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Dive Brief:

• A mass exodus in carriers didn’t materialize in 2025 when compared to the overall market — and a drawdown in capacity slowed compared to recent years, according to Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data analyzed by Trucking Dive.
• The for-hire carrier population was largely unchanged in 2025 compared to the previous year. Revocations in operating authority barely offset carriers that stayed in the market, as represented by grants and reinstatements.
• The market still has nearly 86,000 for-hire trucking firms than it did before the pandemic, representing a 33% increase in that carrier market, FTR Transportation Intelligence VP of Trucking Avery Vise said on a weekly podcast Jan. 5.

Dive Insight:

An annual net change in additions and exits to the market went closer to zero when looking at FMCSA revocations data for 2025, according to Trucking Dive’s analysis.

Operating authority tallies represent an imperfect but more up-to-date metric than other data. Notably, each operating authority doesn’t capture the total number of trucks for a business, meaning the market could shrink even as the total number of players remains largely intact.

But the data point can highlight trends and serve as a leading indicator.

Analysts have given different views on whether demand is needed to drive meaningful change in the freight market or whether supply constraints are needed to materially move rates. The market has been in a freight recession for over three years, with spot rates essentially moving sideways since about May 2023, said Andrew King, director of operations for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association affiliate OOIDA Foundation.

Despite some rate movement, “it's basically the same level,” he said.

Amid insurance costs, low demand and other factors, federal policies have also put pressure on the foreign driver population. But English language proficiency out-of-service violations only affected 184 carriers undergoing revocations in December, which may or may not have spurred revocations for that small pool of carriers that month, Vise said.

Revocations in December were some 6,400 based on FTR’s analysis or nearly 8,600, according to Trucking Dive’s analysis, with data varying based on filters applied. That suggests ELP enforcement may have been negligible in the overall change in capacity. (But a revocation could represent a small, medium or large carrier.)

While it may seem like revocations took a big hit in December, that may have been skewed because of more Mondays than usual for federal data processing, Vise also noted.

While constraining capacity could improve spot rates, there hasn’t been meaningful change when looking at those rates since June 2025, King said. That’s when current out-of-service violations for ELP violations went into effect. 

“In fact, they're just following seasonal patterns,” King said. “If anything, it's kind of like what you see when there's a safety blitz. CVSA will do a road safety check a couple times a year, and during that period of time, rates will go up because capacity will leave the market. But it's only for a short time.”