Why the Monthly Payment Is the Wrong Number to Focus On The monthly payment is a cash flow number. It tells you whether you can keep the lights on week to week. It tells you almost nothing about what the truck actually costs. What the truck actually costs is the purchase price plus every dollar […]
Spend a day on any interstate in this country and you will lose count. Trucks rolling down the highway with the company name scrawled on the door in black marker. USDOT numbers handwritten so small you would have to be parked next to the truck to read them. Letters smeared, crooked, half peeled off, applied […]
(The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FreightWaves or its affiliates.) Recently, a driver pulled into an Arizona scale house learned that an officer could reconstruct his entire multi-state trip from license plate readers and roadside cameras, matching the real timeline against paper logs […]
Why This Matters More Than It Did Two Years Ago Trucking insurance is expensive and getting more so. According to ATRI’s 2025 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, insurance premiums hit a record 10.2 cents per mile in 2024, following a 12.5 percent increase in 2023 and an additional 3 percent rise in 2024. […]
The Gap Is Bigger Than You Think Picture two owner-operators, both running a regular Midwest corridor. Same general freight, similar weights, comparable miles per week. One of them is averaging somewhere around 7.5 to 7.8 miles per gallon. The other is pulling 6.1 to 6.3. On a week where each truck burns 400 gallons of […]
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges has fallen to its lowest level in several months.
A Note Before We Start Tax law is not a place for general advice to substitute for specific counsel. The concepts in this article are educational. The numbers used are illustrative. Your actual tax situation depends on your entity structure, your annual taxable income, your state’s conformity with federal law, and decisions that need to […]
As enforcement tightened on long-haul trucking, marginal operators did not leave the business. They moved into hotshot and auto transport, where the rigs are smaller, the inspections fewer, and the insurance cheaper.
Two weeks ago, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration flipped the switch on the biggest overhaul of its registration infrastructure in decades. The legacy systems carriers had used for years, including the Unified Registration System, the Licensing and Insurance public filing system, and the FMCSA Portal’s registration functions, were permanently retired at 8:00 PM Eastern […]
A notice has been going out to carriers in the C.H. Robinson network, and it is worth reading carefully because of what may sit behind it. The message, branded under C.H. Robinson and titled “Changes to carrier eligibility,” tells the recipient that their company “exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson’s scoring model based on data […]
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges fell for the sixth time in seven weeks.
Commercial auto has lost $4.9 billion in a single year. Fourteen consecutive years of underwriting losses. Crash rates are actually falling. So why is the industry bleeding? It stopped doing the one thing insurance was designed to do.
Pull up the import data on U.S. charcoal briquette shipments and you are looking at something that some people in trucking would not think to check heading into a holiday weekend. But that data, read against the consumer spending picture for Memorial Day 2026, tells you something specific about the supply chain, the retail freight […]
A Freightliner Cascadia operated by Amritsar Trans Inc., a five-truck carrier out of Manteca, California, rear-ended three vehicles on Highway 99 near Lodi on May 19, 2026, killing two young men. The driver fled on foot. The carrier sits inside a web of 267 carriers clustered across residential addresses in the same ZIP code, and 10 involuntary revocation actions.
FMCSA removed 12 more electronic logging devices from the registry today, bringing the total to 79 revocations since January 2025. The registered list is bleeding devices faster than the market is adding them. At this rate, the agency may be building a de facto third-party certification standard without ever formally adopting one.
On Monday, May 18, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced that FMCSA is deploying $217 million across four grant programs targeting trucking safety enforcement, CDL program modernization, technology deployment at roadside inspections, and career training for military veterans entering the trucking industry. This is not a future commitment. Applications are open right now. The […]
The benchmark price of diesel used fo most fuel surcharges declined this week.
On October 17, 2025, President Trump signed a proclamation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, imposing a 25% tariff on imported medium and heavy-duty trucks and truck parts — Class 3 through Class 8 vehicles, engines, transmissions, tires, chassis components. It took effect November 1. For USMCA-compliant parts out of Mexico […]
The 2026 CVSA International Roadcheck ran May 12 through 14 — but enforcement didn’t stop there. Blitz week ran May 10 through 17, and by the time it closed out, the numbers were more significant than what the three-day event alone produced: 38,926 inspections. 69,446 violations. 13,273 out-of-service orders. 25,008 carriers inspected. What a lot […]
Safe isn’t always exposure-free or risk-free. Compliant isn’t always safe. What “safety” means doesn’t matter. A carrier can be all three of those things on paper and still bury everyone who touched the load in exposure. This is a working primer on how risk professionals actually vet, qualify and screen a carrier.
