Free report · 4 pages
Where the trucks actually are
Most capacity reports count trucks. This one counts companies, because who you can actually book is a different question. Built from all 3.19 million FMCSA carrier records.
- Carriers you can actually book
- 1,428,837 Active authority, interstate, for-hire. Under half the 3.19M headline census figure, because most registered carriers are private fleets you cannot tender a load to.
- Operate exactly one truck
- 65% The median carrier in American freight is one person and one truck. 89% run five or fewer.
- Share a phone number
- 402,268 Carriers listing a telephone number at least one other carrier also lists. The largest single cluster puts 3,082 DOT numbers on one number.
- Registered in the last 12 months
- 84,331 5.9% of the active for-hire market is less than a year old.
Carrier supply by state
Every state drawn the same size, because a geographic map would let Montana and Wyoming dominate the picture while carrying almost no carriers. Shading is the count of active interstate for-hire carriers domiciled in each state. This is supply, not freight demand.
What is inside
01 Market structure
Fleet size distribution across the whole for-hire market, and why a capacity shortage is almost never a shortage of trucks.
02 Geography
Carrier counts, power units, single-truck share and per-capita density for the top 20 states.
03 Contact clustering
How common shared phone numbers actually are, what that does and does not indicate, and the combination that is worth a question.
On the methodology
The report shows its own workings, including where the underlying data is unreliable. The largest fleet reported anywhere in the census is 2,099,979 power units, which is plainly a data entry error, so power unit totals exclude any carrier reporting more than 500. MCS-150 filings can be two years old, so fleet figures describe a carrier as it was at its last biennial update. Out-of-service status is not included, because FMCSA publishes it in a separate dataset. All of that is stated in the report rather than buried.