If you searched this term, you probably wanted the raw figure. Most pages that rank just point you at the SEC PDF and stop there. This one gives you the numbers, then shows you the reason the format matters to anyone running a real store with real ad spend.
What J.B. Hunt's 2015 Form 10-K actually reported
A Form 10-K is the annual report public companies file with the SEC. The "operating expenses" section sits on the income statement — it's every cost of running the business except interest and taxes. Here is J.B. Hunt's full 2015 breakdown.
| Operating expense line | 2015 amount | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Rents and purchased transportation | $3,000M | 48.5% |
| Salaries, wages and employee benefits | $1,396M | 22.6% |
| Depreciation and amortization | $341M | 5.5% |
| Fuel and fuel taxes | $316M | 5.1% |
| Operating supplies and expenses | $223M | 3.6% |
| Insurance and claims | $74M | 1.2% |
| General and administrative | $68M | 1.1% |
| Operating taxes and licenses | $43M | 0.7% |
| Communication and utilities | $19M | 0.3% |
| Total operating expenses | $5,480M | 88.6% |
Every figure above comes straight from the consolidated statement of earnings in the J.B. Hunt 2015 Form 10-K; the percentages are each line divided by the $6,188M in total operating revenue reported in the same filing.
Notice the shape. One line — rents and purchased transportation, the money J.B. Hunt pays other carriers to actually move freight — is nearly half of all revenue. Everything else is comparatively small. That concentration is the real lesson, and it maps directly onto how a store's costs behave.
Why a trucking company's 10-K matters to your store
You don't run a $6 billion carrier. But you run the same income statement, just smaller. Revenue comes in, cost of goods goes out, operating expenses come out of what's left, and whatever survives is operating profit.
The 10-K format forces a discipline most store owners skip: it separates the cost of making the sale possible from the cost of running the business. If you've never drawn that line in your own numbers, the ecommerce ops economics guide is the map for the whole territory.
Operating expenses are not your cost of goods
On J.B. Hunt's statement, the money paid to other carriers to haul the load is the direct cost of delivering the service. For your store, the equivalent is what you pay Printify, Printful, or Gelato to produce and ship each order — your cost of goods sold.
Operating expenses are the layer below that: ad spend, your Shopify plan, apps, email tools, and card-processing fees. Mixing the two together is the single most common reason an operator thinks a product is profitable when it isn't. If you want the clean definition and the standard buckets, the operating expenses formula breakdown lays them out, and the unit economics primer shows how they roll up per order.
Read your own operating expenses the way a 10-K does
Say you run an operating store doing 340 orders a month at a $31 average order value. That's $10,540 in monthly revenue. Let's build your income statement in the 10-K's own order.
First, cost of goods. Say your supplier charges $14 to produce each item plus $5 to ship it — $19 per order. Across 340 orders that's $6,460. Subtract it from revenue and your gross profit is $4,080.
Now the operating-expense layer, line by line, the way J.B. Hunt lists it:
| Your operating expense line | Monthly amount | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Meta ad spend (your "purchased transportation") | $2,800 | 26.6% |
| Card processing (say ~3% of revenue) | $316 | 3.0% |
| Shopify plan plus apps | $150 | 1.4% |
| Email tool (Klaviyo) | $30 | 0.3% |
| Samples, design, misc. | $100 | 0.9% |
| Total operating expenses | $3,396 | 32.2% |
These are example inputs, not market facts — plug in your own. The arithmetic is what matters: gross profit of $4,080 minus $3,396 in operating expenses leaves $684 in monthly operating income, a 6.5% operating margin. Divided across 340 orders, that's about $2.01 of operating profit per order.
Two things jump out, and both echo the 10-K. Your single biggest operating line, ad spend, is 26.6% of revenue — your version of J.B. Hunt's 48.5% purchased-transportation line. And your operating margin of 6.5% is meaningfully thinner than their 11.4%, which is your signal that the ad line is where the whole game is won or lost.
What J.B. Hunt's expense ratios teach an operator
The reason the 10-K lists each cost as a percentage of revenue is that dollar amounts lie as you grow, but ratios don't. A store doing $10,540 a month and one doing $105,400 look nothing alike in dollars — but if both spend 26.6% of revenue on ads, they have the same core problem or the same core strength.
Watch the concentration. When one line dominates — freight for J.B. Hunt, ads for you — small moves in that line swing the whole result. If your Meta spend drifts from 26.6% to 33% of revenue with no lift in orders, that alone can erase your $684 operating income. That's the operator's version of margin compression, and it's invisible if you only ever look at total revenue.
The other lesson is that the small lines stay small. Email at 0.3%, apps at 1.4% — trimming those is rearranging deck chairs. Your leverage is in the big line and in the COGS above it, which is why disciplined operators obsess over ad efficiency and supplier cost, not their app stack.
Where the true per-order number usually hides
Here's the practical trap. J.B. Hunt has a finance team that assembles this statement every quarter. You have a Shopify tab, a Meta Ads Manager tab, a Google Ads tab, and a supplier invoice — four screens that never add themselves up. So the $2.01-per-order truth stays scattered, and most operators run on gut feel about which products and campaigns actually clear the operating-expense bar.
That's the gap PodVector AI's AI employee, Victor, is built to close. Victor connects your Shopify store, your Meta Ads and Google Ads accounts, your Printify, Printful, or Gelato fulfillment, and Klaviyo, then computes your true per-order profit after those operating costs — and delivers the report straight to your Google Drive. Every action he takes is approval-gated, so nothing runs until you sign off. It's the 10-K discipline, assembled for you instead of by you.
Once you can see per-order profit cleanly, the next move is getting the cost side onto your books correctly — start with recording cost of goods sold.
FAQs
What were J.B. Hunt's total operating expenses in 2015?
About $5.48 billion, against $6.19 billion in operating revenue, per the 2015 Form 10-K. That left roughly $708 million in operating income for the year.
What was J.B. Hunt's largest operating expense line in 2015?
Rents and purchased transportation, at $3.0 billion — about 48.5% of revenue, calculated from the figures in the 2015 Form 10-K. It's the money paid to other carriers and for equipment to actually move freight, which is why it dwarfs every other line.
Are operating expenses the same as cost of goods sold?
No. Cost of goods sold is the direct cost of producing what you sell; for a store that's your supplier's production and shipping charge per order. Operating expenses are the costs of running the business around those sales — ads, software, processing fees, and administration. Keeping them separate is the whole point of the income-statement format.
How do I find a company's operating expenses in a Form 10-K?
Open the filing on SEC EDGAR and go to the consolidated statement of earnings (income statement) in the financial statements section. Operating expenses are the block of lines between operating revenue at the top and operating income below.
Why should a store owner care about a trucking company's 10-K?
Because the structure is universal. A 10-K forces the separation of cost of goods, operating expenses, and operating income — the same three layers that decide whether your store actually makes money. Reading a clean public example makes it obvious how to organize your own, which is the foundation for every profit decision that follows in the ops economics guide.