Every rate you are quoted for a one-way movement contains a journey you never asked for. The truck has to get home. Whether it does that loaded or empty is not your decision, but you pay for it either way, because the round trip is what the vehicle actually performs.
That is the whole of the backhaul question. It is not a clever technique. It is the observation that half of what you buy is invisible to you, and that on a small number of your lanes you can do something about it.
This is about finding and pricing that return leg. Measuring how much of your own fleet's distance runs empty is a different job, and so is deciding whether to run fixed routes at all.
A backhaul is not a discount, it is a second customer
A return load is a load that happens to move in the opposite direction to yours, at roughly the same time, in the same kind of vehicle. When one is found, the vehicle earns twice on the same journey. The saving is real, and it gets split between whoever finds it, whoever supplies it and whoever carries it.
This matters because of what it rules out. You cannot ask for a backhaul rate. You can only ask for a rate on a lane where a return load exists, and the difference between those two sentences is where most of the money is lost.
If a carrier has nothing to bring back from your destination, the empty return is a fact about the geography of your lane, not a negotiating position. Pressing on price there gets you either a refusal or a carrier who has agreed to something it cannot sustain.
The four tests a return load has to pass
Only a small fraction of candidate loads survive all four. Run them in this order, because each one is cheaper to check than the next.
Geography. The return load's collection point must be near your delivery point, and its delivery point near your origin. Near means near in road distance, not on a map. A collection 60 km off the homeward road is 120 km of deviation, and it has to be paid for out of the backhaul before anything is left over.
Timing. The return has to be loadable while the vehicle is still there, or on the next available shift, and the driver has to have legal hours left to move it. This is the test that kills the most candidates and the one people check last.
Equipment. A curtain-sider, a flatbed, a tipper and a reefer are not interchangeable. A return load that needs a different body is not a return load for that vehicle.
Commodity compatibility. What was carried outbound constrains what can be carried back in the same space. Food after chemicals, clean goods after dusty bulk, anything after a spill. The cleaning time, if it is even possible, comes out of the same saving.
Notice that three of the four are physical facts you can settle in an afternoon, and the fourth is a policy question you can answer once for your whole operation.
The cheapest return load you have is the one you are already buying
Most companies buy transport twice and only notice once. Outbound finished goods are bought by the person who runs distribution. Inbound raw materials, components and packaging are usually bought delivered, on the supplier's terms, by procurement, and their freight cost is buried inside the purchase price where nobody ever looks at it as freight.
If any of those inbound flows starts near where your outbound flow ends, you already own both halves of a round trip and are paying two separate parties to perform them.
Arranging for bought-in goods to be collected by the vehicle you already have there, rather than delivered separately by the supplier, is the oldest available answer to the empty leg. It is also the only version of a backhaul you fully control, because both ends of it are your own commercial relationships.
The work is not clever. It is a list of your inbound suppliers with their collection addresses next to a list of your outbound delivery points, sorted by province, looking for pairs. Almost nobody has ever put those two lists on the same page, because they live in two different departments and two different budgets.
Three warnings before you start.
- The purchase price will not fall by the freight amount. A supplier quoting delivered has priced its own delivery somewhere inside that number, and it will not necessarily tell you where. Ask for the ex-works price as a separate quotation rather than asking for a deduction.
- You now own the risk on that leg. Collecting goods yourself moves the point where responsibility passes. That belongs in the purchase terms before the first collection, not after the first damaged pallet.
- You can only count the saving once. If the same return leg is used to justify a lower outbound rate and a lower inbound purchase price, one of the two is imaginary.
What it looked like when somebody actually did it
A Thai transportation company of more than twenty years, carrying agricultural commodities such as maize, cassava chips and soybean meal, had begun hiring outside vehicles when its own fleet stopped covering the work. Published research on that operation set out what pairing outbound and return movements produced over January and February B.E. 2564.
The finding tool was a spreadsheet. A run control register with a row per vehicle movement, carrying the date, the time, the plate, the commodity, the origin and the destination of the outbound job, and then, in a second block of columns, the date, time, commodity, origin and destination of a return collection. The test applied to each row was whether the place the outbound load came off and the place a return load went on lay on a similar route.
