Is the Freight Recession Over?

For the past eighteen months, someone in this industry has declared the freight recession over roughly every six to eight weeks. Analysts, executives, economists — all taking their turn at the podium, all eventually walking it back. Craig Fuller himself admitted he called the bottom prematurely in late 2024, thinking capacity had cleared enough to move the market, only to watch demand crater again in 2025 to near-pandemic lows. So when the Wall Street Journal ran “America’s Four-Year Trucking Slump Is Finally Over” on June 10th, the instinct for most supply chain professionals was probably a familiar one…..sure it is.

This time, the data is harder to dismiss.

Dry van spot rates hit record highs this spring, with FreightWaves‘ National Truckload Index briefly touching $3.83 per mile — the highest ever recorded. Tender rejections climbed to 17.55%. Schneider‘s Mark Rourke called it the highest contract renewal activity since 2021. J.B. Hunt flagged a likely 20% cumulative rate increase over two years. Uber Freight now expects spot rates to run 20 to 25 percent above prior-year levels through the rest of 2026. Webb Estes, whose company is adding trucks, drivers, and terminals at a pace not seen in years, put it plainly: “I think we’ve entered a bottom.”
Paul Brashier, vice president of global supply chain at ITS Logistics, sees the same signals. “We have hit the bottom in freight rates,” he said. “We are not cratering and we may be lifting off the bottom a little bit.” Brashier points to truck-to-load ratios and freight pricing data that, taken together, are “starting to resemble more of 2019.”

This recovery didn’t happen because freight demand surged. It happened because the supply side of the market went through a genuine, structural, painful purge. Yellow shut down in the summer of 2023, taking 30,000 jobs with it. Convoy, which had raised $260 million at a $3.8 billion valuation just eighteen months earlier, folded that October. Hundreds of thousands of small operators who flooded the market during the pandemic rate boom quietly handed back their authorities as fuel costs outran their revenue. Then, in February 2026, FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule landed, threatening to remove as many as 194,000 drivers from the commercial pool within two years. As Schneider‘s Jim Filter told investors, there simply “aren’t 50,000 carriers in this country that you could vet and say that they’re safe.” The ones who couldn’t clear that bar have been leaving.

NFI Industries CEO Sidney Brown captured the distinction cleanly: “This has been a supply-driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand-driven freight recovery.”

The equipment market tells the same story. Blanks Baldwin, President of Gulf Relay, points to what should have been a blowout pre-buy year ahead of 2027 emissions rules, but isn’t. “Four years of recession-level rates wrecked most carriers’ balance sheets. The capital for a speculative pre-buy just isn’t there. What’s getting ordered is replacement equipment that has to be cycled no matter what. That’s not growth buying; it’s maintenance buying, and that’s the ceiling until carriers rebuild equity. Frankly, that blowout likely won’t come until 2028.”

FTR‘s Avery Vise put the cautious case in plain terms: “Our best explanation is that the market has tightened because of supply, not because of demand. Frankly, none of that’s going to matter unless we have more freight. That’s the bottom line.” DAT‘s Ken Adamo has been even blunter, arguing the slump is fundamentally demand-driven: “The economy stinks, especially the consumer economy. And what do we all ship? Things that fuel the consumer economy.” The ATA‘s Bob Costello agrees the outlook is improving but draws the same line: “It’s not going to be a boom.”

There are also macro wildcards that no rate chart accounts for. The Iran war’s diesel shock pushed national average fuel prices above $5.35 per gallon this spring — a 50 percent jump that simultaneously squeezed small carriers out of the market and threatened to suppress the demand-side recovery everyone is waiting on. Tariffs, averaging 13 to 14 percent effective rates, drove a 2025 import frontloading hangover that left Q1 2026 import volumes down nearly 12 percent year-over-year. Consumer spending remains skewed toward higher-income households. Manufacturing has been flat to contractionary for much of this cycle.

So where does that leave us?

The freight recession, as carriers experienced it, is ending. The capacity market has genuinely tightened, rates are rising, and the companies that survived four years of compressed margins are finally seeing some relief.

But a supply-side recovery resting on a demand-side question mark is not the same thing as a freight boom. The benchmarks worth watching through the rest of 2026 are whether tender rejections hold above 10 percent after summer seasonality fades, whether contract rates sustain gains through the fall bid cycle, and whether diesel normalizes enough to let genuine demand signals come through.

The carriers who weathered this are in better shape than they’ve been in years. The shippers who held back on freight spend are going to find a tighter, more expensive market waiting for them. The logistics providers who kept investing through the down cycle via technology, relationships, and capacity are perfectly positioned for the turn.

The recession is over. The boom is still a question mark… buy both things can be true at the same time.

Sources

Wall Street Journal — America’s Four-Year Trucking Slump Is Finally Over

FreightWaves — State of Freight: Freight Recession ‘Over’ as Demand Builds Into Summer