Trucking is living through a contradiction this year: freight volumes are shrinking while freight costs climb. National freight shipments fell 2.8% year-over-year in Q2 2026, and truckload volumes have been declining on a similar trend, according to the U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index. Rail intermodal was the exception, up 6% year-over-year as some shippers moved freight off trucks to manage cost (Truck Parts & Service). Despite that softer volume, shippers are paying substantially more to move what’s left.
Why rates are climbing while freight slows
Spot rates climbed 43% year-over-year in June 2026 (excluding fuel), and contract rates — typically slower to move — were up 13% to $2.41 per mile, a sign the rate strength is durable rather than a spot-market blip (ACT Research). Falling volume paired with rising price only makes sense if capacity is leaving the market rather than demand returning to it — and that’s exactly what’s happening. Industry executives have been careful to frame this as a “driver-constrained” market rather than a classic shortage: regulatory enforcement, not economic demand, is pulling capacity out from under the industry (Truck Parts & Service).
RSM estimates that roughly 10% of commercial drivers may lack English-language proficiency under new enforcement standards, potentially removing 25,000 drivers from service in the first year alone, while about 194,000 non-domiciled CDL holders — 5% of the domestic commercial driver pool — face exit over the next two years. Across every enforcement measure combined, RSM puts the total number of drivers at risk above 600,000. The carrier base itself is also thinner than it looks: interstate motor carriers grew 31% since 2019 even as demand stayed flat, and more than 90% of them run fewer than 10 trucks — exactly the operators least able to absorb today’s higher insurance, financing, and compliance costs (RSM).
What it means for fleets, dealers, and distributors
For carriers, the near-term math is uncomfortable: higher revenue per mile on the freight that moves, but thinner margins everywhere else. RSM’s advice to shippers — lock in longer-term contracts earlier in the bid cycle — reflects an expectation that rate pressure has more room to run before it stabilizes, likely by mid-2026 at the earliest (RSM).
For the parts and service side, the signal is more mixed than “everyone’s hurting.” Class 8 order backlogs just hit a 38-month high, driven partly by replacement needs and pre-buy ahead of EPA 2027 (ACT Research) — evidence that fleets are still running older equipment longer, which typically supports aftermarket parts demand even in a soft freight environment. It also means the replacement cycle could turn again faster than fleets expect once carriers decide it’s time to renew.
There’s a second layer worth watching: rising freight costs affect not just what it costs to move a load of goods, but what it costs to move the parts that keep trucks running. Anyone sourcing components internationally is contending with freight and tariff pressure compounding at the same time, on top of the capacity crunch described above — which puts a premium on sourcing diversification and on knowing exactly where in the supply chain that cost pressure is building.
The bottom line
This isn’t a demand story — it’s a supply story, driven substantially by regulation, layered on top of a freight market that’s still soft by volume. The usual playbook of waiting for demand to recover before rates normalize doesn’t apply here. Rates could stay elevated well into an otherwise sluggish freight year, and the fleets, dealers, and distributors who plan for that now — rather than waiting for a “normal” recovery signal — will be better positioned when the market does rebalance.