“This Was Supposed to Be the Best Stretch of the Year for Trucking.”
In less than a month this September, 16 trucking companies filed for bankruptcy protection. Eight filed under Chapter 7, which liquidates the business. Eight filed under Chapter 11, which allows a company to reorganize its debts and continue operating. They ranged from single-truck operators to a carrier that once ran 114 power units, hauling general freight, last-mile packages, agricultural loads, and specialized freight.
This was supposed to be the best stretch of the year for trucking. Fall is when carriers expect to earn the money that carries them through the winter. Instead, the court filings kept coming, and not from any one corner of the industry.
What the Filings Show, and What They Do Not
The filings do not state a cause. FreightWaves attributed the pressure broadly to “rising diesel fuel prices and other elevated operating costs” and noted that “financial distress is not confined to a single segment of trucking.”
Five of the eight Chapter 11 filers reported liabilities exceeding their assets, and Pacer Transport listed assets of less than $50,000 against liabilities between $1 million and $10 million. Several of the Chapter 7 filers ran one to three trucks. The list was not only small operators, though. Globemaster reported 51 power units and Xoco Transport more than 40 tractors.
This was not the first wave. In May, more than 20 trucking-related companies filed for bankruptcy, including Standard Forwarding Freight, which had a fleet of 302 trucks. FreightWaves cited erratic demand, insurance costs, equipment expenses, driver retention, and fuel costs.
My reading of both lists is that segment, size, and region do not explain who filed. What the companies most likely shared was a business with no margin left to absorb a cost that moved.
The Margin Was Gone Before the Year Started
ATRI’s 2026 cost study put the industry-average cost to operate a truck in 2025 at a record $2.336 per mile. Operating margins in the truckload and refrigerated sectors remained below 1%; flatbed carriers averaged an operating loss of 0.5%; and only less-than-truckload carriers and fleets operating more than 1,000 trucks maintained healthy margins.
A carrier operating at a margin under 1% does not need a disaster to fail. It needs one line item to move, and in 2026 several moved at once.
We Have Written About Every One of These Pressures This Year
None of what put those 16 companies in court arrived without warning. Each pressure has been visible for months, and each one has been the subject of an article on this site.
Fuel Moved Faster Than the Surcharge
The national average price of on-highway diesel reached $6.529 a gallon on September 21, up 24.4 cents in one week and $2.780 higher than a year earlier. A surcharge indexed to the weekly government average recovers last week’s price while the carrier pays this week’s, and even J.B. Hunt warned investors of a sequential fuel headwind of at least $10 million in the third quarter. We laid out what the carriers who outperform do about it in our diesel article.
The Lists Brokers Load From Got Shorter
Schneider’s brokerage has cut its approved carrier list to 14,000, down from 60,000 at the peak. When the largest brokers shrink the pool of carriers they will tender to, the carriers who fall off do not find a second market waiting for them. A carrier with a gap in its insurance filing or a safety score moving the wrong way can lose access to a broker’s freight without any driver doing anything wrong on the road.
Drivers Got Harder to Find and More Expensive to Keep
Long-distance general freight truckload payroll fell to 496,500 in January 2026, the lowest level since February 2014. FMCSA’s rule restricting non-domiciled CDLs took effect on March 16, 2026, and Congress is considering Dalilah’s Law, which would codify those restrictions into law and require CDL knowledge and skills tests to be administered only in English. The cost shows up on the income statement. J.B. Hunt told investors to expect $25 million in incremental driver-related costs for recruiting and bonuses in the third quarter. We made the case last year that tighter standards are an opportunity for operators who can document compliance, and the carriers who can hire and keep qualified drivers are the ones that case was written for.
Insurance and Liability Kept Climbing
FreightWaves cited elevated insurance costs as one of the pressures behind the May filings. As we argued in August, a carrier or broker that cannot demonstrate a working risk process faces higher premiums or no coverage. On the broker side, the jury in the $604 million verdict found that a carrier’s driver was a borrowed employee of the broker, making the broker liable for the driver’s negligence.
Theft Moved Online
Cargo theft is part of why Schneider started cutting its list, and thieves now steal freight by logging in with someone else’s credentials. At a margin under 1%, one stolen load erases the profit on a great deal of freight, and the exposure belongs to the owner, not only to IT.
Rates Are Rising. Costs Rose First.
Rates are starting to move toward carriers. Werner forecasts a 10% to 13% year-over-year increase in one-way rate per total mile for the third quarter and expects strong contract increases heading into the 2027 bid season.
