Trucking Is Booming Again, And Drivers Aren't Happy About It

Trucking is an extraordinarily cyclical industry, and the current rebound has been driven more by supply contraction than by demand recovery. The Van Rate Index on the Internet Truck Stop rose from roughly $1.94 per mile in December of last year to above $3, and equity markets followed, with Knight-Swift outperforming Meta year to date and JB Hunt approximately doubling since January. The primary structural cause is the new administration's crackdown on English language proficiency requirements and non-domiciled CDLs beginning around June 2025. Non-domiciled CDLs have existed since the mid-1980s and are issued to foreign nationals legally authorized to work in the US, but states including California, Minnesota, and New York saw CDL issuance spike roughly ten times historical levels around the COVID period. A group called FreightX spent over two years investigating and found CDLs issued to individuals with no name listed, around 200 trucking companies registered to a single apartment address in Signal Hill, California, and roughly 600 companies registered to a single PO box in Sheridan, Wyoming. Small carriers with one to seven trucks operating in the spot market are the most severely impacted, and if a COVID-level demand spike occurred today, the market likely could not bring on capacity at the same pace it did during COVID.

A Supreme Court ruling in the Montgomery case has opened the door for freight brokers to be held liable as the carrier in accidents caused by carriers they hired, which analysts describe as a serious structural issue for the brokerage business model rather than a cyclical one. CH Robinson is facing a roughly $600 million judgment after a satisfactory-rated carrier it hired caused a wreck, despite that carrier having completed over 200 loads for the company beforehand. Brokers have historically relied on FMCSA ratings of satisfactory, conditional, or not rated to vet carriers, but no clear government standard defines what vetting threshold constitutes due diligence. The ruling is causing brokers to scrutinize carrier safety ratings more carefully, raising the cost of certain capacity, and may create a rate premium for safer carriers, though whether that materializes remains uncertain. Because hundreds of thousands of small carriers depend on brokers to access freight from large shippers who will not work directly with single-truck operators, any threat to the brokerage model cascades down to the long tail of small carriers. One proposed solution is a regulatory safe-harbor rating from the FMCSA that would allow brokers selecting a top-rated carrier to demonstrate due diligence and limit exposure to large liability settlements.

Cargo theft has surged since COVID, jumping 60 percent last year according to Roadmaster Group, with organized crime rings spoofing carrier identities, setting up fraudulent entities, and stealing freight after acting as normal carriers to identify valuable loads. High-value cargo tied to data center construction, including turbines and GPUs, has become a particular target. Flatbed trucking has been an area of strength driven in part by data center buildout, and physical goods demand tied to AI infrastructure has been cited as a plausible driver of the broader trucking rebound.

Driver morale is described as being at an all-time low. The cultural identity of trucking as a lifestyle of freedom, reflected in films like Smokey and the Bandit and the cowboy imagery of the 1970s and 1980s, has eroded significantly. Technology has been a negative word for drivers because it has meant in-cab surveillance cameras, speed limiters, and electronic logging devices that restrict operational freedom. The job has shifted from lifestyle sacrifice plus paycheck plus freedom culture to merely lifestyle sacrifice plus paycheck, and driver turnover at some fleets exceeds 100 percent per year.

Truck parking is the top quality-of-life issue for drivers and also a direct pay issue. Drivers are compensated by the mile rather than by the hour, and the electronic logging device mandate limits drivers to 14 hours on duty per day with no more than 11 of those hours spent driving. Time spent searching for parking counts against the hours-of-service limit without generating mileage pay, so losing three hours of an 11-hour driving window to parking uncertainty directly cuts earnings. At an average of 60 miles per hour, a full 11-hour day yields roughly 660 miles, making that loss material. Traditional rest areas and truck stops together provide approximately 700,000 parking spaces, far short of daily demand, and new rest area construction can cost as much as $200,000 to $300,000 per space and takes years to complete. One company in this space has built its network to nearly 90,000 spaces and is adding roughly 1,000 to 1,500 new spaces per week, a pace it claims already exceeds what truck stop chains build in an entire year.

Autonomous trucks are currently operating on lanes mostly in Texas but still require reliable staging areas and guaranteed parking connectivity that traditional infrastructure does not provide. How quickly autonomous trucks reach significant adoption is described as uncertain, though the prospect is already deterring some young people from pursuing a commercial driver's license as a long-term career. The CDL crackdown will likely result in better pay for drivers who fit the profile companies are seeking while further complicating fleet operations, and the industry's fragmented structure, with nearly a million trucking companies and most having fewer than ten trucks, means technology adoption and structural change move slowly across the sector.