The short answer: The best-sourced measure of trucking capacity leaving the market is ATRI's 2026 cost report, released 15 July 2026: carriers cut their truck counts by 2.4% during 2025, the largest reduction in freight capacity since the freight recession began in 2022. The reason sits in the same report — truckload and refrigerated fleets averaged operating margins below 1.0% and flatbed carriers averaged an operating loss of -0.5%, while the average cost to run a truck rose 3.4% to $2.336 per mile. There is no public, retrievable count of how many operating authorities have been revoked, so this page does not quote one.
Key numbers, with dates attached
- Capacity: truck counts down 2.4% in 2025 — the largest capacity reduction since 2022 (ATRI, 2026 Update).
- Margins, 2025: truckload and refrigerated below 1.0%; flatbed a -0.5% operating loss; tank carriers 4.0%; LTL and 1,000+ truck fleets healthy but flat (ATRI).
- Cost to operate: $2.336/mi all-in for 2025, up 3.4% from $2.260 in 2024; $1.854/mi excluding fuel, up 4.2% (ATRI).
- Biggest cost increases, 2025: tolls 13.2%, repair and maintenance 8.6%, driver benefits 6.6%, tires 6.4% (ATRI).
- Diesel: $5.257/gal, week ending 10 August 2026 (EIA). 2026 to date: $3.46–$5.64, averaging $4.80.
- Dry van spot, national: $3.00/mi all-in in July 2026; $3.06/mi for the week of 28 June – 4 July 2026 (DAT).
- Spot vs contract: spot passed contract in June 2026; prior occurrence February 2022.
- Van load-to-truck ratio: 9.38 national at our July 2026 check; tender rejections above 15% since mid-May 2026.
How many trucking companies went out of business in 2026?
Nobody publishes that number in a form you can check, and this page used to pretend otherwise. It carried a headline count of lost carrier authorities, a table of active-authority totals running from a 2023 peak to a 2026 projection, and regional authority-loss percentages for four parts of the country. None of it was sourced to a retrievable document, the table contradicted the headline count, and the same count appeared elsewhere on this site attached to three different time periods. All of it has been removed rather than restated.
The reason is practical. FMCSA holds carrier registration data in MCMIS and its Licensing and Insurance system, but there is no stable public page that returns a current active-authority total on request — fmcsa.dot.gov answers automated requests with an HTTP 403. A defensible figure requires pulling a dated extract and recording the query. Until someone does that, an authority count on this page would be a number we made up.
What can be sourced is fleet size. The American Transportation Research Institute's 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, released 15 July 2026 and covering calendar year 2025, found that carriers "executed their largest reduction in freight capacity since the start of the freight recession in 2022 — reducing truck counts by 2.4 percent."
That is a different thing from a company count, and the difference matters. A carrier can park three trucks out of ten and keep its authority current; a carrier can also surrender authority while its trucks get bought and run by someone else. Truck counts measure the capacity actually available to haul freight, which is the thing that moves rates. For the count of formal business failures, see our separate trucking bankruptcies coverage.
Why are so many trucking companies shutting down?
Because the margin went to zero. ATRI's 2026 report is unusually blunt about it: in 2025, truckload and refrigerated carriers averaged operating margins below 1.0 percent, and flatbed carriers averaged an operating loss of -0.5 percent. Tank carriers averaged 4.0 percent. LTL carriers and truckload fleets over 1,000 trucks were described as healthy but flat year over year.
Read that alongside the cost side. The industry-average cost to run a truck rose 3.4 percent in 2025, and ATRI recorded increases in every major line item, with the largest percentage gains here:
| Cost line item | Increase, 2024 to 2025 |
|---|---|
| Tolls | 13.2% |
| Repair and maintenance | 8.6% |
| Driver benefits | 6.6% |
| Tires | 6.4% |
| All-in cost per mile | 3.4% (to $2.336) |
| Cost per mile excluding fuel | 4.2% (to $1.854) |
Source: American Transportation Research Institute, 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, released 15 July 2026, covering calendar year 2025. ATRI noted only two line items rose at sub-inflationary rates: fuel, and — for the second year running — driver pay.