Two results are worth more than the saving itself.
Only four routes could be paired at all, and those four were the ones nearest the company's own base. This is what a real pairing exercise produces. Not a transformed network, a short list.
The pairs were not same-day. In the published register most outbound movements ran on one day and the return load was collected the following morning. The vehicle stayed out. What the pairing removed was an empty journey, not a working day, and those are different savings with different values.
The recorded result was 137 external vehicle hires removed and 489,600 baht over the two months, which is about 2.3 hires a day across the period and
489,600 ÷ 137 = 3,573.72 baht
per hire avoided.
What a return leg is actually worth
The number above is the useful one, because it is smaller than people expect and it shows why.
A separate table in the same study prices an average vehicle hire in that operation at 7,500 baht a trip, on an average of 20 trips a month. Against that trip, the same table gives fuel at 6,000 baht a fill and 10 fills a month, maintenance at 5,000 baht a month, other running costs at 1,500 baht a month, and a vehicle instalment of 44,250 baht a month. Per trip that is:
| Line | Per month | Per trip | Share of the 7,500 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fuel | 60,000 | 3,000.00 | 40.0% |
| Maintenance | 5,000 | 250.00 | 3.3% |
| Other running | 1,500 | 75.00 | 1.0% |
| Vehicle instalment | 44,250 | 2,212.50 | 29.5% |
| Remainder, being labour and margin | 1,962.50 | 26.2% |
Two things fall straight out of that table.
The fuel line does not disappear. Whatever you do about the empty leg, the vehicle still burns fuel driving home, and if you fill it, it burns slightly more. Only about 30% of a trip price is the standing cost that a second load genuinely spreads.
So the saving is roughly half a trip, not a whole one. The 3,573.72 baht recorded per avoided hire is 47.65% of the 7,500 baht that the same operation prices a hire at. The study does not join those two figures together, so treat the comparison as indicative rather than measured. But the direction is exactly what the cost structure predicts, and it gives you the shape of a reasonable ask.
Then use it as a ceiling, not a target. If you hand your carrier a return load on a lane it already runs for you, the most it has gained is the distance it was going to drive anyway, less the fuel to carry your goods and the time to load them. Asking for the whole of the second trip price back will end the conversation. Asking for a share of about half of one, with the deviation and the loading time deducted, is a conversation the carrier can have.
The licence that stops you selling your own empty leg
This is the part that catches out companies running their own trucks, and it is worth checking before anybody builds a plan on it.
Thai law does not treat a truck as a truck. It treats it according to whose goods are inside. The Land Transport Act defines การขนส่งส่วนบุคคล, private transport, as transport for one's own trade or business. Carrying somebody else's goods for a fee is การขนส่งไม่ประจำทาง, non-fixed-route transport, defined as transport เพื่อสินจ้าง, for hire, and that is a different licence.
Section 23 prohibits carrying on any of the four kinds of transport without a licence from the registrar. Section 27 makes the relationship one-way: a fixed-route, non-fixed-route or small-vehicle licence may be used as a private transport licence, but a private transport licence cannot be used the other way round, and no licence holder may use a vehicle for the wrong type without occasional written permission from the registrar.
So the obvious idea, selling the empty leg of your own fleet to the factory next door, is carrying goods for hire. On a private transport licence that is a breach of Section 23, and Section 126 sets imprisonment of up to five years, or a fine of 20,000 to 100,000 baht, or both.
There is a second trap that applies to your carriers as well as to you. Section 39 forbids the holder of any of the four licences from using, or allowing anyone else to use, the authorised vehicle to perform transport outside the route or outside the locality authorised. Under Section 30, the central registrar issues the licences for Bangkok, for inter-provincial transport and for international transport, while a provincial registrar issues licences for transport inside that province. A licence covering one province does not silently stretch to a return load from the next one. Written permission from the registrar is the route, and Section 137 prices going without it by the number of vehicles used outside the permitted area, at up to 5,000 baht per vehicle per day until it is corrected. That is a fine that accrues, not a one-off.
