Empty miles in European road freight: what they cost and how to cut them

Empty miles are the kilometres a freight vehicle drives with no revenue-earning load on board, and in European road freight they account for roughly one in five kilometres driven. The latest Eurostat road freight journey data shows 21.6% of EU road freight vehicle-kilometres were run empty in 2024, split between 25.8% on national work and 12.6% on international work. This guide sets out where empty running comes from, how the rate varies from 7.5% in Denmark to 43.7% in Cyprus, what those kilometres actually cost a carrier, and the specific dispatch and planning changes that bring the number down.

What are empty miles (deadheading) in road freight?

Empty miles are any kilometres driven without cargo. Dispatchers also call them deadhead miles, empty running, or empty kilometres, and Eurostat uses the term "empty running" measured as a share of total vehicle-kilometres. The most common case is the leg between a delivery point and the next collection point, but it also covers repositioning to a depot, running to a workshop, and driving to a border or port to pick up a container.

Empty running is not the same as load factor. The European Environment Agency defines freight transport load factors as a share of available tonne-kilometres with empty running included, which means a truck can be loaded on every leg and still have a poor load factor because it is carrying five tonnes in a 24-tonne trailer. Empty running is the cruder and more brutal metric: the vehicle either earns on that kilometre or it does not.

One methodological detail matters for anyone benchmarking a fleet. Eurostat is explicit that road freight performance in tonne-kilometres derives only from loaded journeys, so distances travelled by empty vehicles are excluded from the headline productivity figure entirely.

How many empty miles do European trucks actually drive?

At EU level, 21.6% of road freight vehicle-kilometres were empty in 2024. The split is the interesting part: 25.8% of national vehicle-kilometres were empty against only 12.6% of international vehicle-kilometres.

That gap is not an accident. National work is dominated by short distances, single-drop runs, and one-directional flows such as construction aggregate, waste, and port drayage, where the return leg has no natural load. International work covers longer distances where an empty return destroys the economics of the whole trip, so planners fight much harder for a backhaul before the truck ever leaves. Eurostat found only five EU countries with international empty running above 20% in 2024: Austria at 22.3%, France at 21.0%, Luxembourg at 20.9%, Ireland at 20.5%, and Germany at 20.2%.

The data comes from national sample surveys carried out under Regulation (EU) No 70/2012. Malta is exempt from reporting, and Italy and Romania do not supply empty vehicle-kilometre figures, so those three countries are absent from the comparison below. You can find more European freight benchmarks across the Logifie blog .

Which EU countries have the highest and lowest empty-running rates?

The table below is the full Eurostat 2024 series for every reporting EU country, sorted by total empty running. Values are the share of vehicle-kilometres driven empty.

Source: Eurostat, road freight transport by journey characteristics, 2024 (dataset road_go_ta_tott).

Three patterns are worth reading carefully. Cyprus tops the table at 43.7% because most of its road freight either carries goods imported through ports or serves construction traffic, and both flows are one-directional by nature. Lithuania looks excellent at 11.0% overall, but its national empty running is 32.2%: the low headline number is a side effect of the fact that 93.0% of Lithuanian road freight performance is international. Denmark and Belgium sit at the other end for the opposite reason, with dense short-haul networks and high load-matching activity that keep both national and international figures in single digits or close to them.

If you operate in one country, benchmark against that country's row rather than the EU average. A German general haulier running 23% empty is at the national norm; a Danish operator at the same 23% is running roughly three times the national average.

Why do empty miles happen in European road freight?

Empty running is mostly structural, not sloppiness. Six causes account for most of it.