The BUILD America 250 Act changes broker qualification rules, overhauls the DataQs violation dispute process, and puts a federal clock on hair drug testing. Here is what those three provisions mean for brokers, motor carriers, insurance renewals and driver capacity
The BUILD America 250 Act creates the first federal framework for autonomous commercial trucks. It is not a green light. DOT has 2 years to write the safety standard; the liability question stays in front of a jury; and the bill funds retraining for drivers in the cab today.
The Supreme Court just told 28,000 freight brokers that they owe a duty of ordinary care in carrier selection. The question every broker, shipper, and 3PL should be asking is not whether they need a carrier vetting process. That question was answered on May 14. The question is: what technology are they using to build one that a jury will believe?
The Supreme Court just opened the courthouse doors to negligent-hiring claims against brokers. The only federally required financial backstop is a surety bond designed to make sure carriers get paid. It was never meant to cover a wrongful death.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that state negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the FAAAA. Twenty-eight thousand brokers just woke up in a different legal universe.
The Day 2 Numbers Through two days of the 2026 International Roadcheck, FMCSA inspection records show 6,406 total inspections conducted, 11,010 violations logged, 2,055 out-of-service orders issued, and 5,217 distinct carriers inspected. Data via searchcarriers.com/blitz, which aggregates live FMCSA inspection records and refreshes daily during the event at no cost. Isolating Day 2 from the […]
This article is not an argument for or against autonomous trucks. It is not a prediction about what the freight market looks like in 2035, and it is not an endorsement of any technology company’s safety record or business model. It is a set of questions that the industry — carriers, drivers, regulators, first responders, […]
The Gap Between the Headline and the Freight The White House published a press release on April 22, 2026, titled “Trump Effect: American Manufacturing Is Roaring Back as Factory Activity Hits Four-Year High.” The ISM Manufacturing PMI did reach 52.7 in March 2026 — a multi-year high that signals genuine expansion in domestic manufacturing activity. […]
What Is Actually Driving the Freight Right Now The surge in freight movement that started in late April and is accelerating through May 2026 is not the organic demand recovery that small carriers have been waiting three years to see. It is, in large part, a tariff front-load. Shippers who import goods from China, Mexico, […]
What Day 1 Actually Produced FMCSA inspection records show Day 1 produced 1,580 inspections across 1,417 distinct carriers. Total violations logged: 2,637. Out-of-service orders issued: 496. That works out to an average of 1.67 violations per inspection — a 31.4% out-of-service rate against total inspection volume. Data via Search Carriers, which aggregates live FMCSA inspection […]
An investigative analysis of the security gaps in American commercial trucking, from terrorism to trafficking and how CVSA Roadcheck plays an important role.
The benchmark price used for most fuel surcharges edged up slightly.
COVID nearly killed the motorcoach industry. Hantavirus is not COVID but the lessons still apply. Here is what passenger carriers should be doing right now without losing their minds.
FMCSA revoked two more electronic logging devices today, bringing the total to 67 noncompliant devices removed since January 2025. Carriers using Safe ELD or MYLOGS ELD have until July 7, 2026, to replace them or face out-of-service orders.
An investigation found 195 active motor carriers clustered along a few miles of East Dublin Granville Road in northeast Columbus; the same corridor was just exposed for a billion dollars in Medicaid fraud. Federal inspection data shows those carriers have been involved in 275 crashes, including 4 fatal and 74 injury crashes. The world’s largest retailer appears in 175 inspections across 44 of those carriers with a 20.6% out-of-service rate.
The benchmark diesel price used for most surcharges has regained three weeks of declines.
We have a carrier-quality problem with a specific geographic signature, an enforcement problem documented for decades, and a financial problem for American carriers competing against operators who pay their drivers 35 cents a mile to do work that American drivers expect 78 cents a mile to perform.