A sub-1% margin is not a thin margin. It is no margin. A fleet earning under a cent on the dollar has no cushion for an engine out-of-frame, an insurance renewal that reprices upward, or a broker who pays in 75 days instead of 30. That is the mechanism behind carriers parking trucks: not a single catastrophic event, but the absence of any buffer against an ordinary one. If you want the failure patterns in detail, we wrote them up in why owner-operators fail.
Two claims that used to sit in this section are gone. This page previously told you the American Trucking Associations had called 2026 "the worst cost-revenue squeeze since 2019," and that nuclear verdicts over $10 million had tripled in a decade "according to the ATA." Neither was tied to a statement, report or spokesperson, and the published research on nuclear verdicts in this industry is ATRI's rather than ATA's. We removed both. Our own coverage of the litigation environment is at nuclear verdicts in trucking, and the premium side is at the 2026 insurance renewal shock.
What does it cost per mile to run a truck in 2026?
The only widely cited benchmark is ATRI's, and it covers 2025, not 2026: $2.336 per mile all-in, up 3.4 percent from $2.260 in 2024, and $1.854 per mile excluding fuel, up 4.2 percent. Two things about that number before you compare yourself to it.
First, it is built from fleet data and includes roughly $1.028 per mile of driver wages and benefits. A solo owner-operator usually does not book a wage line at all, so subtracting it leaves about $1.308 per mile — a much fairer comparison. Our cost per mile calculator carries the full ATRI line-item table and walks the method with your own figures.
Second, the fuel line inside that figure is already out of date. ATRI's implied 2025 fuel cost is $2.336 minus $1.854 = $0.482 per mile, which at 6.5 miles per gallon corresponds to about $3.13 a gallon. Diesel has not been near that for most of 2026. That gap is the single biggest reason a 2025 cost benchmark understates what your truck costs you today.
What is the diesel price right now, and what does it cost per mile?
EIA's weekly U.S. on-highway diesel average was $5.257 a gallon for the week ending August 10, 2026. Across 2026 to date the same series has run from $3.46 to $5.64 and averaged $4.80. Fuel cost per mile is price per gallon divided by miles per gallon — nothing more complicated than that. At 6.5 MPG:
| Reading | Diesel per gallon | Fuel cost per mile at 6.5 MPG |
|---|---|---|
| Week ending 10 August 2026 (EIA) | $5.257 | $0.809 |
| 2026 average to date (EIA) | $4.798 | $0.738 |
| 2026 high to date (EIA) | $5.643 | $0.868 |
| 2026 low to date (EIA) | $3.459 | $0.532 |
| Implied in ATRI's 2025 cost figure | about $3.13 | $0.482 |
Diesel prices: U.S. Energy Information Administration weekly on-highway diesel series, recorded in our market snapshot on 2026-08-11. Cost per mile is price per gallon divided by 6.5 MPG — our arithmetic, using an assumed MPG. The ATRI row is $2.336 minus $1.854 = $0.482, converted back to a gallon price at the same MPG.
Use your truck's real MPG, not 6.5. At $5.257 a gallon the difference between 6.0 and 7.0 MPG is $0.876 against $0.751 per mile — twelve and a half cents, on every mile you turn, loaded or empty. That is a larger swing than most of the cost-cutting moves people spend their time on. The fuel cost calculator runs it for your own numbers, and our diesel price outlook tracks where the series has been going.
This page used to carry a national diesel band and a fuel-cost-per-mile figure with no date attached to either. They were March 2026 readings still written in the present tense five months later, by which point diesel had moved well past them. Both have been replaced. Every fuel figure on this page now carries the week it was read.
What happens to freight rates when carriers go out of business?
The mechanism is simple and it is the only part of this that is genuinely predictable: every truck that stops running is one fewer truck bidding on the loads that remain. Fewer bidders means brokers have fewer options, which means the carriers still running can hold a price instead of matching the cheapest quote on the board.
