When a shipper puts an LTL lane out to bid, price is the number everyone can compare in five minutes. Price, however, doesn’t say much about what happens six months into the contract. A rate quote doesn’t indicate whether a shipment arrives on the dock when it’s supposed to, whether the weight matches the bill of lading, or whether a claim gets resolved in two weeks or two months. Those costs simply show up in a shipper’s bottom line in the form of detention charges, rebooked appointments, and customer service hours.
The Mastio & Company LTL Carrier Customer Value & Loyalty Study is one of the best resources for quantifying what happens after the contract goes into effect. Now in its third decade, the survey interviews more than 1,600 shippers directly and scores national LTL carriers across 28 performance attributes. It’s one of the few datasets shippers can use to parse out marketing language from measurable performance.
What’s Measured
Mastio’s methodology does not rely on a self-reported scorecard, and it isn’t built from carrier marketing claims. Each year, researchers conduct detailed interviews with shipping decision-makers (more than 1,600 of them for the 2026 edition) and collect thousands of additional data points from open-ended questions about specific carriers. The result is a grade across 28 attributes that roughly sort into four groups.
Operational performance covers the fundamentals: on-time pickup and delivery, transit time consistency, and whether a shipment arrives without damage or shortages. Service quality covers the human side, including how responsive a carrier’s team is, how proactively it communicates when something goes wrong, and how professional its drivers are at the dock. A third group covers the business mechanics shippers feel on every invoice: billing accuracy, weighing precision, accessorial pricing, and overall ease of doing business. The last layer is loyalty; i.e., whether shippers believe a carrier has earned their repeat business and would recommend it to a peer, which Mastio has found correlates with outsized revenue growth over time.
The study goes beyond a one-dimensional ranking system, and it’s not a simple popularity contest or trophy. It acts as a detailed breakdown of carrier performance and customer experience.
One Strength Isn’t the Only Strategy
No carrier typically wins all 28 categories. The attributes measure genuinely different things, and a carrier built to win on price often isn’t the same carrier built to win on claims prevention or proactive communication. That’s useful information, but only if a shipper knows which categories matter most to their own operation.
If you’re a retailer who moves time-sensitive inventory into stores ahead of a promotional window, you probably care more about on-time delivery and transit consistency than about accessorial pricing. If you’re a manufacturer and you ship oversized freight to a narrow set of industrial customers, you might weigh damage prevention and billing accuracy more heavily, since one mis-rated invoice or damaged pallet can cost more than a year of rate savings. If you’re a high-volume shipper and you juggle multiple carriers, you may care more about ease of doing business and visibility.
The goal isn’t to find the carrier that wins the most categories overall. It’s to find the carrier whose performance aligns with what matters most to a specific supply chain. There are typically a handful of attributes where consistency has an outsized effect on cost and customer experience, whether that’s transit reliability on a tight production schedule or billing accuracy across thousands of monthly invoices.
Old Dominion Freight Line’s Consistent Results
Old Dominion Freight Line’s 2026 Mastio results are a useful illustration of what breadth across categories looks like in practice. The carrier was named the #1 National LTL Carrier for Quality for the 17th consecutive year and ranked first in 24 of the study’s 28 attributes, based on responses from more than 1,600 shippers surveyed this year.
The headline ranking isn’t the whole story as it pertains to shippers, though. If you’re evaluating the data, you need to see where those 24 wins land. They include categories tied directly to operational risk, like on-time delivery and damage and shortage prevention; alongside categories tied to cost predictability, like billing accuracy and ease of doing business; and categories tied to day-to-day account management, like timely customer service and carrier trustworthiness. That’s a carrier scoring well across the operational, financial, and relationship dimensions of the study at once, rather than leaning on strength in one area to offset weakness in another.
“This award is very important to us because it is selected by shippers,” Old Dominion President and CEO Marty Freeman said of the result. “It shapes how we focus our strategy. From strategic investments to our culture, it is all built around serving our customers.”
Mastio & Company President Kevin Huntsman, whose firm runs the independent survey, called the streak “a particularly impressive accomplishment” given how much the carrier landscape has shifted over nearly two decades.
If you’re building a scorecard, multi-category consistency is itself a data point that suggests performance across a range of conditions, not just the ones a single rate quote can capture.
Consistency Is the Important Signal
A 17-year win streak over a time period in which freight shipping has changed substantially is a track record that’s difficult to overstate. Not only have conditions changed drastically over the past two decades, but so have consumer expectations.
Each year’s Mastio results show a carrier exactly where shippers think it’s falling short, and carriers that take the study seriously use that feedback to fix those specific weak spots before the next year’s survey. The relevant information for Old Dominion Freight Line has been less about any single year’s score and more about whether improvements are made in areas that matter most to shippers.
“Our business strategy is focused on customer service,” says Chip Overbey, Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning at Old Dominion Freight Line. “When we look at Mastio, we recognize it outlines the key attributes our customers actually care about. If we know what our customers want, we then have to ask ourselves what we need to do to ensure we’re the best at delivering what they’re looking for. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. It hasn’t happened overnight, but we’ve stayed focused on chipping away at it and continue to do so year after year.”
That’s a different kind of evidence than a single award cycle provides. A carrier that jumps to the top of one year’s survey could be having an unusually good year due to a fluke in the market, or could be benefiting from a competitor’s misfortunes. A carrier with close to two decades of sustained, broad-category performance has had to keep closing gaps as shipper expectations shift around digital visibility, accessorial transparency, or whatever attribute shippers start weighting more heavily next.
Those kinds of consistencies are evidence of an operation that’s built to keep responding to what shippers are saying year-to-year.
Building Your Own Scorecard
The practical takeaway, if you’re evaluating LTL carriers, is that Mastio gives shippers the opportunity to pull the attribute-level data, identify the four or five categories that matter most to a specific supply chain’s priorities, and compare carriers against those specifically.
For a time-sensitive operation, that likely means weighting on-time delivery and transit consistency above everything else. For an operation with thin margins on accessorials, it means scrutinizing billing accuracy and ease of doing business. For an operation managing dozens of lanes with a small team, it means weighting responsiveness and the digital tools that reduce manual follow-up.
If you want to see how a 17-year streak breaks down, category by category, rather than taking the headline ranking at its word, Old Dominion Freight Lines’s results are published in detail on its Mastio award landing page.
Click here to learn more about Old Dominion Freight Line.