The compliance crackdown of 2026 has pushed a meaningful volume of used equipment back to dealer lots, and with the freight market recovering and tender rejections at 14.43% as of late April, the pressure to add capacity is building for carriers who have survived the freight recession with room to grow. That convergence — more […]
Most small carriers have never heard of National Small Business Week. That is not a knock — it tends to get covered as a general small business story and the trucking press largely ignores it. But the 2026 Virtual Summit running May 5 and 6 has a session lineup that maps directly onto the challenges […]
Walk a truck dealer lot right now and you will see something you have not seen in years: inventory. Real inventory. Trucks lined up. Choices. And prices that look — compared to where used equipment was in 2022 and 2023 — like someone left the door open. That is not an accident. That is the […]
We have never seen a twelve-month period in which the White House, the Department of Transportation, and FMCSA moved as aggressively, as comprehensively, and as effectively on the specific safety failures that haunt our highways and our industry. Before we sit down with Derek Barrs on Monday, here is the year that got us here.
Every year, roughly the same time, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance runs its International Roadcheck. Three days. Thousands of inspectors. Tens of thousands of trucks. The dates get announced months in advance, the focus areas get published, and somehow, fleets still get caught off guard.
The rate is the rating. When the cheapest available carrier becomes the default selection criterion, the safety rating nobody actually checks becomes irrelevant anyway. The Supreme Court will decide by June whether brokers face any liability for that calculus at all.
On April 23, a State Department spokesperson confirmed that commercial truck driver visa processing has resumed under strict new standards. Now the question is whether the states tasked with running the new system have the institutional capacity to maintain what federal audit pressure forced them to fix.
The single most common-sense safety reform available to the trucking industry right now is to acknowledge that a regulation based on annual snapshots of a driver’s licensing status is inadequate for an industry where licenses can be suspended, revoked, or downgraded at any time.
A CDL driver disappeared from a Florida rest stop on April 17 with multiple vehicles missing from his hauler. Cargo theft is at record levels and the pipeline moving stolen American vehicles out of the country has never been more active.
This week the agency announced that new Clearinghouse registrants will have to prove their identity before gaining SAP-level access to a federal database that 38 million queries have trusted since 2020.
The benchmark price of retail diesel fell for the third straight week.
89 agents control process agent relationships for 1.67 million American carriers, several of those agents cannot be verified as legally incorporated entities in any state, In 2019, the FMCSA said enforcement personnel were reporting an inability to complete service of process when the agent on file simply refused to answer.
Here is a number that does not get talked about enough: we have seen a some small carriers that have somewhere between $40,000 and $100,000 in completed work sitting as unpaid invoices at any given time. That money has been earned. The load moved. The delivery was made. The BOL is signed. The money simply […]
The maintenance cost story in trucking has been quietly telling the truth about the freight recession in a way that spot rates and load volumes never fully captured. When freight slows down, trucks run fewer miles, which means fewer service events per truck per month. The Q4 2025 Decisiv/TMC Parts and Labor Service Benchmark Report […]
If you have been running the load board for the past three years, you know what the bottom felt like. Loads sitting for hours. Brokers lowballing you on every call. Rates that barely covered fuel, let alone the truck payment. That was the freight recession — and it held from 2022 through most of 2025. […]
When the insurance renewal comes in higher than last year, most small carriers respond the same way: shop it, push back on the broker, maybe raise the deductible to get the premium down. That has been the playbook for a decade. It is increasingly not working — because the problem is not your specific loss […]
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges fell the most it has declined since 2022.
Gord Magill has been behind the wheel since high school. So was his father. So was his grandfather. That lineage gives “End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers” something most books about trucking fundamentally lack: the credibility that comes only from someone who actually lived it.
FMCSA confirmed today that $73,502,543 in federal highway funding has been withheld from New York after the state refused to revoke non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses that its own DMV system issued illegally. More than half of the records audited violated federal law. Decertification of New York’s entire CDL program remains explicitly on the table.
The federal government just rewired the system carriers use to challenge erroneous violations and crash data. Most truckers still do not know it exists. That needs to change, because your SMS scores, your insurance premiums, and your ability to keep working may depend on what you do next.
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges fell for the first time after 12 weeks of increases.
Rob Carpenter breaks down what it was like working with 60 Minutes on their explosive segment about chameleon carriers and the Super Ego network.