What is not predictable is the lag. It depends on freight demand, on seasonality, and above all on how quickly parked trucks come back when rates improve — which they do, because a parked truck with a note on it is a strong incentive. Anyone quoting you a specific number of months is guessing.
The 2026 readings are consistent with capacity having tightened. At our last verified market check in July 2026:
Spot passed contract
Dry van spot moved above the contract rate in June 2026 — the first time since February 2022. Spot above contract is the classic signature of capacity being short relative to the freight on offer.
Tender rejections above 15%
The Outbound Tender Rejection Index ran a 13–14% band in Q1 2026 and has been above 15% since mid-May 2026. A rejected tender is a contracted carrier turning down committed freight because it can do better elsewhere.
Load-to-truck at 9.38
The national van load-to-truck ratio read 9.38 at our July check, against a 11.12 May average. Read the metric the right way round — our guide explains it.
Two things this page used to claim here have been deleted. One was a "carrier-to-load ratio" with a declining trend line — a metric nobody publishes in that form, defined as the inverse of DAT's load-to-truck ratio and then judged against a threshold that belongs to the non-inverted scale. The other was a claim about how far spot rates and survivors' revenue rose after a previous exit wave, which functioned as an implied earnings projection for the reader. No source was ever attached to any of it.
For where rates actually stand and what they leave after costs, see freight rates 2026, and for how the two rate types diverge, spot market vs contract freight.
Which regions have the tightest capacity?
This section used to carry authority-loss percentages for four regions, lane-level rate premiums, and a table of year-over-year spot changes for six regions. None of those had a retrievable source and the regional figures contradicted the table two paragraphs below them. They are gone.
What we can source is the regional spread in the rate itself. In the July 2026 DAT reading the Southeast averaged about $3.20 per mile while the Northeast averaged about $2.45 — a spread of roughly seventy-five cents on the same equipment in the same week. DAT also reported flatbed spot hitting a record high in 2026, which is worth noting against ATRI's finding that flatbed carriers ran an operating loss in 2025: the segment with the worst 2025 margin is the one that turned hardest in 2026.
A national average is a sanity check, not a quote. The lanes you run, the season, and what is moving out of your origin market matter more than any regional figure. We dispatch in Texas, Georgia, Florida and Colorado among others, and the honest answer on any given lane comes from the board that week, not from an article. If you want to track the market yourself, the indicators worth watching covers which readings actually lead rates.
How can a small carrier survive a freight downturn?
The moves below are the ones that matter. What you will not find attached to them any more are savings amounts — a monthly figure for cutting deadhead, an annual figure for raising a deductible, an annual figure for slowing down, a weekly figure for better dispatch. Not one of those had inputs, a method or a source, and several did not survive arithmetic against their own stated assumptions. Where a number is genuinely useful here, the arithmetic is shown and every input is stated.
Measure your deadhead, then cut it
Empty miles cost you fuel, tires and hours and return nothing. The arithmetic is worth doing once with your own numbers rather than reading a range. Worked example, all inputs stated: a truck running 2,500 total miles in a week at 78 percent loaded turns 1,950 loaded miles; at 85 percent loaded it turns 2,125. That is 175 extra revenue-earning miles, and at the July 2026 national dry van spot average of $3.00 a mile it is $525 of revenue in that week — before any change in the rate you negotiate. Your miles, your loaded percentage and your lane rate will all differ; run them in the deadhead calculator and the weekly revenue calculator.
Shop the insurance renewal properly
Get quotes from several markets rather than renewing on autopilot, keep your CSA record clean, run cameras, and ask what a higher deductible does to the premium before you assume it helps. We are not going to tell you what percentage you will save, because that depends on your loss history, your radius, your commodity and your authority age — and the range this page used to publish had no source behind it. What the renewal market is doing is covered in the 2026 insurance renewal shock, and the coverage types themselves in our owner-operator insurance guide.
