How we write
Editorial policy
Hotshot owner-operators make money decisions from what they read. These are the rules our guides and calculators follow.
Last updated
Who writes our guides
Guides are written and reviewed by the HotshotDispatchers Dispatch Desk, the team that books hotshot loads for our carriers. Until individual author profiles are published, guides carry the desk's byline rather than a name we can't stand behind.
Official sources first
- Regulations come from the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, FMCSA, the IRS, IFTA, the UCR Plan and state agencies. We link the exact section and check it against the official page before publishing.
- Company facts, like a load board's prices or an app's features, come only from that company's own current pages, with the date we checked them. If a company's page can't be checked, we say so instead of repeating a third-party figure.
- Market numbers, like costs per mile or pay figures, come from named public sources such as ATRI and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the period they describe.
Dates and EXAMPLE labels
Every guide and calculator shows the month it was last updated, and each source in a guide's source list shows when we checked it. When there's no reliable public number, we don't invent one. We use clearly labeled EXAMPLE numbers to show the math and tell you to replace them with your own. We never publish an invented national average.
Independence
- No company pays to appear in our guides, and we don't use affiliate links.
- We don't rank companies without stating the criteria, and we don't publish ratings or reviews we didn't gather.
- We sell hotshot dispatch, and our guides say so where it's relevant. The guides are written to be useful whether or not you ever use our service.
Not advice
Guides are general information, not legal, tax, insurance or financial advice. Pages that touch those topics say so, and point you to the official source and a qualified professional.
Corrections
If you find an error or an outdated rule, tell us through the contact page with the page and what's wrong. We check the official source, fix the page if we got it wrong, and update its date. Significant corrections are noted on the page.
Read the guides in our hotshot guide library, or how we handle data in the privacy policy.