On Nov. 30, 2022, a delivery driver put Athena Strand in the back of a branded van and strangled her. The company that hired him was seven months old. Its owner had never worked a day in the trucking industry. The box was checked. The FBI has linked more than 850 murders to commercial truck drivers since 2004 and is tracking 450 active suspects right now. This is a hiring problem. It has always been a hiring problem.
The war with Iran moved diesel up nearly 50 percent in five weeks and analysts are modeling $6 and higher if the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted into summer. Carriers are repricing surcharges, shippers are absorbing new fees and everyone is looking for relief. The biggest lever most fleets have on their fuel budget is not an aerodynamics package or a new engine spec. It is the driver.
The benchmark price used for most fuel surcharges rose for the 12th straight week.
Most truckers track spot rates. Some track load-to-truck ratios. A smaller number pull freight data every week. Not many are watching the pallet Producer Price Index or the American Forest & Paper Association’s monthly packaging report — which is exactly why understanding those two numbers right now puts you ahead of most of the market. […]
A data-driven investigation into the risk retention groups insuring America’s most dangerous carriers, the factoring companies keeping them cash-flowing, and what happens to crash victims when the whole thing collapses.
One Indianapolis suburb has 1,000 newly registered trucking carriers. One neighborhood inside that suburb has more than 300 active carriers covering roughly 250 homes. The CDL crackdown is real, starting today in Indiana
A Denver-papered, Chisinau-operated freight broker dispatched a truck owned by a carrier with 10 fatalities on its federal record, driven by a man with a temporary CDL. Seventeen people and their families paid for it in Beaumont, Texas.
America’s highways became a testing ground for unqualified drivers long before anyone in Washington was paying attention. Now, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shuttering thousands of sham CDL schools and placing unqualified truckers out of service, he emphasized to the frontline at the Mid-America Trucking Show that drivers’ day has finally come.
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges is now up 11 weeks in a row.
Let’s start with what the numbers actually look like. On March 1, diesel was averaging roughly $3.90 per gallon nationally. By March 9, a single week produced a 96-cent spike — the largest one-week increase in diesel prices since the federal government began tracking the series. By mid-month it crossed $5. As of this week […]
If you have spent any time in trucking Facebook groups, diesel forums, or on X this week, you have probably seen some version of this story: The EPA removed DEF requirements. The DOJ said deletes are legal. DPF is going away. The whole emissions system is getting scrapped. Trump said you can modify your truck. […]
The mood has shifted. After three years of one of the most brutal freight downturns in modern trucking history, the data is finally moving in the right direction. Spot van rates have climbed for seven consecutive months. Load-to-truck ratios are at multi-year highs. Carrier exits have been accelerating, tightening the supply side of the equation. […]
You delivered the load. The BOL is signed. The POD is in. The job is done. And now you wait — 30 days, 45 days, sometimes longer — for a broker to release payment while your truck payment, your fuel bill, your insurance premium, and your driver’s paycheck are all due right now. That gap […]
One in eight return-to-duty clearances in the FMCSA Clearinghouse may be fraudulent. This is the network that made it possible.
The $750,000 federal minimum set in 1980 has lost 70% of its purchasing power and covers a fraction of what a serious crash costs today.
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges is up for the 10th straight week.
No federal law requires an insurer to evaluate a carrier’s safety record before issuing a commercial trucking policy and that’s creating a significant safety gap.
The difference between what a driver should catch on the pre-trip and what a PM program should catch before the truck ever leaves the shop tells two completely different stories about where the failure lives
Let’s start with what is not in dispute. In 2023, 5,472 people were killed in traffic crashes involving large trucks, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System — the most reliable national crash database that exists. Seventy percent of those people — 3,837 of them — were not in the […]
A tow bill landed on trucking Facebook this week and it has been making the rounds ever since. Drivers are sharing it, tagging each other, dropping fire emojis and expletives in equal measure. Some are calling it a scam. Some are saying the driver should have known better. Most are just staring at the total […]
How a cocaine-positive truck driver exploited a federal self-certification loophole to clear 1,000 prohibted Clearinghouse violations
Rates, liability, legal chaos and insurance exposure are colliding in real time. Most carriers are not prepared for it.
