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A Nickel a Mile: What ATRI's 2026 Cost Report Says About Tires and Retread Strategy

ATRI's latest operational-cost report puts tires at about 5 cents per mile and rising 6.4%. Small per mile, large per fleet — and worth managing.

Published October 4, 2026 · Good Hope Retreaders

Every July, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) publishes its Operational Costs of Trucking update — the benchmark most fleets use to sanity-check their own cost per mile. The 2026 update, covering 2025 operations, landed with a headline number: the average cost to run a truck reached a record $2.336 per mile, up 3.4% on the year. Buried in the line items is a number that matters to anyone who buys, retreads, or supplies tires.

What ATRI actually reported about tires

• Tires averaged about 5 cents per mile in 2025 (parts and labor), up 6.4% — after rising by only about a tenth of a cent in each of the previous two years.
• Regionally, tire cost was highest in the South-Central U.S. (about 5.2 cents per mile) and lowest in the West (about 4.6 cents).
• ATRI's explanation for the jump: tariffs on natural rubber from Southeast Asian countries, plus synthetic rubber costs tied to petroleum prices.
• Repair and maintenance — which ATRI surveys separately from tires — averaged $0.215 per mile, up 8.6%.
• Context: every major line item rose in 2025. The biggest percentage gains were tolls (13.2%), repair and maintenance (8.6%), driver benefits (6.6%) and tires (6.4%). The study drew on data from more than 182,000 trucks covering roughly 14.7 billion miles.

One caveat worth stating plainly: this is U.S. carrier data, reported in U.S. dollars. Canadian fleets face different tire pricing, duties and exchange rates, so treat the figures as a benchmark for direction and proportion, not as a Canadian price list.

Why a nickel per mile still deserves attention

Five cents sounds trivial next to $2.336. By simple division, tires are roughly 2% of the average per-mile cost. But a per-mile figure hides the scale. As straight arithmetic on ATRI's average (an illustration, not a result from any real fleet): a hundred trucks each running 100,000 miles a year would spend about $500,000 a year on tires and tire labor at 5 cents per mile. A 6.4% rise on that base is on the order of $30,000 a year — for a line item the fleet doesn't control the price of.

Two things make this line different from fuel or driver pay. First, tires are a purchased commodity-driven input: ATRI itself attributes the increase to rubber tariffs and petroleum-linked synthetic rubber. Second, unlike most operating costs, a large part of a tire's value can be recovered and reused. That is the whole premise of retreading.

Where retreading fits

The Tire Retread & Repair Information Bureau (TRIB) reports that retreading saves the U.S. trucking industry more than $3 billion a year, and states that for truck tires a retread can cost as little as one-third of the price of a new tire. We covered the underlying numbers in our cost-per-mile comparison; the ATRI data adds a timing argument. When new-tire inputs are getting more expensive, the share of the tire budget that can be shifted to retreads — on casings that qualify — becomes a more valuable lever, not a less valuable one.

It also connects to the tariff story. If you want the policy side, see our look at the Section 232 truck parts tariff and fleet tire costs.

The sourcing question: who controls the retread step?

Most fleets that retread buy the service from an outside retreader, so the retread price, turnaround time and casing handling are set by someone else's operation and terms. That arrangement works well for many fleets, and nothing here argues against it. The structural point is narrower: any single-supplier arrangement limits how much leverage and scheduling control a fleet has, and that limit matters more as volume grows.

For a fleet with enough casings to keep a line busy, the alternative is running its own retread operation. That is a capital and staffing decision, not a free lunch — we lay out the realistic costs in what it costs to set up a retread shop, the payback logic in Fleet Retreading ROI, and the independence angle in The Real Cost of Single-Supplier Lock-In vs. Running Your Own Retread Line. Whether it pays depends on your volume, your casing quality and your ability to staff a line; the ATRI numbers simply raise the stakes on getting the decision right.

A practical way to use the ATRI numbers

• Benchmark your own tire cost per mile — parts and labor together — against ATRI's figure for your region, and track the trend, not just the level.
• Separate the drivers: new-tire price, retread price, casing yield and tire-related maintenance each move differently.
• Measure casing yield. The more of your casings that are retreadable, the more of the tire budget the retread lever can reach. See our 5-point casing inspection check.
• Only then compare buying retreads against building capacity — with your own volume, not an industry average.

The honest takeaway from ATRI's data is modest: tires are a small slice of operating cost that just got noticeably more expensive, and the part of the tire budget a fleet can influence is the part tied to how it sources and manages casings and retreads.

Sources

• American Transportation Research Institute, An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update (released July 2026) — as reported by ATRI (truckingresearch.org), FleetOwner, Truck News, Transport Topics and Fleet Maintenance.
• Tire Retread & Repair Information Bureau (retread.org) — retreading cost and industry savings statements.

Thinking about your own retread line?

Good Hope Retreaders is a manufacturer-direct supplier of retreading equipment and consumables with local service from Ontario. Tell us your casing volume and tire sizes and we'll talk through what a line would need — with one transparent, all-in Canadian price.

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