• Directional trade imbalance. Volume from Western Europe into Central and Eastern Europe does not match the reverse flow lane by lane. A truck delivering into a region with thin outbound volume will either wait for a load or leave empty.
• Equipment mismatch. Reefers, tankers, tippers, ADR-certified units, and mega trailers cannot take whatever load happens to be available. The freight exists; the trailer cannot carry it.
• Time and driving-time constraints. A return load that appears two days later is worth nothing to a driver who is out of weekly driving time or has a fixed booking slot on the next outbound. Waiting has a cost, and often that cost exceeds the empty leg.
• Cabotage limits. Cabotage (the right of a foreign carrier to run domestic transport inside another EU member state) is capped at three operations within seven days of an international delivery, followed by a four-day cooling-off period for that vehicle in that country. That cap deliberately restricts how much of a return journey can be filled with domestic freight.
• Contract shape. Many shipper contracts are priced one way. If the rate card covers the outbound only and the shipper carries no obligation on the return, nobody in the transaction is paid to solve the backhaul.
• Market fragmentation. The European carrier base is dominated by small operators, and a five-truck haulier simply does not see enough of the market to fill every return leg from its own book. That visibility gap is exactly what freight exchanges and matching platforms exist to close, as trans.info has documented for SME operators .

How much do empty miles cost carriers and shippers?

The IRU puts the cost of moving goods by road in Europe at 0.50 to 2.00 EUR per kilometre , depending on mode, goods type, and distance. An empty kilometre does not cost the full figure, because there is no cargo handling and fuel burn is lower without payload, but it does carry the distance-driven share of fuel, tolls, tyres, maintenance, and driver time.

Work the arithmetic for a single vehicle. Take an articulated unit running 120 000 km a year at the EU average of 21.6% empty. That is 25 920 empty kilometres. Apply a conservative marginal running cost of 1.00 EUR per kilometre, near the middle of the IRU range, and the vehicle absorbs roughly 25 900 EUR of distance-related cost that produces no freight revenue. Bring that fleet from 21.6% to 15% and you recover about 7 900 EUR per truck per year. Across 40 vehicles that is more than 300 000 EUR.

Two costs sit on top of the diesel. The first is driver time. An empty leg consumes the same finite weekly driving hours as a loaded one, and driver hours are the scarcest input in European road freight. The second is carbon. Empty kilometres emit at close to a loaded truck's rate while producing zero tonne-kilometres, which is why freight efficiency sits inside the European Commission's Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy and its target of a 90% cut in transport emissions by 2050. For shippers running Scope 3 reporting, a carrier's empty-running rate is a supplier-selection input, not a footnote.

If you want to build your own per-kilometre baseline before running these numbers, work through the freight cost per kilometre calculation guide and track your fuel line against the live European diesel price map , since fuel is the single largest variable in the empty-kilometre cost.

How can carriers reduce empty miles?

None of the following is theoretical. Each item is a change a dispatch office can make within a planning cycle.

1. Measure it per vehicle, per month. Empty kilometres divided by total kilometres, split national and international. If the number does not appear on a weekly report, it will not improve.
2. Benchmark against your country row, not the EU average. Use the table above as the reference point.
3. Price the round trip, not the leg. Quote outbound and return as one commercial unit so the return is somebody's responsibility from the start.
4. Search for the return before the outbound departs. The best return loads are gone by the time the truck tips.
5. Triangulate instead of returning. Three legs in a triangle usually beat an out-and-back with an empty return, especially on Western Europe to Central Europe lanes.
6. Reposition towards demand, not towards base. If an empty leg is unavoidable, aim it at a loading region with dense outbound volume rather than at the yard.
7. Use cabotage deliberately. Plan the three permitted operations into the return sequence rather than discovering the option after the fact.
8. Widen delivery windows contractually. A two-hour fixed slot at the receiver is often the reason a good return load was declined. Negotiate flexibility as a rate concession.
9. Automate the matching. Route optimisation and load assignment inside a transport management system will find combinations a manual planner will not, and it does so at every re-plan rather than once.
10. Get on more than one source of freight. Fragmented visibility is the root cause; the fix is exposure to more loads.

What role does digital freight matching play in cutting empty running?

Matching is the only lever that attacks the visibility problem directly. Transport Intelligence's European Road Freight Transport report found that more than 50% of road freight bookings already move through digital freight platforms, that 61.0% of surveyed companies had built such a platform, and that a further 34.8% planned to within five years. The same report names capacity and empty mileage as the operational problems that adoption is meant to solve.

