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For truck drivers

Before you sign that lease or carrier agreement, check these three things.

Drivers who lease onto a carrier sign agreements that decide much of their take-home pay. Deductions, escrow and the rules for ending the lease matter as much as the rate per mile or the percentage of the load.

Owner-Operator Lease.pdfPage 1 of 8
Example
High risk— review carefully before you sign

This operating agreement lets the carrier deduct any cost from your settlements and hold escrow with no refund date.

Lower riskHigher risk
Against youHigh · Payment

Any charge can come out of settlements

No list and no amounts: what comes out of each settlement is up to the carrier.

Ask for

Check which costs can be deducted, and ask for each one to be listed with its amount.

  • Escrow can be applied to anything owedLow · Payment
  • No date for the escrow refundLow · Termination
See the full sample analysis →

The numbers

In May 2025, there were 2,062,040 wage and salary jobs for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in the U.S., with a median annual wage of $58,640.

Median hourly wage, U.S., May 2025: heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers ($28.19) and 28 other occupations these pages cover. Each dot is one occupation's median.

These figures count jobs, not people, and do not include self-employed work — so they say little about how many heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers work freelance or run their own business.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025, national estimates for SOC 53-3032. Public domain.

Deductions, escrow and ending the lease

  1. Deductions and chargebacks — Check which costs the carrier can deduct from settlements, and whether each is listed with an amount.
  2. Escrow — If money is held back in escrow, look for how much, what it can be used for, and when it is returned after the lease ends.
  3. Ending the lease — Check the notice period and what you owe if either side ends the agreement early.

Check the agreement before you lease on

A lease agreement decides what a settlement is worth. Free: one analysis every 30 days, no card. Each analysis gives a risk read of the key clauses, quotes the contract's own words for its findings, and turns each flagged clause into a specific ask.

Analyze my contract — free
  • Encrypted in transit & at rest
  • Files auto-deleted after 30 days
  • Never used to train models
  • Informational — not legal advice

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