In my view, the cost increases arrived faster than the revenue did, and that timing caused the court filings. A carrier that was already running below a 1% margin had no room to wait for rates to catch up with fuel, insurance, and driver pay.
What the Carriers Still Running Do Differently
When I look at why a load was delivered late, there are three primary reasons. The hours-of-service plan did not match what the driver could actually run. The driver spent longer at the shipper or receiver than the plan allowed. Or something broke down. In my experience, the first two are common, and a breakdown is the exception.
The trouble is that the answer sits in three different places, and somebody has to go and find it before anyone can fix it. A carrier that captures the reason for every late load can refine its plan lane by lane, so the plan improves every week. A carrier that keeps paying for the same miss, at a margin under 1%, cannot carry a miss repeated every week.
Management software built on static rules and manual steps breaks down when it meets the messy, unstructured data that freight actually produces. In my experience, the carriers that absorb a year like this one catch the exception while it can still be fixed, which is the argument we made for running freight like a real-time control room. It starts with the records, which is why freight needs to fix its fundamentals before it adds more AI on top.
Where We Fit
EKA runs the life of a load on a single record, in the order the work actually happens, with an AI agent at each step where cost eats into a thin margin. EKA’s published figure for the platform is a cut of up to 50% in admin workload.
- Load orders. EKA LOP AI turns load orders that arrive as PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets into orders in the system, which removes the retyping, improves data accuracy and shortens workflow lifecycles that improve margins.
- Planning and dispatch. EKA LOAM AI matches each load to the truck and driver that fit it, for dispatch and planning.
- On the road. EKA On-Time AI predicts delivery against the service level, so a load headed for a late delivery is flagged while there is still time to act.
- At the dock. EKA DockTime AI tracks detention, meets shipper contractual terms in an automated manner and automates the associated shipper billing and driver pay, so time spent waiting is recovered as additional revenue.
- At the pump. EKA EconFuel AI plans when, where, and how many gallons each driver buys on each route. EKA’s published figure is 3% to 8% off fuel spend within a few months.
- After delivery. EKA Documents AI processes carrier invoices and delivery documents with high automation with over 90% accuracy. The result is faster payment and improved cashflow.
- Across all of it. EKA Control Center AI brings exceptions from every step into one place, so nobody has, as an example, to check three systems to find out why a load is late.
For brokers, EKA’s risk and compliance guardrails vet carriers continuously against safety and insurance requirements on the same record. EKA is headless and API-first, so each of these can run alongside the systems a company already has.
For Carriers: What to Do Before the Next Bad Quarter
Recalculate Cost per Mile by Lane This Month
Rebuild your cost per mile for each lane using this month’s fuel, insurance, and driver pay, not last year’s average. ATRI’s figures describe 2025, when fuel held nearly flat, so a lane priced on last year’s cost is priced on a year that no longer exists.
Cost is data already sitting in your fuel, settlement, and payroll records.
Bill Every Hour of Detention You Are Owed
Record arrival and departure at every stop and bill detention on every load that earns it. Time at the dock is one of the two common reasons a load runs late, and unbilled detention is revenue a thin-margin carrier is handing to its customers.
Cost is capturing times you may already be recording and sending the invoice.
Put a Reason on Every Late Load
Code every late delivery as an hours-of-service plan problem, a time-at-the-stop problem or a breakdown. The codes turn into lane-level planning corrections, and planning that improves every week recovers margin without spending anything.
Cost is one field on the load record.
For Brokers: The Carriers You Depend On Are Under the Same Pressure
Expect a meaningful share of small and medium size trucking and brokerage companies to be sold, merged, or gone within two years. A broker’s exposure to that is direct. A carrier that files under Chapter 7 stops operating, and freight tendered to it has to be re-covered on short notice. Continuous checks on authority, insurance, and safety status catch those changes as they happen rather than at the next annual review, and courts have been willing to treat a broker as the employer when a carrier re-brokers a load. EKA RMX AI, due in the fourth quarter of 2026, will add driver and carrier risk prediction to the same record.
For Shippers: Ask Who Will Still Be Running in 2027
A carrier that files in the middle of peak season leaves its freight to be re-tendered at peak rates. Ask each provider how stable its carrier base is, how many carriers it has lost this year, and how it vets the ones it adds. With carriers like Werner expecting strong contract increases into the 2027 bid season, the rate that matters is the one a provider can still honor in March.
This article is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal, financial, or operational advice. Bankruptcy filings, regulatory proposals, and market conditions change continuously. Verify current figures and legal status against primary sources, and consult qualified counsel on any bankruptcy matter.