The mechanism is simple. A dispatcher planning by phone and inbox sees only the loads their contacts happen to mention. A dispatcher plugged into a matching network sees a far larger pool at the moment the truck is about to go empty, which is the only moment when that information has value. Shippers benefit from the same liquidity in reverse: capacity on an imbalanced lane is cheaper when the carrier already has a paid outbound. If you move regular volume on such a lane, request a lane quote and ask explicitly how the return leg is covered.

Matching does not eliminate structural imbalance. It compresses the gap between the loads that exist and the loads an operator can see.

Is empty running in Europe getting better or worse?

Honestly, it is not improving at EU level. Eurostat reported 20% total empty running for 2020 , with 24% national and 13% international. The 2024 figures are 21.6% total, 25.8% national, and 12.6% international.

Read that carefully. International empty running has edged down, which is what you would expect as matching platforms and telematics spread across long-haul work where the financial incentive is largest. National empty running has moved the wrong way. Short-haul, domestic, and construction-linked traffic is where the structural one-directional flows live, and it is the segment least well served by cross-border freight exchanges.

Part of the movement is composition rather than behaviour: these are national sample surveys, and the mix of construction, retail, and industrial freight shifts between years. But four years of flat-to-worse EU-wide empty running is a fair signal that technology alone has not solved this. The operators who improved did so because they changed how they price and plan the return leg, not because a platform did it for them.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good empty-mile percentage for a European haulier?

It depends entirely on what you haul and where. For international long-haul work, anything under the EU international average of 12.6% is respectable and under 10% is strong. For national general haulage, the EU benchmark is 25.8%, and beating 20% is a genuine achievement. Tipper, tanker, and construction fleets will always sit higher because their flows are one-directional by design.

Are empty miles the same as deadhead miles?

Yes. Deadhead is the common North American term, empty running is the Eurostat statistical term, and empty kilometres is the everyday phrase in EU dispatch offices. All three describe a vehicle moving without a revenue-earning load.

Which EU country has the highest empty-running rate?

Cyprus, at 43.7% of vehicle-kilometres in 2024, followed by Ireland at 34.7%, Greece at 34.4%, and Austria at 34.0%. Denmark is lowest at 7.5%, ahead of Lithuania at 11.0% and Belgium at 11.6%. Italy, Romania, and Malta do not report comparable empty-running figures.

Do empty kilometres count towards tonne-kilometre statistics?

No. Eurostat calculates road freight performance in tonne-kilometres from loaded journeys only, and distances travelled by empty vehicles are excluded. That is precisely why empty running has to be tracked as a separate vehicle-kilometre metric, otherwise it never appears in the headline numbers.

Does cabotage help reduce empty miles?

It helps, within limits. A foreign carrier may perform up to three cabotage operations within seven days of an international delivery, after which the vehicle faces a four-day cooling-off period in that country. Planned into a return sequence it can convert an empty leg into two or three paid movements, but the cap means cabotage cannot fill every return.

Can empty miles ever be zero?

No, and chasing zero is the wrong target. Repositioning to a workshop, running to collect an empty container, and the final leg back to base after the last delivery of the week are unavoidable. A realistic goal is to cut discretionary empty running, meaning the legs where a load did exist but was not found in time.

Do shippers pay for empty miles?

Indirectly, always. Carriers price empty repositioning into the rate on imbalanced lanes, which is why a backhaul rate on a thin outbound corridor is higher than the headhaul in the other direction. Shippers who help their carriers fill return legs, by widening delivery windows or committing volume in both directions, generally see that reflected in the rate.

Key takeaways

Empty miles are the largest efficiency gap in European road freight that nobody puts on the invoice. Eurostat's 2024 data puts the EU rate at 21.6% of vehicle-kilometres, with national work at 25.8% and international at 12.6%, and the four-year trend shows no EU-wide improvement. At typical annual mileages the cost runs to tens of thousands of EUR per vehicle.

The operators who move the number do three things consistently:

• Measure empty running per vehicle every month.
• Price and plan the return leg as part of the outbound.
• Widen the pool of loads their dispatchers can actually see.

Looking for steady European freight with fewer empty return legs and transparent payment terms? Join the Logifie carrier network .