Your broker quotes you $850 to move a vehicle. Fair enough — that's the price, you pay it, the vehicle shows up. But here's a question most dealers have never had reason to ask: of that $850, how much actually reaches the truck?
The answer, as an industry benchmark, is about $637. The other $213 — roughly 25% on average — is the broker's margin. It's folded into the quote and never itemized, which is why you've never been shown it. You're quoted one number, and that number quietly contains two: what it costs to move the vehicle, and what the broker keeps for arranging it.
The broker is doing real work that deserves compensation — vetting carriers, confirming insurance, handling the back-and-forth. But the margin is undisclosed by design. You're given a single price and left to assume it's the cost of the move, when a meaningful slice of it never reaches the truck. Once you can see the split, a few things about your cost structure start to make a lot more sense.
How the broker model is built
A broker sits between you and the carrier. You tell the broker what you need moved; the broker finds a carrier who will haul it for less than they quoted you, keeps whatever cut they can make in between, and passes the remainder to the carrier who actually does the transport. The vetting, the insurance check, the booking — that's the service you're paying for, and it has value. The margin just isn't shown to you.
That's the entire model in one sentence: the broker is paid to stand in the middle, and the size of the cut is theirs to take, not yours to see. At low volume, paying for that convenience may be a trade worth making. At volume, it's a trade worth examining — because then it's not $213 once, it's $213 times every vehicle you ship.
What the margin costs at volume
One vehicle, $213 to the broker. Not worth a second thought.
Now run it across a month. A dealer moving 40 vehicles is routing roughly $8,500 a month — over $100,000 a year — to broker margin alone. That's before floor plan interest, before auction storage, before any of the other costs that stack onto a vehicle between the auction lane and your lot. It's the single largest hidden layer in most dealers' transport spend, and it's the one nobody itemizes because it never appears as its own line.
When dealers do see the split, the numbers tend to run bigger than they guessed. Cable Dahmer freed up more than $500,000 in a single year after going direct — using the same haulers they'd used through brokers. Baxter Auto Group cut $55,000 and pulled the broker layer out of all 20 of its stores. Neither changed who was driving the truck. They changed who was setting the price.
The number you're never shown
This is the part worth sitting with: you've been quoted on this thousands of times, and not once were you shown what the carrier was actually paid. The split exists on every load — $637 to move it, $213 to arrange it — but it lives on the broker's side of the table, not yours. You can't manage a cost you can't see, and the broker margin is the cost most dealers have never been allowed to see.
That's why direct carrier access changes the math. When a marketplace connects you straight to a vetted carrier, the coordination layer doesn't disappear — it just stops costing 25% of the invoice, and it stops being a number someone else gets to decide for you. The vetting and insurance verification get handled by the platform instead of priced into every load. Dollars that were going to the middle go to the move.
See the split for your own dealership
The broker margin is one of five cost layers that sit between a transport quote and the true landed cost of a vehicle on your lot — alongside floor plan interest, auction storage, manager time, and arbitration risk. (For the full stack in one place, see the hidden costs of vehicle transportation for dealerships, and for why a marketplace isn't just a broker with a nicer interface, here's the distinction.) The fastest way to see how the layers stack up for your specific volume and vehicle mix is to run your own numbers.
See what your transport actually costs → AHX Dealer True Landed Cost Calculator
It's free and there's no signup required. Enter your typical quote, volume, and floor plan rate, and it'll show you the gap between what you're quoted and what you actually pay — broker margin included.
Curious what direct carrier access looks like in practice? Talk to Auto Hauler Exchange.
.png)