Know what your factoring actually costs
The headline percentage is rarely the whole cost — reserve holdbacks, ACH fees, minimum volumes and non-recourse surcharges all sit underneath it. Work out your effective annualised cost on your own invoice volume and compare offers on that basis. We are not publishing a market rate range here; the one that used to be on this page was unsourced. Our freight factoring guide walks the full fee structure.
Attack fuel through MPG, not fuel cards
At $5.257 a gallon, moving from 6.0 to 7.0 MPG changes your fuel cost from $0.876 to $0.751 a mile — a difference of $0.125 on every mile you turn. Over 100,000 miles that is $12,500, and the arithmetic is entirely visible: price per gallon divided by MPG, times miles. Speed, tyre pressure, idle time and aerodynamic condition all move MPG, but we are not going to assign a percentage to each of them, because this page used to and the numbers did not reconcile with their own inputs at any 2026 diesel price. Measure your own before and after in the fuel cost calculator.
Hold a reserve sized to your own fixed costs
There is no industry-standard reserve figure, and any article giving you one in dollars is guessing at your truck note. The method is what transfers: add up the costs you pay whether or not the truck moves — equipment payment, insurance, permits, base plates, ELD, accounting — and multiply by the number of months you want to be able to absorb. ATRI's finding that truckload margins ran below 1.0 percent in 2025 is the argument for making that number larger than feels comfortable: at that margin, the reserve is the business.
Is now a good time to buy a used semi truck?
That depends on your cash position, not on a market call, and we are not going to make the call for you. What ATRI recorded for 2025 is a split by fleet size: small fleets spent less on trucks and trailers than they had in 2024, while truckload fleets running more than 1,000 trucks spent 16.1 percent more. The operators with balance sheets were adding equipment into weak freight; the ones without were not.
Buying into a soft equipment market and running the truck when rates improve is a strategy. It is not a guaranteed outcome, and this page previously described it as one — to readers the same page described as financially distressed. The used-truck prices quoted alongside that claim also contradicted our own truck and trailer price guide by roughly a factor of two. Both the prices and the phrasing are gone. Check the price guide for current ranges, and run the note through the truck payment calculator to see what it costs you per mile at the miles you actually run.
The bottom line on the 2026 carrier exodus
Capacity left the market in 2025 — 2.4 percent of truck counts, ATRI's largest recorded reduction since the freight recession began — because at sub-1 percent operating margins there was nothing to absorb a bad month. By mid-2026 the market on the other side of that contraction looks different: dry van spot passed contract in June for the first time since February 2022, tender rejections have held above 15 percent since mid-May, and the national dry van average read $3.00 a mile in July.
What has not improved is fuel. Diesel at $5.257 a gallon in the week ending 10 August 2026 puts fuel at roughly $0.809 a mile at 6.5 MPG, against the $0.482 implied in ATRI's 2025 cost figure. A recovering rate and a rising fuel line can cancel each other out, which is why the only number that decides whether a load is worth taking is your own cost per mile, computed this month.
If you want help pricing against that number rather than against a national average, talk to our dispatch team. No contracts, no setup fees. Comparing your options first? Read dispatch vs self-dispatch or run the numbers in the dispatch ROI calculator. This article sits under our freight rates and market conditions hub, which collects everything we publish on rates, costs and capacity.
Where these figures come from
- Capacity, cost and margin: American Transportation Research Institute, 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, released 15 July 2026, covering calendar year 2025.
- Diesel: U.S. Energy Information Administration, weekly on-highway diesel price series, week ending August 10, 2026, verified 2026-08-11.
- Spot rates and ratios: DAT Trendlines national van rates and FreightWaves SONAR, recorded in our market snapshot on 2026-07-18 for July 2026.
- Fuel cost per mile: our own arithmetic — EIA price per gallon divided by an assumed 6.5 MPG. Stated as an assumption, not a measurement.
- Carrier authority counts: not published here. FMCSA holds the data in MCMIS and Licensing & Insurance, but no public endpoint returns a citable current total, so we quote none.