Most transport operations treat an open driver vacancy as a saved salary. In practice it is one of the most expensive line items on the depot — it just never appears as a single number on a report.
Ask a finance director what a vacant Class 1 seat costs and the instinctive answer is often "nothing — we're not paying anyone." Ask a transport manager the same question and you will get a very different answer. The vacancy is being paid for; it is simply being paid for in overtime, subcontracted work, missed collections, agency cover from other suppliers, service credits and, eventually, the resignation of the driver who has covered for six weeks. This article sets out how to build an honest number, because until you have one it is impossible to make a rational decision about how hard and how fast to recruit.
A tractor unit and trailer represent a significant capital or lease commitment, and that cost continues whether or not there is someone to drive it. Finance or lease payments, insurance, VED, O-licence margin, telematics and depot overhead accrue daily. When the vehicle stands, you are paying for capacity you cannot sell.
The more meaningful figure, though, is the revenue that vehicle would have generated. Most operators can calculate an average daily or weekly revenue per vehicle from their own management accounts. Take that figure, subtract the direct running costs that only occur when the vehicle moves — fuel, driver wages, wear-related maintenance — and you have the contribution that a working unit makes. That contribution is what disappears every day the seat is empty. For most UK general haulage and distribution operations it is a materially larger number than the driver's daily wage.
Very few operators simply park the vehicle. Instead the work is absorbed, and each absorption route has its own price.
The third layer is the one that damages the business rather than the month.
Service failure. Late or missed deliveries erode the on-time performance that most contracts are judged on. In contract logistics and 3PL environments this can trigger service credits directly; in general haulage it quietly reduces the volume a customer offers you next quarter.
Growth you decline. Operators short of drivers routinely turn down work. That is a real cost, and an invisible one — it never appears anywhere except in a slower growth curve.
Compliance and safety risk. Pressure to cover work with fewer drivers increases the temptation to push at drivers' hours, plan unrealistically and defer training. The regulatory and reputational exposure that follows is disproportionate to any saving.
An unfilled seat rarely stays a single vacancy. It becomes two, because the drivers covering it decide the depot is permanently short-staffed and start looking.
This is the most expensive consequence and the least often modelled. When one vacancy is covered by sustained overtime and weekend work, the drivers carrying that load experience a measurable drop in quality of life. Over a few months, some of them leave. Each departure then repeats the entire cycle: another empty seat, another round of premium cover, another recruitment process, another induction. Operators who allow this pattern to establish itself find their annual driver turnover climbing year on year for reasons that look like a market problem but are actually a staffing-level problem. We look at how to break that cycle in our guide to reducing driver turnover in transport and logistics.
You do not need a sophisticated model. A defensible weekly cost of an open vacancy can be built from five inputs you already have:
Multiply the total by the number of weeks the vacancy has been open. Most operators are surprised by the result, and it usually reframes the recruitment conversation entirely: the question stops being "can we justify investing in hiring?" and becomes "why did we let this run for two months?"
Once you have the weekly number, the value of a faster process becomes obvious. Cutting time-to-hire from eight weeks to three is worth five weeks of that figure on every single vacancy, every year. That is why we push clients so hard on process discipline — the reasons vacancies stall are covered in why you're struggling to recruit HGV drivers, and getting the fundamentals right is covered in our guide to hiring HGV drivers in 2026.
It is also why permanent recruitment is worth doing properly. Freight Talent is a permanent-only consultancy: our specialist driving recruitment desk and our wider driver recruitment and haulage recruitment teams work the live market on your behalf rather than waiting for applications. Where the gap is at planning or management level, our transport recruitment and transport manager recruitment desks cover it, and contract-logistics clients are supported by our 3PL recruitment team. Before you commit to a rate, it is worth checking where the role sits using our salary checker — underpricing a vacancy is one of the surest ways to keep it open.
Employers: if you have a driving or transport vacancy that has been open too long, submit your vacancy and we will come back with a realistic view of what it will take to fill it, or complete a hiring brief for a fuller conversation. Candidates: if you are a professional driver looking for a permanent role with an operator that is properly staffed, upload your CV and we will talk you through what is genuinely available.
Permanent driver and transport recruitment, worked properly — so the seat gets filled and stays filled.