Index of driver pay, product of two companies, is surging 

The higher numbers in the Truck Driver Pay Index as it is called, also helps to confirm with hard data other evidence of driver pay increases, be they anecdotal or announcements of higher compensation.

The index was set with a January 2020 baseline of 100. The post-pandemic surge in freight markets and the concurrent increase in driver pay put the index at 141.9 in January 2023. It sunk to a post-pandemic low of 115.9 in January 2024 before starting to move higher. But nowhere in the history since then has it made a move like recent months and in particular the last two.  

In September 2024, it hit a recent cyclical low of 132.18. It began moving higher the next month, jumping to 144.18 from 130.42 between December and January of 2024. 

The joint AscendTMS/Superior index was 150.83 in April. In June–with the calculation coming right after the month’s end, as it always does–it was up to 170.04, a 13.5% increase in two months. Ritzema said that increase was easily the highest two-month gain in the history of the index.

Ritzema said that while Superior does service the payments of independent contractors who work for its clients, the index does not include those numbers. It is an index that is based strictly on employee drivers (though some so-called “1099” drivers are in the mix) and does not include back office or C-suite management. 

“It takes out the shop people and the office people and the president of the company who pays himself either $1 per year or $8 million per year,” Ritzema said.

Ritzema said paying trucking company employees is the company’s core business. “We pay thousands of drivers every week, or all different shapes and sizes, from companies with one truck to 500 trucks,” Ritzema said in an interview with FreightWaves. He described the drivers they pay as “flatbedders and reefer haulers and all in between.”

Higham, whose company is a major provider of TMS solutions primary to small to medium sized carriers, says his company’s system “does the payroll settlements for trucking companies, and then that goes electronically to Superior.” 

Superior processes the input from the AscendTMS system and makes the payment to the driver. What also comes out of that is a big fat database of what drivers are getting paid.

Discussing the decision to publicize the index this month for the first time, Higham said Ritzema called him and said “Have you seen what’s going on with the driver payroll?”

“He showed me the charts, and I was like, that’s crazy,” Higham said. Ritzema also commented that the increase was moving higher alongside the increase in spot freight rates.

Higham described movement in the index before the recent volatility as “goes up 2%, goes down 3%, went up 4%.”

“I have never seen it jump like it jumped from May to June,” Ritzema said. The index might fluctuate three points between those two months, he added, with June usually going up a small amount relative to May because of May’s slowdown around Memorial Day. In June, he added, “basically everybody’s running the whole month.”

More to come?

Ritzema said he has compared moves in drive pay to spot freight rates. A lag of four to six months between higher spot rates and driver pay is a rough correlation between the two, he said, suggesting more increases in driver pay are likely in the coming weeks and months.

It happens on the way down also, Ritzema said. “When things started going south in the spring of 2023, driver wages were still going up for a little while and started coming back down in the fall,” he said.

As far as the reasons for the surge, Higham recapped the general consensus in the market about the push behind higher spot rates and trucker pay alongside that. 

“There’s a bunch of trucking companies right now that are trying to find drivers, legally compliant drivers, because of the ones that have been pushed out,” he said. “There are cabs that are sitting empty.”

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