Fleet Basics for Contractors: GPS Tracking, Fuel Cards, and Maintenance for 2 to 10 Trucks

Short answer first. Three trucks is a fleet, whether or not you call it one. The moment you have trucks you are not driving yourself, you need three things: a GPS tracker in every truck, fuel on a card that asks for a driver ID, and maintenance on a calendar instead of a breakdown. For a small residential crew that whole setup runs under $30 per truck per month, and the first month of arrival time stamps and fuel exceptions usually pays for the year.

Here is what each piece actually does for a contractor, what it costs on the vendors' own pricing pages, and the federal trucking rule most residential contractors are breaking without knowing it.

When Three Trucks Becomes a Fleet

You know you have a fleet problem when you find out where a truck was by asking, when the fuel receipts live in the center console, and when a job started late because a truck did not.

Start with what a truck really costs. The IRS business mileage rate is a decent proxy for the all-in cost of running a light truck, and it rose to 76 cents per mile on July 1, 2026, up from 72.5 cents in the first half of the year. A work truck that drives 20,000 miles a year is costing you somewhere around $15,000 in fuel, tires, maintenance, insurance, and depreciation. Three trucks is $45,000 a year of cost that nobody on the crew is watching.

That is the number fleet basics protect. Everything below is about seeing where that money goes and stopping the leaks.

GPS Tracking: What It Actually Does for a Contractor

Forget the surveillance framing. For a residential contractor, a GPS tracker does four jobs.

It time-stamps arrivals and departures. When a homeowner says your guys showed up at ten and left at two, you have the record. When you are trying to figure out why a bathroom took 40 crew-hours instead of 28, the truck log tells you how many of those hours were on site. This is the cheapest job-costing data you will ever collect.

It ends after-hours use. A truck that runs to the lake on Saturday burns your fuel, adds your miles, and is on your insurance when it hits something. Most trackers send an alert the moment a truck moves outside the hours you set.

It flags idling and speeding. Thirty minutes of idling a day across three trucks adds up over a season, and speeding tickets in a wrapped truck are a marketing problem as much as an insurance one.

It finds a stolen truck. Trucks with tools in the bed get stolen from driveways and hotel lots. A tracker turns that from a total loss into a phone call to the police with an address.

Tell the crew before you install it. Framed as protecting the business and settling customer disputes in their favor, most crews shrug. Framed as spying, you will lose a good guy over it.

What Tracking Costs

Prices below come from each company's own site as of late September 2026.

One Step GPS is the one that publishes a number. Its GPS tracking plan is $13.95 per vehicle per month with no contract, no equipment purchase, three years of location history, and a 100-day money-back guarantee if you return the hardware. That is the plan for a two-to-ten-truck contractor who wants to start this week.

Motive and Samsara are the full platforms: GPS, AI dashcams, maintenance, driver scorecards, and in Motive's case a fuel card, all in one login. Neither posts per-vehicle pricing; you get a quote. Motive's own buyer's guide says GPS fleet tracking averages $25 to $45 per vehicle per month and that most fleet management software lands around $35. One Step GPS, for its part, claims competing enterprise platforms typically start at $25 to $45 and require annual or multi-year contracts, which is a marketing claim, but it matches what contractors report.

The practical call: start with a no-contract tracker. Move to a full platform when you want dashcams to fight at-fault claims, or when you have enough trucks that maintenance, fuel, and tracking in separate apps is costing you time.

Fuel Cards: Stop Paying for Somebody Else's Truck

A fuel card does two things a company credit card does not. It asks for a driver ID at the pump, so every gallon is tied to a person and a truck. And it lets you lock the card to fuel only, cap the dollars per day, and block purchases outside working hours.

WEX is the standard fleet card, and its own page for the WEX Fleet Card lays out the terms. It is accepted at 95 percent of U.S. fuel stations. Rebates run from 3 to 15 cents per gallon inside the WEX EDGE savings network, and 1 to 3 cents per gallon everywhere else, but the 3-cent top rate outside the network requires 5,000 gallons in a month, so a small crew should assume a penny outside the network and shop the network stations for the real discount. Rebates do not apply at the big truck stops, meaning Flying J, Love's, Petro, TA, and Pilot, or at big-box retailers. WEX also advertises average annual savings of about $1,500, but its own footnote says that figure comes from customers with 28 to 250 vehicles, so treat it as a ceiling, not a forecast.

Four rules make a fuel card pay for itself.

• Issue one card per truck, not per driver, and tie driver IDs to people. When a truck changes hands, the card stays with the truck.
• Lock cards to fuel and fluids. Snacks, tires, and repairs go through a separate approval.
• Set a daily dollar limit that matches a full tank plus a little.
• Read the exception report every Monday. A fill-up at 9 p.m. Saturday, or two fill-ups an hour apart, is the whole reason you got the card.

Fuel card statements also drop straight into your books with a truck and driver attached, which is what your bookkeeper has been asking for. Our bookkeeping guide for contractors covers coding vehicle costs to jobs.

