“One Mile in Six Still Runs Empty.”
Carriers are rejecting truckload tenders at about 3 times the rate they did from 2023 through 2025. FreightWaves SONAR has its rejection index holding near 14%, with rejections up 268% over 3 years while volume rose 9%. The same analysis counts about 51,000 fewer for-hire tractors in August alone.
Running a truck costs more than at any point in ATRI’s records. Its 2026 study put the average at a record $2.336 a mile in 2025, and diesel averaged $6.199 a gallon the week of October 5, $2.488 more than a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration. Rates have followed. Dry van spot rates including fuel reached $3.55 a mile in early October, about 50% above a year ago.
On October 3, we published our read on the 16 trucking companies that filed for bankruptcy in less than a month, and those filings came while spot rates were climbing. When a carrier cannot easily add trucks or drivers to seat them, revenue growth has to come from more paid miles per truck and per driver hour already on the books. Utilization is the term for that work, and in this market, it determines who grows.
Capacity Is Tightening the Market More Than Demand Is
Julie Van de Kamp of FreightWaves SONAR has made the case that available capacity, more than demand, is driving the tightness. Tender volumes are down about 20% from their June peak, yet outright rejections peaked at 14.67% in mid-September and were still near 13.8% in early October.
The supply side explains the gap. ATRI found that carriers cut truck counts by 2.4% in 2025 and left another 10% of their trucks unseated on average, meaning those trucks had no driver. The driver pool continued to shrink in 2026. FreightWaves reports that 202,345 CDL and permit holders were in prohibited status in the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse as of January 2, and that English proficiency enforcement removes about 2,700 drivers from service a month.
Net new operating authorities reached a 5-year high above 2,000 a week in late summer, and Van de Kamp cautions against reading them as new capacity: in the last capacity boom, authorities rose 51% while tractor counts rose 12%. She expects the market to stay tight at least through early 2027.
The Largest Carriers Have Already Shifted From Fleet Growth to Utilization
Knight-Swift and Werner have said that driver availability is limiting their fleet growth and that they are shifting their focus to yield and utilization. Knight-Swift’s second quarter shows what that shift looks like inside a truckload fleet.
In its second-quarter 2026 results, Knight-Swift’s truckload segment ran 2.8% fewer tractors than a year earlier, and miles per tractor fell 1.4%. Non-paid empty miles dropped from 13.9% to 12.5%, and revenue per tractor rose 5.8%. The company tied the decline in loaded miles to “a tightening driver supply that pressured our seated truck count,” and listed “increasing our seated truck percentage, and enhancing utilization” among its priorities.
Fewer trucks earned more per truck. A fleet of any size can run the same play when dispatch can see its trucks, drivers, hours, and loads on one record, and the quality of that record matters more than the size of the fleet.
Where the Paid Miles Leak
Empty miles are the largest leak. ATRI’s 2026 study put deadhead at 16.5% of miles in 2025, as we covered when the study came out. Every empty mile now burns diesel at a national average of over $6 a gallon and consumes a driver’s hours-of-service clock without generating revenue.
Unseated trucks are the second leak. A truck without a driver still has a payment due, and ATRI’s 10% average means 10 parked trucks for every 100 a carrier owns.
Dock time is the third. ATRI’s detention research found drivers were detained at 39.3% of stops in 2023, costing the industry $11.5 billion in lost productivity and $3.6 billion in direct expenses. An hour at a dock is an hour of on-duty time the truck cannot spend driving, and in a tight market that hour is capacity the whole market loses.
The back office is the fourth. ATRI found fleets cut non-driver staff 7.8% in 2025, so fewer people now handle the orders, documents, and invoices that every load still requires.
For Carriers: Get More Paid Miles From Every Seated Truck
The levers a carrier controls sit inside its own operation: how many of its trucks have a driver, how many of its miles are loaded, where its trucks buy fuel, and how many of its dock hours become invoices.
Report Seated Trucks and Empty Miles Every Week
Track 2 numbers by week: the share of your trucks with an assigned driver, and the share of your miles run empty. Knight-Swift reports its empty miles every quarter and names its seated truck percentage as a priority, and ATRI’s 2025 averages of 10% unseated and 16.5% deadhead give you an outside benchmark to measure against.
Cost is one weekly report built from the ELD and settlement data you already keep.
Match Each Load on Hours, Equipment, and Location Before Dispatch Commits
Before a load goes to a truck, check the driver’s available hours, the equipment the load needs, and where the truck will be when the load is ready. A load matched to the wrong truck burns hours in the wrong place and pushes an empty mile onto the next load.
