Dive Brief:
- Trucking firms as a whole gained traction once again in terms of joining and remaining in the market, according to an analysis of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data.
- Q1 2026 data showed a net influx of carriers in operating authority, meaning grants and reinstatements outweighed revocations. The last time that happened was in Q2 2025 and Q3 2022 before that.
- Because the data has a lagging effect, diesel price shocks in recent months “might not show up in the data set until May, if it does so at all,” FTR Transportation Intelligence VP of Trucking Avery Vise said on a weekly podcast for the week beginning April 6. A surge in diesel prices and a carrier need to protect margins could translate into higher spot rates sticking.
Carrier exits trend reverses in Q1 2026
Dive Insight:
As part of the apparent shift away from carriers exiting the market, revocations slowed to the lowest level of any quarter since Q4 2021.
That could suggest that market dynamics are turning, where greater stability may be materializing from a yearslong freight recession.
A wrinkle to that, though, is for-hire trucking payroll changes year over year, which have been declining, per an FTR analysis of seasonally adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
“Employment is still the lowest since September of 2020 and is the lowest since November of 2017 if we exclude” the COVID-19 pandemic period, Vise said.
A revision of federal data showed an initial figure of a 5,000 job decline in LTL from December to January was only a 1,900 decline.
In TL, a seasonally adjusted decrease of 600 employees in January put the long-distance general freight workforce at 496,500, a level that hasn’t been this low since February 2014.