Maintenance: The Calendar Beats the Breakdown

A breakdown costs you the repair, the tow, and a crew standing in a driveway with no tools. Preventive maintenance costs you an oil change on a Tuesday.

At three trucks, a spreadsheet works: one row per truck, columns for oil, tires, brakes, inspection, registration, and insurance renewal, with the next due mileage or date. At six trucks the spreadsheet stops being read.

Fleetio is the maintenance software most small fleets land on, and it publishes pricing. The Essential plan is $4 per vehicle per month billed annually or $5 billed monthly, and covers vehicle inventory, inspections, service reminders, and fuel and telematics integrations. Professional is $7 per vehicle per month and Premium is $10, both billed annually only, and both add work orders, parts, and deeper reporting. There is a 14-day free trial with no credit card, and Fleetio notes the posted prices assume a five-vehicle plan. Its Tools add-on, for tracking generators, saws, and compressors alongside the trucks, starts around 50 cents per piece per month.

The habit that matters more than the software: a two-minute walkaround before the truck leaves the shop. Tires, lights, fluids, a look under the truck for a drip. Drivers who do it every morning catch the $60 problem before it is the $1,800 problem. If your trucks are big enough to fall under federal rules, that walkaround is not optional, which brings us to the part most residential contractors have never heard.

The Rule Most Contractors Do Not Know They Are Breaking

Federal trucking rules apply to a commercial motor vehicle, and the definition is about weight, not about whether you think of yourself as a trucker. Under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, a vehicle used in interstate commerce with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,001 pounds or more is a commercial motor vehicle. So is a combination whose gross combination weight rating, the truck plus the trailer, is 10,001 pounds or more.

FMCSA's own guidance spells out the trap. A truck with a GVWR under 10,001 pounds towing a trailer with a GVWR under 10,001 pounds is still a commercial motor vehicle if the two ratings added together exceed 10,001 pounds. A three-quarter-ton pickup with a GVWR near 10,000 pounds pulling a 7,000-pound equipment trailer is over the line by a wide margin. If that truck crosses a state line for work, even once, the company is a motor carrier and needs a USDOT number, driver qualification files, medical cards for drivers, annual vehicle inspections, and the company name and USDOT number marked on the truck.

The hours-of-service side is more forgiving than contractors fear. Under the short-haul exception, a driver who stays within a 150 air-mile radius of the shop, starts and ends at the same location, and is off duty within 14 hours does not need an electronic logging device or a paper log. The company does have to keep a simple time record showing time in, time out, and total hours per day, and hold it for six months. Most residential crews fit inside that exception easily.

If you never cross a state line, the federal rules do not reach you, but your state may have adopted the same rules for intrastate work, and many have. Two things to do this week: look up the GVWR on the door sticker of every truck and the plate on every trailer and add them, and if you cross state lines with a combination over 10,001 pounds, apply for the USDOT number through FMCSA's online registration before someone at a weigh station does it for you. One Step GPS and the full platforms all sell an ELD option if you ever need one, but a short-haul residential crew usually does not.

Trucks, Bodies, and Leasing: When You Outgrow the Half-Ton

At some point the question stops being how to manage the trucks you have and becomes what to buy next.

A service body beats a pickup bed for most trades once the crew is carrying the same tools every day. Knapheide builds service bodies, KUV vans, and upfits and describes itself as the largest work truck body maker in North America. If you want to see what is actually on dealer lots by body type and upfit before you start calling, Comvoy is a search engine for in-stock work trucks and vans, which its site says covers more than 200,000 units.

At five or more trucks, leasing through a fleet program starts to make sense, because the lease comes with maintenance management, resale handling, and a single monthly number. Enterprise Fleet Management is built for exactly that size of contractor. Whether to lease or own a truck is the same math as any other piece of equipment, and our rent versus buy guide walks through it.

Whatever you drive, make sure it is on a commercial auto policy, not a personal one. A personal policy can deny a claim on a truck used for business, and that is the worst possible day to find out. Our contractor insurance guide covers commercial auto alongside the rest.

A Simple Setup for a Three-Truck Crew

Here is what the whole thing looks like at the published prices above.

Roughly $55 a month, before fuel rebates, to know where every truck is, who pumped every gallon, and when every oil change is due. Compare that to one missed job, one after-hours fender bender, or one stolen truck.

The order to do it in:

1. Install trackers this week. Tell the crew why, then set after-hours alerts and geofences around the shop and active jobs.
2. Apply for the fuel card and issue one per truck, locked to fuel, with a daily cap.
3. Build the maintenance calendar from each truck's manual and put the next due date on every row.
4. Add the GVWRs on every truck and trailer. If any combination is over 10,001 pounds and crosses a state line, start the USDOT registration.
5. Read the exception report and the arrival log every Monday for ten minutes. That habit is where the money is.

The Bottom Line

You do not need a fleet manager to run three trucks. You need a $14 tracker in each one, a fuel card that asks who is pumping, and a calendar that says when the oil is due. Start with the no-contract option, move to a full platform when dashcams and maintenance in one place are worth the sales call, and check your trailer weights before a weigh station checks them for you.