Cost is dispatcher time on every load when the matching happens by hand, and no added headcount when the system proposes the matches for dispatch to Appointments at Once
Optimize Route for HOS, Stops & Appointments & Ensure Driver Compliance
Most routes are still planned with mapping tools and dispatcher experience. Maps show the miles, but not the driver’s available hours, the receiver’s appointment, or the truck’s next stop. As a result, dispatchers often rebuild the plan by phone after the truck is already moving. With route optimization. Using state-of-the-art route optimizer with driver compliance, you will be running fewer miles to complete a load.
Cost is using a Robust Route Optimizer
Optimize Fuel Purchase on the Route & Ensure Driver Compliance
Decide where each truck buys fuel and how many gallons it buys before the trip starts, using the route, the tank level, state fuel tax, and your negotiated pricing. With diesel up $2.488 a gallon from a year ago, the stop a driver picks on the road moves the cost of the load. We laid out how the carriers that outperform buy fuel when diesel hits a record in September.
Cost is the fuel card and route data you already have, plus a plan your drivers follow.
Bill Every Hour Your Trucks Wait at a Dock
Timestamp arrival and departure from telematics, send the detention invoice with the proof attached, and pay the driver from the same record. A detention charge backed by objective timestamps is harder to dispute than one rebuilt from texts and calls days later.
Cost is the telematics data you already pay for, and billing time only on the charges a customer disputes.
For Brokers: Your Carriers’ Utilization Is Your Capacity
When carriers reject 14% of tenders, they are choosing which freight to haul, and they have every reason to choose loads that keep their trucks moving. Brokers have also been approving fewer carriers, as we showed in our article on brokers shrinking their approved carrier lists, so each approved carrier’s trucks matter more to the brokers who rely on them.
Tender Loads With Complete Appointments and Reference Data
Send every tender with confirmed pickup and delivery appointments, equipment requirements, weight, and reference numbers. A carrier planning around a missing appointment either holds a truck or turns the load down.
Cost is the time your team already spends confirming appointments, moved to before the tender goes out.
Pay Detention From Timestamps, On Time
Settle detention against the same timestamps the carrier sees, and pay it on the carrier’s normal cycle. Truckload carriers ran operating margins below 1% in 2025, per ATRI, and carriers that thin have reason to favor the brokers who pay for the hours their trucks spend waiting.
Cost is the detention you were going to owe anyway, paid on time and billed back to the shipper from the same record.
For Shippers: Dock Time Is Capacity You Take From Carriers
ATRI’s figure for detention at 39.3% of stops is as much a shipper number as a carrier number, because the delay occurs at shipping and receiving docks. In a market where carriers turn down 14% of tenders, a facility that holds trucks for hours is an easy one to turn down. Measure dwell time by facility, set appointment windows your docks can meet, and then review each detention charge against the carrier’s timestamps.
Shippers that run their own trucks face the same utilization questions carriers do. The load matching and route planning in the carrier section apply to a private fleet as well.
Where We Fit: How EKA’s Agents Handle Load Optimization and Dispatch
EKA Omni-TMS runs carriers, brokers, and shippers on one record. EKA has 8 AI agents live today and 7 patents pending. The agents that bear directly on utilization work in sequence on the same load.
EKA LOP AI reads load orders arriving as PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets and creates the order on the platform, so the load is ready for planning without anyone having to retype it. EKA LOAM AI then matches open loads to the trucks, trailers, and drivers available to run them, weighing location, hours-of-service, equipment type, home time, dwell time and operating cost and timing, and it matches only against drivers and assets that meet your requirements that day. In a traditional TMS, the dispatcher builds each match from memory, and the system records the decision. With LOAM AI, the agent proposes the full match set and the dispatcher reviews and confirms it.
EKA Route AI plans each route around the driver’s available hours, the stops, and the appointments. EKA EconFuel AI tells the driver when, where, and how many gallons to buy along the route, and cuts fuel spend by 3% to 8% within a few months. EKA DockTime AI records arrival and departure against each facility’s free time, builds the detention invoice with its proof attached, and triggers the driver’s detention pay from the same event. EKA Control Center AI brings exceptions from every step into one place, so a team can run freight as in a real-time control room.
Each agent works because the order, the match, the route, and the dock time sit on the same record, which is why we argued that freight has to fix its fundamentals before it adds more AI. EKA goes live in 2 to 8 weeks on the records a company already has. For companies that want to keep their current system, Route AI and EconFuel AI begin delivering their work into it through EKA’s API at the end of Q4 2026, and LOAM AI, LOP AI, and DockTime AI follow in Q1 2027.
Capacity will come back when drivers and trucks return to the market, and FreightWaves SONAR expects tight conditions to persist at least into early 2027. Until then, the carriers that grow will be the ones getting more paid miles out of the trucks and drivers they already run, and the brokers and shippers that keep those trucks moving will be first in line for the capacity those carriers have.
This article is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. Freight rates and fuel prices change weekly, and company results cited here are as reported by those companies.
