Driver Pay Overview

DashFuel calculates what each driver earns for every load they complete, itemizes it, and gives payroll managers a review-and-export workflow. Pay is computed per completed delivery from the rules you configure — there's no spreadsheet math to maintain.

How a driver's pay is calculated

Driver pay is driven by pay programs: named pay plans (for example "Company Drivers" or "Owner Operators") that contain the rules for how pay is built. When a load completes, DashFuel finds the driver's program and evaluates its rules, producing an itemized breakdown:

• Base pay — a percentage of the load's freight revenue, an hourly rate, or a mileage rate.

• Extra components — loading/unloading fees, a share of accessorial charges, a share of the fuel surcharge, night or weekend premiums, seniority or safety bonuses, detention, layover, holiday pay, multi-stop pay, and more — each calculated flat, per hour, per mile, per gallon, per load, per stop, or per day.

• Minimum pay floors and guarantees — if the rules produce less than a configured floor (per delivery, per load, or per day), pay is topped up to the floor. Drivers can also have daily or per-period pay guarantees.

Every calculation is recorded with its inputs and line items, so you can always see exactly how a number was produced.

Drivers not yet assigned to a pay program fall back to the classic pay model — a default pay percentage (plus a surcharge share) or the driver's hourly rate, with per-mile rate bands and per-lane driver site bids. See Classic Driver Pay and Rate Setup.

When rates conflict: precedence

When more than one rule or setting could apply, DashFuel uses the most specific one:

1. Manual adjustment (highest — an explicit correction always wins)

2. Customer override — a special rate for loads delivered to a specific customer

3. Driver override — a special rate for a specific driver

4. Program policy — the driver's pay program rules

5. Company default (lowest — the tenant-wide default pay settings)

From calculation to paycheck

1. A load completes and its freight bill is generated; the driver's pay is calculated and stored with it. The accessorials on the invoice that carry driver pay (wait time, pump-offs, split deliveries…) flow into the driver's total.

2. Managers review pay per driver and date range in Payroll, seeing the full component breakdown per delivery.

3. Exporting payroll (CSV or per-driver PDFs) marks the included loads paid.

4. Paid pay is frozen — once marked paid, a delivery's driver pay is never recalculated, even if the invoice is regenerated later.

Driver pay goes to your payroll process — it does not create a bill in Accounts Payable. (Loads hauled by outside common carriers are different: carrier costs flow through Accounts Payable, not driver payroll.)

Where things live