Truck Driver - Truck Driver Problems (U.S.) - Compensation/wages - Household Goods Miles

Household Goods Miles

Household goods (HHG) miles, from the Household Goods Mileage Guide (aka "short miles") was the first attempt at standardizing motor carrier freight rates for movers of household goods, some say at the behest of the Department of Defense for moving soldiers around the country, long a major source of steady and reliable revenue. Rand McNally, in conjunction with the precursor of the National Moving & Storage Association developed the first Guide published in 1936, at which point it contained only about 300 point-to-point mileages.

Today, the 19th version of the Guide has grown to contain distances between more than 140,000 cities, zip codes, or highway junctions.

Therein, if you ask many drivers, lies the inherent unfairness of HHG-based mileage pay; miles are driven point-to-point, not from "city" to "zip code" or "highway junction".

Occam's Razor may suggest it is safe to assume that distances provided by the HHG Guide have been thoroughly examined to ensure drivers are not "overpaid" for miles not driven. Given the obvious accuracy limitations of computing mileage between fewer than 150,000 points and the availability of less expensive consumer-grade map and routing software such as Microsoft Streets & Trips many magnitudes more inclusive and therefore accurate than such a crude method, it may also be safe to assume HHG miles are shorter than those of a "real world" practical route. most companies do not use streets and trips but use a program called PC*MILER as it is set up for trucking using truck routes and tends to be more accurate than the HMG or Microsoft streets and trips. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association (FMCSA) rely on PC*MILER as their worldwide distance standard.

How much shorter is a matter of contention, but it is not uncommon to hear drivers report 5-12 percent, and carriers to claim the miles vary from shorter to longer and it all works out in the end to be a wash, or that drivers are paid more per mile to compensate. Drivers may then point out that not only do they drive more miles, those additional miles require additional time which is extracted from the hours available to the driver for driving permitted by the federal hours of service.

The argument continues, but drivers are always free to seek another employer who calculates compensation by the preferred method of the driver, and many do not simply because all major and most minor carriers use this less than accurate method for computing miles.