One further point matters to foreign-owned manufacturers. Section 24 puts a nationality test on the applicant for the fixed-route, non-fixed-route and small-vehicle licences, requiring Thai nationality, and for a private limited company, registration under Thai law, a head office in the Kingdom, not fewer than half the directors of Thai nationality and not less than 51% of the capital in the Thai hands the section defines. It does not name private transport. A foreign-owned manufacturer can therefore hold the licence to move its own goods while being structurally unable to hold the licence that would let it sell the empty leg. For that company there are only two honest routes to the return journey: fill it with its own inbound freight, or buy the outbound from a licensed transportation company that can fill it with somebody else's. The licences and the order of the set-up decisions sit behind this.
None of the above is a reason to avoid backhauls. It is a reason to be clear about which of the two you are doing: filling your own return, which is your own business, or carrying for hire, which is a licensed activity.
Why the matching is harder than the arithmetic
Thailand has had an organised attempt at this for longer than most people realise. The Division of Logistics at the Department of Industrial Promotion has run a backhauling programme since B.E. 2555, offering participants a transport management system and a matching system that pairs return movements, with not fewer than 113 establishments having used it.
The programme's own account of why this is hard is more useful than the software. The stated obstacle is not routing. It is that companies cannot find counterparties whose needs fit, and that doing the matching by hand is slow and mistake-prone. And the stated key to making it work is that operators have to group together, share transport data, and trust each other: the party handing over goods has to be satisfied they will not be lost or damaged, and the party carrying them has to be satisfied it will be paid once they are delivered.
That is worth reading twice, because it tells you what a backhaul actually costs to arrange. You are asking two companies who do not know each other to exchange custody of goods and extend credit on a single journey. The reason so few pairs happen is not that nobody has done the geography. It is that the geography is the easy half.
It also tells you who is best placed to do it. A transportation company that already carries for many customers on the same corridor is looking at a much larger pool of candidate pairs than you are, and it can match without either party having to trust a stranger. This is the standard reason primary movements get outsourced at all: the operator carrying for many shippers is more likely to find the backload than the shipper carrying only its own goods.
What to give your carrier so it can find one
You are usually not the one who finds the return load. What you control is whether your lane is findable, and every item here is free.
- Regularity. A lane that runs on the same days every week can be planned around and paired. One that appears at random cannot be, and gets priced as a one-off with the empty leg inside it.
- Notice. A return load has to be arranged before the vehicle sets off, not after it arrives. Notice is the raw material of matching, and the ladder of what each step of notice buys is worth reading alongside this.
- A loading window at the far end, not a loading time. The pairs in the published case loaded the next morning. A carrier that can leave your delivery point without a fixed release deadline has far more candidates.
- Your inbound flows, on the table. Tell the carriers you already use where your suppliers are. Several of them will already be running near one.
- Nothing in the contract that forbids it. Exclusive use, dedicated vehicle and no-other-cargo clauses are sometimes bought deliberately and are sometimes copied in from a template. If you have one, you have paid for the empty leg on purpose. Check which it is.
What to expect
Most of your lanes will not pair. In the one published Thai case, an operation running many movements a day found four routes, and they were the closest ones. That is a normal result and it is not a failure of the exercise.
The lanes that do pair tend to share three features: they are long enough for the empty distance to be worth removing, they run often enough to be planned, and the far end is a place where other goods actually originate. An industrial province with two-way flow produces pairs. A delivery point at the end of a road where nothing is made produces none, at any price, and that is a fact about the location rather than about your negotiation. Where the two-way flow of goods sits is decided long before the first quotation.
A week of work
- List your outbound lanes with origin, destination province, frequency and vehicle type.
- List your inbound flows the same way, including everything currently bought on delivered terms, which means asking procurement for the supplier collection addresses.
- Sort both by province and look for opposites. Outbound to a province where something inbound comes from.
- For each candidate, run the four tests in order: geography, timing, equipment, commodity.
- Price the deviation and the loading time before you price the saving. A pair that survives the tests can still be worth nothing after 120 km of detour.
- Take the survivors to your carriers as a round trip rather than as two jobs, and ask what the round trip prices at.
- Check whose licence covers what before anybody moves goods that are not yours, and before you assume a carrier's licence reaches the province you want the return from.
- Write the saving down once, on the leg where it belongs.