.H. Robinson and Coyote each stay your account, billed and administered by them. Connecting one puts its loads on the same screen as the others so a dispatcher compares them side by side instead of opening four tabs, and a load from any of them can be turned into a dispatched trip the same way.