One month ago the national average for diesel was $3.65 a gallon. As of this week, it is over $5.00. According to AAA, that is a 38% increase in roughly 30 days — the fastest one-month fuel price spike the trucking industry has experienced in years, driven by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran that […]
Most small carriers operate their entire business through a load board. The freight comes through a broker, the rate gets negotiated down, the carrier moves the load, gets paid on net-30 or net-45 (or quick pay/factoring), and then goes back to the board looking for the next one. That cycle is familiar. It is also […]
The chart below is real. It comes directly from FMCSA’s Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse. It is publicly available. And based on the coverage it has received relative to its significance, it might be the most important piece of data in the trucking industry that the industry has largely ignored. Here is what it says, in […]
The deal is straightforward. Shell Rotella and Truck Parking Club are running a promotion called “Night on Us.” Drivers who get a qualifying Shell Rotella T5 Synthetic Blend or T6 Full Synthetic oil change — at a minimum of 11 gallons — at a participating service location can submit their receipt at rotella.com/nightonus and receive […]
The benchmark used for most fuel surcharges is above $5/g for the first time in more than 3 years.
If you are watching your shop bills, you may have noticed the fourth quarter of 2025 was slightly less brutal than the third. That is not an accident, and it is not because your trucks got more reliable. There is a real reason the numbers moved the way they did, and understanding that reason tells […]
Part two of a two-part series on how Dragos Sprinceana, while carrying $889,630 in unpaid federal fines, became a self-described envoy to Trump’s inner circle.
Part one of a two-part series that highlights 150 crashes, 10 fatalities, $889,630 in unpaid federal fines, and a dead man running a Mar-a-lago linked trucking company
Sanjay Singh founded Royal Bengal Logistics, Inc. in 2018 in Coral Springs, Florida. He built a website that described a company with 250 employees, a fleet of over 200 semi-trucks and growing, and revenue of $1 million per month. He held annual investor banquets in hotel ballrooms. He posted a video of himself onstage announcing […]
There is a legal process in the United States called civil asset forfeiture, and if you drive a truck, carry cash, or run a small business that deals in either, you need to understand it before you drive through Texas — or most other states — with your operating capital in your pocket. The case […]
Dalilah Coleman is a seven-year-old girl from California’s San Bernardino County who, on June 20, 2024, was five years old and riding in her family’s car when a commercial 18-wheeler driven by Partap Singh — a citizen of India who entered the country illegally through the southern border in 2022 and was later issued a […]
For most of the past year, two federal agencies have been doing more to reshape the trucking driver pool than anything else in the industry: the Department of Transportation with its non-domiciled CDL crackdown, and the Department of Homeland Security with its immigration enforcement raids. DOT and DHS have operated in close coordination — DOT […]
Let’s start with something that sounds simple but changes everything about how you should read the freight market: retail is the engine that drives truckload freight. Not manufacturing alone. Not energy. Retail. When Americans buy things — clothes, furniture, electronics, appliances, home goods, groceries — those products move on trucks. Multiple times. From a factory […]
FMCSA just put the industry on formal notice of the sale of MC authorities and DOT numbers.
Three times in five years. That is how many times the federal standard governing whether an owner-operator is legally classified as an independent contractor or an employee has fundamentally shifted under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The 2021 Trump rule. The 2024 Biden rule. And now, on February 27, 2026, the Department of Labor’s formal […]
FMCSA does not publish emergency bulletins for hypothetical problems. When a federal agency puts out a formal, dated, publicly addressed warning that begins with the phrase “DO NOT” in all capital letters, it is because the behavior being warned against is happening — at scale, right now — and the agency wants the industry to […]
The freight market is improving. That part is true. Spot rates on the Sonar National Truckload Index climbed from around $2.60 per mile in mid-January to nearly $2.82 by February — a 20-cent jump that had carriers posting on social media for the first time in years without the word “survival” attached to it. Tender […]
The headline writes itself and the industry groups are celebrating: Pell Grants are coming to CDL schools. The American Trucking Associations called it a move that would “dismantle financial barriers that prevent students from low-income households from accessing the career pathways that lead to the trucking industry.” The Secretary of Education said a great education […]
A crash on the Florida Turnpike last August killed three people. The driver was Harjinder Singh, a native of India who had entered the country without authorization in 2018 and was operating a commercial motor vehicle under an out-of-state CDL. On March 6, 2026, the Florida Senate passed a bill in direct response to that […]
