Why do tender lead times keep climbing

A few things are going on at once. First, there’s a real seasonal component baked into this chart — the recurring bumps around early summer and again heading into the holidays aren’t noise; they’re shippers front-loading tenders ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas, when staffing gets thin on both the shipper and carrier side and last-minute freight becomes riskier to move. That’s the predictable part of the pattern.

The less predictable part is the underlying trendline itself creeping upward year after year, independent of the holiday spikes. Some of that reflects genuinely improved planning — better forecasting tools and tighter S&OP processes mean shippers simply know their volumes further in advance than they used to. But lead times have also lengthened during years when rejection rates (a proxy for how hard it is to find a truck) barely moved, which suggests something beyond pure capacity anxiety is at work. Trade policy volatility and pulled-forward import activity in recent years gave shippers extra buffer time before freight needed to move domestically, and some of that cushion has stuck around even as the immediate cause faded.

For carriers, the read-through is mostly favorable from an operational perspective: more lead time means better equipment positioning, fewer scrambles, and in theory fewer service failures.

The possible negative implication sits on the other side of that same coin: longer lead times give shippers more time to plan and ship, which increases their ability to shift freight onto intermodal — eroding the sense of urgency that otherwise favors trucking. That dynamic is reflected in the rapid growth of domestic intermodal usage over the past few years. Longer lead times also theoretically reduce rejections, which softens the market.

For shippers, it’s a signal of how much slack — or lack of it — exists in their own supply chain planning. Shippers have been forced to make the upstream portions of their supply chains more resilient to shocks created by erratic trade policy shifts and geopolitical disruptions. Many have been holding more inventory than they strictly need, which gives them more time to ship downstream.

As mentioned above, trade policy and geopolitical disruptions — including the ongoing issues in the Middle East — have created the need to buffer inventories. A new round of Section 301 tariffs went into effect on Friday, replacing the prior temporary ones. The administration has numerous additional tariffs in the pipeline, effectively ensuring this level of tariff activity will persist for the rest of Trump’s second term. That means shippers have largely adapted to this baseline level of tariffs, though the degree of influence on individual commodities can still shift.

Trade policy seems somewhat settled as a factor influencing inventory levels, but numerous concerns around global and consumer stability remain that could still influence lead times. If the STLT declines, it will be a meaningful signal — with both positive and negative implications for transportation managers and providers.

About the Chart of the Week

The FreightWaves Chart of the Week is a chart selection from SONAR that provides an interesting data point to describe the state of the freight markets. A chart is chosen from thousands of potential charts on SONAR to help participants visualize the freight market in real time. Each week a Market Expert will post a chart, along with commentary, live on the front page. After that, the Chart of the Week will be archived on FreightWaves.com for future reference.

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